Peter Burling says New Zealand’s America’s Cup year boosted by SailGP campaign

Peter Burling is comfortable in crunch time.

With the America’s Cup regatta in Barcelona only seven months away, the competing syndicates have reached a vital stage in their campaigns where their race boats are being built and design features are being refined.

It also coincides with an important stage of the SailGP season, which has six more events on the calendar before the start of the final America’s Cup preliminary regattas in late August that signals the beginning of the quest for the Auld Mug in Spain.

With many sailors across the America’s Cup fleet also involved with a SailGP team, the coming months shape up as a rather busy period in the sailing schedule.

However, Burling believes the America’s Cup entering the final stages before racing begins won’t alter too much as far as he’s concerned.

“I think everything goes into the public eye a little bit more, but from a personal point of view nothing really changes too much,” he told the Herald.

“For people that haven’t really seen how an America’s Cup programme works, a lot of the hard work actually goes on a couple of years beforehand in those base hours that really set the campaign in its direction.

“The intensity grows as you get closer to the competition, but a lot of the workload has been going on in the background the whole time.”

New Zealand SailGP team members Liv Mackay, Blair Tuke and Peter Burling will all represent Team New Zealand during the America's Cup regatta in Barcelona. Photo / SailGP

The New Zealand SailGP team is one of three that features a sailing group largely similar to that of their country’s America’s Cup team, alongside France and Great Britain. Great Britain helmsman Sir Ben Ainslie recently handed over his driving role in SailGP to Giles Scott, noting a desire to put more focus on the America’s Cup as one of his reasons for doing so.

SailGP has often been billed as a rival competition to the America’s Cup, but Burling said the two complemented each other perfectly, particularly given the limited competitive sailing in the latter, with just three preliminary regattas before the challenger series.

“For us as a sailing team, being able to race is the critical thing and that’s where we find SailGP, it’s an amazing competition, but they combine really well,” Burling said.

“In the Cup environment, you do a whole heap of testing, training and development, and in the SailGP environment, you do a whole heap of racing. They’re two incredible competitions that are showcasing our sport to a massive audience so we really love being a part of both of them.”

With the next SailGP event still a month away, Burling has been back on the waters of Auckland with Team New Zealand in their LEQ12 testing vessel during the past week as they continue to test their foils.

This week, the team unveiled a new port foil wing — less than a week after running a new starboard wing through its paces — and immediately got a sense of how the new addition performed in various conditions as the breeze dropped off late in the session.

Flight controller and trimmer Andy Maloney, who is also part of the New Zealand SailGP team, said conditions had allowed them to learn plenty about how the new foils perform.

“[We’re] really happy with the day, putting both foils through their paces and tested them out as much as we could across the wind range, and at the end we got some nice light winds as well, so really happy to get that full wind range today and you know we ticked all the boxes and really happy with the results,” Maloney said.

Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.