Champagne still on ice, but Bertarelli says NZ comeback tough

10.45am

Alinghi boss Ernesto Bertarelli is exuding quiet confidence as his Swiss America's Cup crew head into today's fifth race holding a 4-0 lead over defenders Team New Zealand.

Bertarelli said a comeback by Team NZ, who spent overnight repairing their battered boat, NZL82, was always possible, but he felt it was unlikely.

"They have to win five races and we have to win only one, and since the beginning of this regatta we have lost only three races," he said. "So we will have to lose more races than we have lost, which is a big ask."

Bertarelli, who is also navigator on the Alinghi yacht, SUI64, said there was no champagne to celebrate Alinghi's feat of getting to match point yesterday.

Instead, it was a beer for him and an early night.

Team New Zealand, sailing a boat that attracted much pre-match comment for its innovations, have now failed to finish two of the four races because of gear failure

Yesterday, with winds reaching 25 knots, they saw their mast crash down in lumpy seas on the second windward leg. The cause was the failure of a fitting called a tin cup, which joins sections of the rig.

As in race one, Alinghi skipper Russell Coutts and his crew were left to sail the rest of the course by themselves. Bertarelli admitted that he was surprised at the way events had unfolded over the past fortnight, taking a dig at pundits who had predicted that NZL82 would have an edge over SUI64.

"We heard so much about their design team, the speed of their boat and how strong the technology of Team New Zealand is," he said. "And out of four races, they have finished only two, so I'm a bit surprised."

Asked for his thoughts on why that should be, the Swiss billionaire replied: "It's not for me to answer that. "I think people who were saying their boat was better and faster and stronger and had the technology should answer that."

Meanwhile, Team New Zealand head Tom Schnackenberg defended the design of NZL82 as against SUI64.

"I think you are seeing two boats that are pretty evenly matched," he said. "Probably some things in our package are better than the equivalent on Alinghi and obviously other things are better on Alinghi than with us."

Schnackenberg said the net result for Team New Zealand was a yacht that was competitive.

"Certainly we haven't seen Alinghi sailing away from us on the race course," he said.

"We have broken our boom and more recently our mast, and there are areas we have let ourselves down. It is either in the engineering or just gremlins, but certainly it's not something we are happy about."

Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker deflected suggestions that his crew hadn't trained enough in rough conditions. "We wouldn't really imagine doing anything terribly different over again," he said. "It's just we haven't had a super breezy summer all in all. It's only in the last few weeks that we've had a lot of strong winds."

But Barker also said Team New Zealand's smaller budget compared with that of Alinghi and other challengers meant they knew they could be in trouble if things broke on their boat. For example, whereas Alinghi had built four masts, Team New Zealand had only two.

"We've always felt that, if we had any serious failure, it was going to hurt our campaign, not having a massive budget to be able to repair things," Barker said. "You are are always worried about what happens if something does break."

- NZPA

Continuous coverage of today's America's Cup race will begin on nzherald.co.nz at 12.30pm.

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