Despite a catastrophic wingsail collapse on Australia’s boat at the weekend’s SailGP event, all its crew walked away unscathed, with an investigation launched to determine the cause of the “very scary” incident.
Veteran driver Tom Slingsby was left shaken following the incident as Australia came close to Italy’s boat on the way to the start line in the seventh fleet race of the event. The main wing crumpled into the water on San Francisco Bay.
“It’s a bit of shock, obviously. A very scary situation,” Slingsby said. “Fortunately, we’re all safe, that’s the first priority. Now we’ve just got to try and save the boat as best we can.”
Race organisers confirmed all athletes had been accounted for and were physically unharmed.
It meant Australia, who were sitting in third place after an impressive weekend of racing, were unable to take their place in the three-way final race, although they had already done enough in San Francisco to assume top spot in the overall championship standings. The next event is in Rio in early May.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Slingsby said. “Obviously, the results and the points are what they are, but we’re not even concerned about that. Just save the boat the best we can, everyone is safe and we’ve got a lot of work to do here.”
SailGP said the teams involved would undertake an in-depth analysis to determine what caused the incident.
“We’ve got to go look at the camera angles,” Slingsby said. “It was obviously close to the other boats, we need to determine if it was a wing failure, or was there something else at play? Did we make an error, or did the boat fail?”
France took Australia’s place in the three-way podium race with defending series champions Spain securing victory over Canada and the French boat.
Spain crew member Florian Trittel described his team’s win as “bittersweet” after what he described as “the Aussie breakage”.
“We would like to send huge energy from the Spanish team to the Aussie team, we could hear it through our comms even though we had noise-cancelling on, so it must have been a massive one and seeing that is never nice,” Trittel said.