Patience is becoming something of a theme for La Roche-Posay Racing Team in Naples.
The French challenger spent much of yesterday ashore, waiting on wind that refused to cooperate. The day had started with serious technical work. Fibre optic measurement systems and load cells were fitted to the rig as sailors and technicians worked through tuning, keen to get AC75 'B2' back out for sail testing.
But the Bay of Naples, enjoying a mild autumn, offered only soft north-easterly thermals across the Mediterranean. The team waited ashore, watching updates roll in from their meteorology staff.
Lines were finally slipped just before 3pm, and hope of an evening breeze built among the sailors. The early sailing was hard going, with short runs off the picturesque district of Posilippo bringing little reward as the wind swung south-west and struggled past 8 knots.
The sail choice stood out. La Roche-Posay opted for the smaller MN3-1 mainsail paired with just a J2-1 jib, a combination Emirates Team New Zealand have also trialled extensively at the lighter end of the wind range. It raises a genuine question for this Cup cycle: is the game now about shaving aero drag aloft rather than chasing raw power?
If take-off and sustained flight can be managed with less sail area, that may be the real prize teams are chasing. Whether that proves true is still unclear.
The breeze finally settled into a gentle, almost drainage-style flow along the shoreline late in the afternoon, and the French boat came alive, hitting speeds up to 41 knots as the sun dipped low. Quentin Delapierre and Diego Botín chased the fading light throughout, but it was a worthwhile session, called off only as darkness and fatigue closed in.
Mathieu Cadei, the experienced sailor and yacht designer behind the Recon Report, offered a telling read on the day. Coming after two days of rig work built around load tension measurements on the cap shrouds, he noted that the presence aboard of the electronics engineer involved in that work would be consistent with checking, under sailing load, what had been set up or calibrated, possibly relating shroud loads to the fibre optic lines or other rig sensors.
The jib selection may fit that pattern too. No J1 has been seen on any observed day, Cadei pointed out, with the team tending toward the smaller of the plausible jibs: J3-3 in very light air on D19, J4-3 on D18 as the breeze softened, and J2-1 and J3-3 today.
That points to a commissioning approach still under way, he suggested, with sail and rig loads kept conservative while the systems are characterised, rather than the boat pushed to its full potential just yet.
