Ineos Britannia now lead Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli in the Louis Vuitton Cup Final six matches to four.
The two teams have been battling it out over the last six days and have been locked on an equal score card in the first to seven points series.
There has been plenty of excitement and drama out on the water with both teams executing some outstanding sailing. After day two resulted in a washout with no breeze, day three saw some old school match racing between the two teams resulting in a fierce head to head competition.
Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli had an unfortunate disqualification in the first race of the day defaulting the win to Ineos Britannia but in the second race the Italians came back strong and both teams executed some tidy maneuvers to create an intense, down to the wire race. In the end however it was Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli who were able to just squeeze ahead and win the fourth race of the series.
More drama kicked off day five of racing after Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli took an extreme nose dive after an excellent start in the first race of the day. The sheer impact of the sudden stop caused some damage to the port side of their boat. They did their best to stay on the course to force Ineos Britannia to complete the course, their only hope being that they would also have some form of damage. The British completed the course, and the scores became 4-3 by default.
The Italian team miraculously sorted their boat and were ready to go for the second race of the day. They went on to secure an impressive win after Ineos Britannia made a costly mistake breaking the far right boundary during the prestart. This gave an advantage to the Italians who executed the rest of the race beautifully and finished a whole 16 seconds ahead of the British team.
Day six ended up being the day that we saw the deadlock broken. In an interesting turn of events, and wind direction, the wave state and close to 20 knot breeze resulted in a complicated field of play. It was ultimately the British who were just too good, and took two wins to split the scores for the first time at the end of a race day to 6-4 in the first to 7 wins series.
More soon…