A Mistral welcome to Cagliari’s race track
The local team on XXII-Sardegna will therefore answer their first start guns today and get a proper test in strong winds in the 40 Series fleet. Francesco Bruni (ITA), Audi Azzurra Sailing Team tactician said this morning: “With these conditions it´s going to be a rough day, our forecast says we should expect 25+ knots today but looking outside it already looks over 30 knots. We´ll have to wait and hopefully we´ll be able to go out this afternoon. If we race, it´ll be in hard conditions. We are excited to be back in Cagliari, last year with Matador we won by a big margin and it was by far our best trophy. As an Italian team we are glad to be back, I´m excited, we´ll try to perform at the best of our capacities here in Cagliari, that´s our goal and we are focused on that. Psychologically, competing at home has helped us in the past, we´ve done very good championships here in Italy. So far it´s been good so I just hope it stays the same this year.”
Leaders of the 40 Series are still the Iberdrola Sailing Team, Skipper-helm Jose Maria Torcida explains: José María Torcida (ESP), Skipper, Iberdrola Sailing Team (ESP): “It´s well known that Cagliari has great sailing conditions. We´ll have the regular thermal winds from the south here for the next two days so it will be fun to sail. Our goals for this regatta don´t change much, we want to stay at the top of the scoreboard and try to win one more trophy. We´ll also see where can we improve with the boat in terms of sails, trimming and the mast, a few things in which we´ve been working this last couple weeks. The changes on our boat are so small that I don´t think that we´ll see big results. The practice race will be a good chance to check on these things and see how everyone else is doing”.
The regatta live coverage will start today at 12:55 hours at www.medcup.org/AudiMedCuptv.
