With a crew stacked with Olympians and America's Cup winners, there was plenty of excitement and expectation around the New Zealand team's arrival to Sail GP last year.
However, their debut campaign was disrupted, with the Olympic Games and World Championships also on the season schedule for many sailors, andalmost everyone in the crew spent significant time away from the SailGP arena in vital moments, leading to an uncompetitive season.
However, with an uninterrupted campaign in 2022, and under the watchful eye of coach Ray Davies, results have changed for the Kiwi crew.
Having not qualified for a podium race at any of the 10 events in their debut season, the Kiwis have now competed for event wins in the last three of the five stops in the 2022 campaign – winning two and finishing second in France at the weekend.
Throughout their time in the competition, the New Zealand crew have spoken of their progress. Now, those words have something tangible to back them up.
"The team is growing and building nicely," Blair Tuke told Newstalk ZB during the weekend's event in France.
"It's nice to have the momentum we have had in the European tour so far. It's not one thing. We've been saying it all along - the incremental gains that the team is making and are still to be had. It's nice to see all that hard work come to fruition now."
The New Zealand SailGP Team in action during the event in Denmark. They won every race of the event. Photo: Bob Martin/SailGP
In SailGP, progress can be extremely limited. Unlike in the America's Cup, where teams design their vessels to a set of rules and specifications, the teams in SailGP work with the same model – an F50 catamaran. With the Kiwis coming into the competition in its second year, those who competed in year one had the advantage of more time onboard.
Time onboard is the most critical factor slowing progress down, as teams are only given the opportunity to sail their boats in race week. Generally, there are two practice days before the racing starts.
After the events, the boats are packed up and shipped off to the next venue, meaning the teams are unable to work onboard until the next practice session.
But whatever the New Zealand team has learned about these boats and how to sail them over the past 18 months has started to translate onto the water, with nine wins in the last 15 races. In those 15 races, they have been outside the top two only twice.
Qualifying for the podium race in France as the top team in fleet racing, with two wins and two more top-four finishes, the overall result could have been different had they got the start right in the event final.
The Kiwis built up too much speed in the starting box and crossed the line early. That saw them given an OCS (on course side) penalty and having to let fellow finalists Great Britain and the USA pass them. It put them at a major disadvantage for the rest of the race, particularly given the light conditions, but they were able to get back ahead of the Brits to claim second.
"We were pretty patient, but maybe not quite patient enough," strategist Jo Aleh said of the error. "Once we start, that was it; once you're going at that pace, if we slowed it, we would have been no good.
"You win some and lose some on that. Sometimes you've got to commit and just send it."
Finishing in second place for the weekend saw the Kiwis close the gap on Australia at the top of the leaderboard, with just one point now separating the two with seven events left to sail. The competition resumes in Spain on September 26.
