Toyota dockside in Bermuda: Team New Zealand are learning on the fly

Jimmy Spithill of Oracle Team USA. Photo / Ricardo Pinto.

The opening round robin of the America's Cup qualifiers has shown Team New Zealand were under-raced heading into the event.

I see that as a positive. There's still a lot of racing to go in this thing and Emirates Team New Zealand, despite the lack of time out on the race course, have emerged as a very strong contender. They are doing a hell of a job considered they had so few races in the build-up.

The teams that have been based in Bermuda for the past few months have had the benefit of all those early practice racing rounds, and had the time to develop solid strategies from that.

Team NZ are learning on the fly, and they are proving to be fast, nimble and adaptable.

There's no doubt the Kiwis have made errors through the racing. The biggest one remains that slip up on day one, when Jimmy Spithill and Oracle Team USA got one over them at the top mark.

It didn't seem like it at the time, but Spithill may have done the Team NZ boys a favour by giving them a bit of a lesson in course management on day one.

It would have annoyed Team New Zealand, but it made them sit down and review it and come up with a strategy of how to manage the top third of the racecourse and they immediately put that into action over the last two days.

Yes they've been guilty of a few errors in the startbox, and then of course they will want to go back and look at the incident with Artemis today and see how they might avoid getting themselves into that situation, but they still have the points on the board and plenty of runway left to develop.

There's no doubt Team NZ helmsman Peter Burling hasn't done a lot of this, but he's smart and he's a quick learner.

With more racing I only see them getting better at those little things that come with time - picking bottom mark gates, picking that top third layline, and not getting in a position of a late tack.

I think in some ways with this America's Cup and the way the courses are, what we've seen is quite removed from traditional match racing. There's some elements of it, but there's newer elements brought about by the speed of the boats, the foiling upwind.

That really plays into a skiff sailor's hands - I'm talking Nathan Outteridge with Artemis and Burling with Emirates Team New Zealand. They're young, they're intuitive and they are comfortable with this type of sailing. It's a young guy's game these days and that is showing up.