The Volvo Ocean Race ended on Sunday in Kiel after some nine months. Having followed this race from the start in Southampton last year all the way around the globe from speculating on who the winners would be beforehand to knowing who they are now, the only thing left to do is to asses the performance of the various teams and debate who lived up to their potential and who didn't. So, in the finishing order, these are my comments on the teams involved.
illbruck: Seemingly the perfect campaign. From the time that they rolled over Amer Sports One to take leg one into Cape Town they never really looked like losing the race. Dominant in particular on the long passages if they had a weakness it was on the shorter sprint legs. Two years of meticulous preparation paid off for the team who were the first to get their campaign for this race underway, and it showed.
Assa Abbloy: A troubled start to the race saw the team with arguably the best boat in the fleet take a while to get up to speed. Once they did so they were remarkably successful. If they had been on this pace from the start the end result would have been a whole lot closer than it eventually was. Skipper Neal MacDonald who took over from Roy Heiner after leg one in Cape Town seems to have gained the most out of this campaign having made his mark as a top level skipper. It will be interesting to see what projects he appears at the helm of in the future.
Amer Sports One: The last team to get their campaign in the water and sailing one of only two non Bruce Farr designed yachts they started off in exactly the opposite fashion to what was expected finishing second in leg one. From there on they had a mixed bag of results, fast at times, very slow at others. Still they provided the moment of the race with their spectacular broach just outside Sydney in full view of a helicopter full of cameras. In the end this is a result that they will be well pleased with however some of the teams will still be wondering how they finished behind this boat.
Tyco: A rudder problem put them out of leg two while they were in a strong position. The boat looked fast often but also suffered some disappointing results along the way. With one leg to sail they were the favourites to finish third overall but a poor tactical decision on the final leg saw them lose out. They will be slightly disappointed with their result but need not be, on the whole they sailed a good race and were certainly not the worst campaign on the race.
News Corporation: They started off consistently and the boat always looked good however the second half of the race did not go well for the team with boat and crew problems. First they struck and iceberg on the southern ocean leg to Rio and then once around Cape Horn they lost their rudder. Then the crew changes followed thick and fast which could not have helped. They won the leg into Baltimore but this will be little consolation for a boat and team who had far more potential than the result they achieved in the end.
djuice Dragons: The biggest underachiever in the race they owe their surprisingly good overall position to a remarkable win in the final leg of the race and some terrible luck that befell one of the boats behind them. Sailing the other non Bruce Farr yacht in the fleet this campaigns biggest mistake seems to have been that they chose to buy two identical yachts from an unproven designer in this class. They were terribly slow at times and how the skipper managed to keep the crew moral as high as he did is one of the wonders of the race. the crew changes came thick and fast towards the end but the bottom line is that the boat was slow. They do however score points for the best colour scheme in the race but that is about where it ends.
SEB: By far the unluckiest team in the race they really deserved better than they got. They suffered both a serious rudder failure and a broken mast in the depths of the Southern Ocean. Thereafter they posted some poor results, undoubtedly with the crew feeling more than a bit despondent. Sometimes it seemed that things were just against them, the boat was by no means slow yet they seemed to lose ground to the bunch at really odd times. Good boat, good crew, remarkably bad result. They will understandably be very disappointed.
Amer Sports Too: Last in the water along side the buys team on Amer One they suffered from a lack of preparation, experience and probably strength on board the yacht. At times they were heavily criticized in the press for a perceived lack of effort. I think that they just sailed as well as they could and that it simply wasn't good enough. There were complaint also of lack of finding and preferential treatment for the boys team that saw them struggle further. Either way they simply did not have the time on the water or expertise to do better than they did.
