The clearest picture yet of what caused the high-speed collision between the New Zealand SailGP Team, the Black Foils, and the DS Automobiles SailGP Team France has emerged from a media briefing held after Race 3 of the ITM New Zealand Sail Grand Prix | Auckland.
Co CEO and driver Peter Burling walked through a sequence of events that played out in a matter of seconds as the fleet hammered down the second leg of the course. The account points to a chain reaction rather than any single cause.
"We had obviously started off with a great first two races. We're really enjoying the conditions and feeling comfortable in the boat," Burling said. "In race three, we're going down reach one to windward of the Italian boat. We ended up high on the foil and sliding sideways. And then we hit a system limit, which drastically escalated that situation."
That system limit relates to control of rake on the leeward foil. Once it was reached, the crew's options narrowed in an instant.
"Then we had to take a kind of quite drastic action to avoid the Italian boat to leeward, which led to us touching down, and then obviously the incident followed that."
The touchdown happened at racing speed. Contact with the French F50 came almost immediately afterwards, leaving both boats with severe structural damage and forcing the abandonment of the race.
Burling pushed back against any attempt to pin what happened on a single explanation. "The boat was working as it should work," he said. "We, as I said before, had a system limit when we were high on the foil, so I think there's a combination of a lot of factors that led to this."
The team was equally direct about the conditions on the Waitematā Harbour. Blair Tuke addressed this plainly: "Saturday's conditions weren't out of the ordinary for us. It was flat water. Yes, the gusts were hitting quite hard off Westhaven there, but it was well within the limits of the boat."
He continued: "We were well in control in that region until we got the slide going."
The fleet was tightly bunched at the time, boats running close together as they accelerated around the course. At speeds approaching 90 kilometres per hour, the margin between a manageable situation and a serious one can vanish without warning.
SailGP has confirmed that a formal review is underway, with onboard data, footage, and system inputs all feeding into the analysis.
For the Black Foils, accuracy matters more than speculation as that process continues. As Burling noted, the sequence moved fast, and "that's all part of the wider review process from here and really how we make the plan go forward."
