KEY POINTS:
Julie Ash and Peter Lester look at the areas Dean Barker & Co need to maintain, if not improve on, going into the America's Cup races.
1. Starting
Dean Barker's starting percentages have improved. It is an area the team have clearly worked on.
For Team New Zealand, starting is a bit like the All Blacks and the scrum.
It is an area in which they are dominant, yet they still keep working on it. You'd expect them to bang away hard on the starts leading up to the Cup races. We know that winning the start and the first cross is important.
You have to be on that side of the ledger.
2. Reliability
So far we haven't seen any major gear failure. We saw one spinnaker get a tear in the foot but that is about it.
In the past there have been some issues with sails tearing on the jumpers but they have addressed that. Reliability will remain crucial for them.
3. Reducing drag
They may look to improve tiny little areas aerodynamically and hydrodynamically. We have seen the pod over the pit winch, which was an innovation to reduce drag. The team may have a few more innovations up their sleeves, some we won't even see.
Drag is the enemy. If you can make incremental reductions in drag, whether it is the way battens are put into the sails, airflow over a deck winch, or spreader fittings, if you can reduce any of those theoretically the boat will go faster.
4. Sails
Team New Zealand have made a major step up in their sails.
We are now starting to see some of their best equipment.
We have seen three different mainsails and a new A1 gennaker, which helped them run away from Luna Rossa in race three.
We have probably seen only a small percentage of their race sail inventory. When you are this close to the America's Cup with such a small amount of time left, sails are the biggest area for performance gain.
5. Time management
The regatta has been hard on the teams, especially with the delays in racing at the start of the challenger series.
In the time left Team New Zealand will be wanting to polish up their crew work, make refinements to the boat and maintain the boat.
But the guys also need time to refresh. Doing the work but giving people enough physical and mental space to go into the regatta fresh is vital.
Full coverage of the America's Cup from nzherald.co.nz/americascup and desktoptv.co.nz
