San Francisco has long been synonymous with advanced technology. Major tech organisations like Apple, Google, X, Salesforce, and Dropbox have strong presences in the city, Facebook’s campus headquarters are located in nearby Menlo Park, and the wider Bay area has become the epicentre of the AI revolution.
No surprise then that a visit to California’s fourth largest city by population is like stepping into the future. Autonomous vehicles like Waymo’s driverless taxis are such a common sight that the locals pay them scant attention as they effortlessly negotiate San Francisco’s often congested streets. Likewise pedestrians have long ago stopped being fazed by an encounter with the cooler-sized food and medicine delivery robots that roam the pavements, and are programmed to wait patiently at crosswalks and even give a friendly wave to any curious pedestrians they might meet.
Beyond all that, virtually every aspect of daily life here – from ordering food, hiring a dog walker, doing laundry, unlocking a shared electric scooter, paying for a street parking space, to managing your home’s central heating and security system – is done through an app on your phone.
All of which is why San Francisco makes such a perfect venue for SailGP and its fleet of 12 futuristic flying boats that tear around a course made up of autonomous marks and bristle with data sensors and whose systems generate 53 billion data requests on a typical race day – all of which is uploaded to the Oracle cloud computing platform over high speed data links in just 110 milliseconds.
Every aspect of how the top flight international crews are racing their boats around the constricted, close-to-shore, stadium racecourses is captured live and made available instantly to all the teams. That means that the teams’ coaching staff – who on race days used to watch the racing from a chase boat – now monitor their boats’ performance in minute detail on an array of computer screens in the SailGP coaches’ booth.
A little like in Formula 1 – Uniquely in Grand Prix sailboat racing, in SailGP the coaches are able to talk directly to their sailors during a race. What specific information gets communicated varies from team to team. Some only chip in when they feel the sailors have missed something important, while others are more vociferous and feed in info about boat-on-boat situations and even call laylines into the windward and leeward gate marks.
Away from the events the coaches are tasked with poring over the shared data looking for nuggets of gold that might lead to a performance breakthrough. Increasingly teams are beefing up their data analysis resource to help sift through the vast ocean of data to identify what is important to focus on.
Friday's afternoon practice session in San Francisco gave the teams a taste of what they can expect for the weekend when winds between 10 to 18 knots prevailed for the four-race day. How much San Francisco’s renowned strong tidal flow affected the boats yesterday was hard to assess while watching from the shore. However I did get the feeling that there were gains to be made upwind and downwind along the shoreline (on the left upwind and on the right downwind).
At yesterday's press conference I asked how the teams were approaching the challenge of achieving consistency over both an individual event and over the entire 13-race season. Tom Slingsby said that what was required was a combination of sailing cleanly and avoiding conditions, knowing when you need to push, and taking advantage of any luck that comes your way.
Over today's four points-scoring races – sailed in 15 - 20 knots funneling down under the Golden Gate Bridge – it was the Canadian team that got closest to Slingsby's wish list – starting with a hard-fought fifth place, which they followed up with a 1,2,1 scoreline to top the table overnight.
"That fifth in that first race was not where we want to finish every race – but it was a solid start,” Scott said after racing. "We have a good day today: we sailed really clean, pushed super hard, and we just got on the right side of some tricky situations."
The Australians turned in a similarly even card for the day, racking up 2,3,3,4 to sit in second overall tonight, three points adrift of Canada. Likewise, a 3,6,1,5 string for Diego Botin's Spanish crew leaves them in third, a further three points back.
Further down the order France had an up and down day. They scored a spectacular wire-to-wire win in race one and looked to have done the same in the fourth before losing out to Canada on the final reach to the finish. A 10,8 in the middle two races leaves them in fourth tonight.
Meanwhile, Peter Burling's New Zealand team looked somewhat out of sorts all day, constantly having to fight their way through the pack to deliver a 4,8,6,3 score that sees them in fifth overall, ahead of Dylan Fletcher's British team who struggled to an 8,2,4,11 to lie in sixth.
Despite some distinct flashes of promise from the home team American squad Taylor Canfield's crew was unable to convert several good starts into a single podium position and they sit at the bottom of the table this evening.
So much to celebrate tonight for the Canadians after an impressive day of ultra-precise sailing, but Scott and Co. will know they will have to be equally impressive in tomorrow's three fleet races to guarantee a place in the three-boat event final.
For me, the real top performer today was San Francisco Bay, which delivered sunny, windy, flat-water conditions that allowed the sailors to push their F50s to the max all day producing some amazing close-quarters action that kept the crowds packing the grandstands and kept the crowd fully engaged throughout.
The teams will be no doubt have some long debriefs tonight as they dig into the data and strategise about day two. The rest of us can relax and look back on a great day of sailboat racing, and look forward to – hopefully – more of the same tomorrow.
Justin Chisholm
