Interview with Iain Percy after Artemis Racing win LVACWS Bermuda
by Rob Melotti 18 Oct 2015 23:17 BST
16-18 October 2015
Iain Percy talks after Super Sunday at Louis Vuitton America's Cup World Series Bermuda © Rob Melotti
Rob Melotti talks to Iain Percy after Artemis Racing take victory at Louis Vuitton America's Cup World Series Bermuda.
Rob Melotti: How are you feeling?
Iain Percy: Good, no fantastic actually! It's great to win the competition here in Bermuda and to come back from a tough season, and on the day to come back from an incredibly tough situation with a big crash. All in all I'm just very proud of the team, to go out today under immense pressure and to perform. To get an incident like that and then to go on and win the day - it's impressive stuff.
Rob: What did you feel like straight after the incident happened? (watch the videos here and here on Facebook, strong language warning)
Iain: Obviously the first thing you think about is the judges, who we'd hit hard. I was suddenly very fearful for one of them being hurt or trapped. Myself and a couple of others jumped forward and we got round and underneath and pretty quickly saw that he was trapped but OK and wasn't hurt. He had more of a look of guilt and shame and that was really reassuring. After that it was a sudden realisation that we didn't need the Code Zero and this might actually be possible (to race) and we really quickly got on with it and everyone mucked in. We realised we needed a result. It would have been easy to stop at that moment and say, 'look we had a good first race and the judges got in our way', but we didn't, we battled. We're not a diver, if you like, in football, we'll just get straight back up and carry on with the game, which is what we did, and then I think to then pull it off was incredibly composed and Nate (Nathan Outteridge) in particular to win the start after all of that was awesome. I'm very proud of him and the rest of the guys.
Rob: Who made the call to actually carry on?
Iain: No-one made the call, no-one thought of anything else to be honest with you. It was straight on trying to fix it from the beginning. We didn't know they'd abandoned it for the first 30 seconds, when we realised they did we thought we had a chance and we just went for it. To go on and win that race, everything was pretty loose, the runner wasn't on and the net was falling off the front, but we somehow still managed to win that race.
Rob: You didn't have any lingering safety concerns that something was loose?
Iain: Well it did actually cross my mind once or twice, but at the end of the day, that boat has got a lot less load on it without the Code Zero so the spine's pretty strong in that situation and nothing had got smashed that far back.
Rob: Did you actually have some advantage by having less windage on the bow?
Iain: You're not wrong to say that it is a bit of a windage gain, but having a totally soft net was a bit of a shocker, so it was swings and roundabouts. There was the odd point upwind where we were going quite fast but I think in all honesty if we had the choice we'd stick with all our gear on the boat.
Rob: And race 1, you were in the lead.
Iain: A couple of missed gates and you get punished hard in these boats. Two gybes and the jammer wasn't on - those mistakes are costly and they cost us the race which was a shame. We don't start getting annoyed and pointing fingers, we just get on with it and got on with the next race. We didn't really have a chance to point fingers frankly!
Rob: So you can start more training in these boats straight away then?
Iain: Yes, but to be honest with you we probably won't be. We'll be concentrating on our development programme which has been our focus all along. As I've said before, it is a bit of an excuse but it's also the truth, we were a bit caught unawares early in the season, suddenly pulling ropes and putting up Code Zeros and we'd lost a lot of that sea craft, so we had to re-learn that a little bit which, as you have seen today, we're getting back on top of.
Rob: It must mean a lot. This isn't just an event win, after the previous two events have gone so badly wrong, this must restore your confidence?
Iain: Yes, a bit because what people don't see so much is over the last two events we've had two training days where we've had six races a day and we've been up there in all of them, so it's one of those things where you know it's going to click at some point. If you look at it probably ourselves, ORACLE and BAR have been the better teams over the four days or all these events, but it wasn't working out that way and the pressure mounts - I think that's the thing, the pressure mounts. Whether it's right or wrong or a bit of bad luck, the pressure starts to mount, so I'm pleased that as a team we went out there and delivered.
Rob: Nathan talked at the Skippers' Press Conference about reducing the pressure within the team.
Iain: Well trying to in the sense that it is mounting and you start to almost try too hard. It's a careful balance between trying to analyse everything and get everything right because you desperately want to get a roll going, and just dropping your shoulders a little bit and going and doing what you do. Me and him have talked a lot together about trying to get that balance right, I don't know if we did this week or just things clicked and off we went. The talent has always been there within our group and we're just going to express ourselves as a group now and go out and perform.
Rob: Well done.