Kiwi duo battle for yachting's triple crown

Team Brunel are on fire.Photo / Getty Images

Peter Burling and his Team Brunel teammates are kicking themselves for their slow start to the Volvo Ocean Race.

Brunel have stormed back into contention with two legs to go in the Volvo Ocean Race after winning two of the last three legs, including the double points crossings of the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic.

They are now three points behind leaders Dongfeng Race Team and two back from Blair Tuke's Mapfre.

Burling (Brunel) and Tuke are now racing each other to become the first individual to win sailing's equivalent of a triple crown - Olympic gold, America's Cup and Volvo Ocean Race - and do it all within two years.

But, Brunel started the round-the-world race very slowly, and have collected more points in the past three legs (36) than the first six (21).

"I think probably looking back at the beginning of the race, a few of us are kicking ourselves at how badly we were sailing," Burling, a helmsman/trimmer on Brunel, told Volvo Ocean Race. "We have improved so much.

"If you look at our team, we obviously have [skipper] Bouwe [Bekking] and [Andrew] Cape, who have done more laps than anyone else.

''But if you look at everyone else we have five under-30s, so we are a pretty inexperienced bunch of offshore sailors.

"Everyone is finding their own way to contribute to the team and getting the most out of themselves in this sort of environment.

"Every time we go out racing, we make some pretty significant improvements, which a fair few other teams haven't seemed to manage to do for a little while.

"That's something that excites us and we feel we have a fair way to go," said Burling.

The seven boats leave Cardiff next weekend for Gothenburg in Sweden before a final 700 nautical mile sprint to The Hague in the Netherlands.

The red boats of Dongfeng and Mapfre, who have often been engaged in a personal match race, will need to be wary of a fast-finishing Brunel. The Dutch team have mixed things up of late, including a more southerly and longer route to Cardiff as they looked to ride a cold front, and in Burling have a helmsman who has a natural feel for how to make a boat go fast.

Bekking revealed recently they've had to rein in Burling, who is used to pushing things to the limit.

"Peter's whole background is in the details, like when he talks about the America's Cup, it's about sailing on that red line all the time," Bekking told the New York Times. "And that is the big difference with us, because, if you are on that red line and you snap something out in the open ocean, you lose out terribly.

"So that balance, I think we had to show him a couple of times, 'Okay, take the pedal off the metal now. We have to survive.'"

Burling admits it took him and a few others a while to find their feet.

"Probably half the race," he said. "We are still learning the whole time but we are starting to get a lot better understanding of when the boat is going well or not. In these kind of legs, where the water is a lot colder ... you can't really rely on the numbers too much on the mast and you do a lot more by feel.

"We are not getting stressed about little bits and pieces getting in the way.''