12.45pm
UPDATE - Seattle-based OneWorld are the only team to change boats for the America's Cup challenger series quarter-final repechage starting tomorrow.
At a skipper's press conference this morning, OneWorld's Peter Gilmour said his team would be using USA-67, rather than USA-65 - the boat they sailed to a 0-4 defeat
in the first stage of the quarterfinals against Oracle BMW.
OneWorld started the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger series with USA-67, but switched to USA-65 for their quarterfinal series against Larry Ellison's San Francisco-based syndicate Oracle BMW.
Despite deciding to change boats again, Gilmour said OneWorld had been happy using USA-65 against Oracle.
"We led around a handful of marks, but that's not good enough," he said.
The team had spent time understanding and coming to grips with the results in the races against Oracle, and realised they needed to do a substantially better job.
"I think you're going to see a very, very polished OneWorld team out there," Gilmour said.
Changes had been made to USA-67 and it was going extremely well, he said.
Prada skipper Francesco de Angelis was unable to attend as he left the dock at 8.30am to test Luna Rossa ITA-74, re-launched and measured at dawn after undergoing extensive work.
It was the first and only chance for Team Prada to test ITA-74 alongside ITA-80, which has also undergone major modifications, before making the final decision on which boat to use for the repechage.
At 12:25 (the time limit set by the rules was 1.05pm) Team Prada declared that they would continue racing with Luna Rossa ITA-74 when the repechage begins.
Matteo Plazzi, navigator on Luna Rossa, said the crew worked through the night to get ITA-74 ready to race again.
"We stepped the mast around 2am, put the boat in the water at 4am and at 5am began measurement.
"Around 7am we were able to carry out the first structural tests and at 8.30 we left the dock."
Today's outing was used primarily to check that everything was functioning correctly.
"Unfortunately the wind was very shifty and we were unable to assess the speed of the boat," said Plazzi.
"However, the few hours that we spent on the water were precious because they enabled us to gain, once more, confidence in our boat and tomorrow we will be able to focus only on racing.
"In the ideal world we would have obviously liked to have 3 or 4 days to train with ITA-74 before the repechage round, but this was not feasable as we didn't have enough time. We trained with ITA-80 and were able to test some solutions that we might decide to use on ITA-74."
The other two teams in the repechage, Team Dennis Conner and Sweden's Victory Challenge, are to stick with the boats they used in the first stage of the quarter-finals.
Conner's team will be racing Stars and Stripes USA-77 in their best-of-seven contest with OneWorld, while Victory will take SWE-73 into their matches with Prada.
The match-ups were sorted out when OneWorld -- the top points scorer of the repechage group after the two round robins -- decided to race Conner's team.
Today, Stars and Stripes' Ken Read said nobody liked to be chosen as the more desired opponent.
"It's a humbling thing in a way, but at the same time our team has used it as a chance to get a little mad, 'These guys think we're the worst of the heap, let's go out there and prove them wrong'," he said.
Victory's Jesper Bank said the big question for the Scandinavians was how fast Prada would be after their modifications.
"We know as little about Prada's performance as anyone," he said.
Prada pulled out of their quarter-finals with the Russell Coutts-skippered Alinghi team when they were 0-3 down to give them time to carry out the changes to ITA-74.
Despite Prada's losses to Alinghi, the Italian team had been highly competitive in those races, Bank said.
"Still they decide to go back into the boatshed and come out with we don't know what."
The weather forecast for Saturday is for showers and NE winds of 5-10 knots becoming S 10 knots.
nzherald.co.nz/americascup
Racing schedule, results and standings
12.45pm
UPDATE - Seattle-based OneWorld are the only team to change boats for the America's Cup challenger series quarter-final repechage starting tomorrow.
At a skipper's press conference this morning, OneWorld's Peter Gilmour said his team would be using USA-67, rather than USA-65 - the boat they sailed to a 0-4 defeat
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