By JULIE ASH
The new format may not please everyone, but all nine challengers agree on one thing - the need to be quickly out of the blocks from day one.
In the last regatta, teams were able to ease into the Louis Vuitton Challenger series with three round robins, which
finished in December.
Just one point was awarded for a win in the first round but this escalated to nine by the third.
This time, after two round robins one team will be eliminated by early November. The top eight boats will then be split into two groups ranked 1-4 and 5-8.
The four teams in the first group pair up after a draw and race each other in the quarter-finals in a best-of-seven match, the winners of each pairing qualify for the semi-finals, the losers go to a repechage round.
The second four teams race each other in a similar pair of best-of-seven matches, the two losers are then eliminated. The two winners go forward to meet the two losers from the first group in the repechage round.
Again the two pairs race a best-of-seven series with the two winners qualifying as the third and fourth teams in the semifinals. The two losers are eliminated.
The two winners from the top group in the quarter-finals race each other in a best-of-seven series again and the winner from this pairing becomes the first finalist.
The two teams coming from the quarter-finals repechage also race each other in a best-of-seven series, the loser is eliminated and the winner goes to the semifinals repechage.
The loser from the top group and winner from the bottom group race each other in a best-of-seven to determine the second finalist.
The Louis Vuitton Cup final is then the best of nine races.
The new system was developed by CORM (Challenger of Record Management) and allows the teams that shine early to concentrate on racing other strong teams while still allowing teams with less success early to survive if they improve their performance.
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