Team Racing World : Epic Breeze on Day 3 Cuts Racing Short; Clear Division Between Teams Sets Scene for Final Day
Sunny skies met big breeze on Day 3 but by 12:30 p.m. racing was postponed, and as the wind built to 25+, the Race Committee abandoned racing at 3:00 p.m. Tension is high among the top contenders for the 2025 Team Racing World Championship; Corinthian Yacht Club (Marblehead, Mass.) leads with 15 points after Day 3 but must meet each of its close rivals on Sunday: Newport Harbor Yacht Club, Baltimore SC, Kiwi Racing and New York Yacht Club.
Winning both of their races today, Great Britain’s West Kirby Hawks are just shy of the top 5 with 11 points after 16 races. But they’re non-plussed, figuring that the preliminary stages of the event have been a learning period. As skipper Dom Johnson notes, the team has enough battle scars to not sweat losses too heavily. Four of the eight Hawks were part of a world-championship-winning team in 2011, including Johnson who is racing with his 16-year-old daughter Izzy. The team formed 20 years ago, and excepting Izzy, all went to Southampton University on the U.K.’s southwest coast at different times, racing together and against each other over the years.
“The starts today were a bit open so we did some racing around the course and managed to shake out our one and twos before the final run and held onto them to the finish; we still had some good opportunities to practice moves which was good fun, and while the conditions were tough they were raceable,” says Johnson. “Ben, Andy and I are the helms of our 3v3 team, which is the format we’re mostly used to; the 2V2 format with no spinnakers is a frenetic and challenging format where no combination is safe until you cross that finish line. It helps that we are quite a unit, we understand each other and what we’re trying to do. The event will be won and lost in the knockout phases, and we can use lessons learned this week to do well tomorrow.”
Trailing fellow American teams by just one point, New York Yacht Club has chalked up 12 points over 16 races, winning both races they sailed today. Longtime fans of the 3v3 format, the two skippers for the New York Yacht Club, Clay Bischoff and Peter Levesque, won a pair of world titles in 2007 and 2009, and are adjusting to the new format for the 2025 Team Racing World Championship.
Italian Team has labored hard to get seven points on the board this week but crew Demetrio Sposato says his team has not given up and they’re still in the game. Collectively the team has a ton of experience team racing in Optis; three crew competed in the Team Race Optimist Worlds in 2015 and received a bronze medal the following year in the same event. But that was a while ago, notes Sposato; he’s happy with the progress they’ve made sailing in the Sonar for the first time.
Intended format for Sunday, June 1:
1. Going into the final day of the 2025 Team Racing World Championship, the intended format will continue races of Stage 1 through to race 120.
2. If time allows, Stage 2 will consist of a single round robin sailed amongst the top 6 teams.
3. The teams in Stage 2 will be ranked according to their wins ahead of all teams not sailing in Stage 2.
4. If Stage 2 is completed by 1330, then Stage 3 will be a first to 2 wins knock-out match between the top two teams.
5. No warning signal will be made after 1500.
Team Racing World :Current results are available here.
