"Definitely the first thing you must get right is approaching the mark on the lay line," said Bruni. "Overstanding or tacking short of the layline is the worst thing that a tactician could do - even if
the
gate helps when you make such a mistake. "Another crucial moment is immediately after the reaching mark, when you must decide whether to jibe immediately or not. Last, it’s important to choose which gate you want to round at the bottom of the run." "The main areas for me are laylines - particularly downwind," Davies said. "I am thinking strategically about where we want to be on the race course. It's very important to be in the most pressure - the breeze make a big difference on these boats especially sailing downwind. So we have done a lot of work learning about San Francisco Bay, where the hotspots on the course are and so that is my biggest focus on the boat - making sure we are hitting those hotspots." "Obviously getting laylines right is very important and probably the most important one is that last one on the last leg because you have to round the right gate mark. If you underlay that then you have got
two gybes in a short space of time to get around the right [hand side] gate [mark] to the finish. It could cost you 200 or 300 metres if you bung that layline up - and right near the end of the race that could be critical. "Also, having boundaries on the course like we do - it's like having a sideline in effect - you can get a little limited at times. Sometimes with the way the run has panned out, you can't get to your ideal layline because you have hit the boundary. "So communicating that early to the guys is critical so that you can change your mode before the boundary to milk it a little bit more to get a bit further down the course before your gybe and then milking it again on the next leg to get to the mark. So it's pretty tricky at times to call those laylines but the slicker you get with the maneuvers the easier it gets. It's a challenging element of the race but then there are a lot of elements in this type of racing that are challenging." With tight limitations on what weather data the teams can collect Davies said the crews and especially the tacticians have to rely on a
20 Image credit: ACEA / Giles Martin Raget.
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