America's Cup: Team NZ lose precious practice time with race on to fix damaged craft

NZ Herald

18 May, 2017 05:00 PM3 mins to read

Team NZ's shore team is working flat out to repair the craft pierced in a pre-start collision. Photo / File

Team New Zealand will likely miss the rest of this week's America's Cup practice racing as the shore crew put in massive hours to get the damaged Kiwi boat back out on the water.

The team's preparations for this month's America's Cup went from bad to worse on Wednesday, when they were rear-ended by British team Ben Ainslie Racing in a pre-start collision during practice racing.

The hull of the Emirates Team New Zealand boat was punctured during the incident - a setback the team could ill afford with racing set to get under way in the America's Cup qualifiers in nine days.

Since the team returned to the dock, the shore team have been working around the clock to patch up the hull and are in the process of putting the boat back together.

Team NZ boss Grant Dalton said the team are unlikely to be back out on the water until Sunday.

"Since the collision [on Wednesday] the guys have been working straight. It's a pretty decent whack. In a perfect world, you would replace the entire inside back of the boat in a new mould and make a whole new piece of boat, but we're not in that environment now - we've run out of time," said Dalton.

"They're putting it back together. It'll be fine, but we won't be back on the water until the weekend, so we're still a few days off being on the water."

While the boat is in the shed, the team have taken the opportunity to move a scheduled maintenance day forward to put in some planned upgrades.

Their time lost in the boat shed has been mitigated by the cancellation of yesterday's third day of practice racing, due to a lack of wind on the Great Sound. The wind is also looking light for today's racing.

For the Kiwi team it was a good outcome to what has been a messy situation. But there remains a lingering sense of disappointment in the Kiwi camp over Ainslie's actions and the limp apology offered for his part in the collision. Ainslie jokingly described to the incident as a "love tap".

Dalton said he did not believe the actions of Ainslie were deliberate.

"Ben just mis-timed it, and he hit us. He was 100 per cent in the wrong and it's one of those things - it just doesn't normally happen in the warm-up lap," he told Newstalk ZB.