KEY POINTS:
Syndicate boss Grant Dalton says he's happy with where Team New Zealand are at with the battle for yachting's biggest prize now just around the corner.
But in typical down-to-earth fashion, Dalton adds the rider: "Whether it's where the team should be, I don't know."
Like the 10 other America's Cup hopefuls looking to claim the right to face Swiss defenders Alinghi in June, Team NZ are in the final stages of their build-up to the challengers' series.
Their two race boats, NZL84 and NZL92, left Auckland this week bound for Valencia and Dalton flies out tomorrow.
After a preliminary fleet racing event in early April, the challengers' Louis Vuitton Cup begins on April 16 and Team NZ will be among the favourites.
They are ranked No 1 by a narrow margin, after sailing NZL84 to the top of the points table in last year's series of lead-up regattas.
But Dalton wasn't prepared to rate his team's chances, saying simply that "we've come a long way, and so we should".
"What happened last year means nothing other than we didn't have to come home and make any radical changes," he said.
"We felt, rightly or wrongly, that the path we were travelling was a good one. But in the end, we are going to have to turn up on the day, every day."
Dalton said luck would play its part, but it was important to "live in the now" and treat every contest out on the water as the same, no matter who the opposition.
"There are so many good teams now and the conditions are such that you will lose races, but you have to be careful you don't lose soft races," he said.
"The best teams will be the ones that have a bad day and come back strong again the next day."
NZL92 was launched last October and skipper Dean Barker and the sailing crew have spent the summer testing it and NZL84 off Auckland.
Dalton said the two yachts, while built according to the same theme, were set up differently.
With the challengers' series running until mid-June, and the conditions changing as spring became summer, it was possible that both boats could be called into action.
"The boats are different, but they are the same -- they are different in that they situated at different parts of the wind range," he said.
"One boat will go better in a breeze, the other will go better in the light. Which one is which, I'm not going to say, but you could conceivably see us racing two boats."
Dalton said the design team had walked the path between being innovative and looking to avoid any potential messy spat over measurement.
New Zealand's 21-year America's Cup history has been punctuated by controversy over design innovations.
They range from the "plastic fantastic" KZ7 in 1986, which brought an allegation of cheating from American skipper Dennis Conner; the bowsprit saga of 1992, when New Zealand's big lead in the challengers' final disappeared after Italy's Il Moro de Venezia launched a series of aggressive protests; to the exotically-dubbed "hula" (hull appendage) the last time around.
Dalton described the yachts for this campaign as evolutionary, with NZL92 being "a little better, a little smarter" than NZL84, which was then "retro-fitted" to bring it up to speed.
In any case, he didn't think one single aspect -- be it boat design, sailing skills or something else -- would be the decisive factor between winning and losing.
"It will be doing 1000 things 1 per cent better, not one thing 1000 per cent better," he said.
"Because the rule has been around for a long time, the boats are a lot closer together, so you won't grab a big speed edge. It will be down to doing everything perfectly."
Dalton was called in to revive Team NZ after they lost the cup in the embarrassing, gear failure-ridden 5-0 defeat to Alinghi off Auckland in early 2003.
As well as being managing director, he is a member of the crew, not among the brains trust at the back of the boat, but as a floater doing the physical stuff of packing sails and grinding.
His presence on the boat mirrors the successful 1995 challenge in San Diego, when then-syndicate boss Sir Peter Blake and his iconic red socks were on board.
Like Blake did, Dalton has a background of Whitbread and Volvo round-the-world racing, with two victories from the six times he competed.
Apart from the longer timetable, bigger budget and greater technological detail of the America's Cup, there wasn't too much that was fundamentally different in the two types of campaign, he said.
"All the principles of Volvo racing, which are basically human dynamics, are identical."
Dalton pointed to Oracle Racing (United States), headed by New Zealander Chris Dickson, and Luna Rossa Challenge (Italy) as the biggest hurdles to Team NZ in the challengers' fleet.
But he was wary of other threats as well, such as Victory Challenge (Sweden), Defasio Espanol (Spain) and Mascalzone Latino (Italy).
"Someone is going to pop out, like the Swedes or the Spanish," he said.
"And if a team like Mascalzone gets ahead of you at the start, it will be hard to get around them because the boats are so close and the wind conditions are such that there tends to be one side favoured."
Starts would be "very important" and, for a crew that got behind during a race, it would be a case of "trying to minimalise your loss".
While the challengers fight it out for the best part of two months until only one is left standing, Alinghi will lie in wait for the best-of-nine cup match beginning on June 23.
Dalton still rated the Swiss defenders, who have been based in Middle East, as the benchmark.
"We had a guy in Dubai watching them and they are a class act," he said. "They are the force."
He believed Alinghi had got over the departure of the America's Cup most dominant skipper, Russell Coutts, after the New Zealander fell out with syndicate head Ernesto Bertarelli.
"They probably suffered from that a little bit early on, but they have such depth.
"With any team in sport, once it's formed and running and the culture is in place, it's always bigger than one person."
- NZPA
