Oracle Racing 4
I hope that you caught the last World Series of sailing on San Francisco Bay a few months ago — blustery conditions made for some exciting sailing. Well round two starts today on the Bay and while the weather looks to be tamer it is always hard to predict.
The races will occur starting this morning and running through the 7th, with Tuesday just consisting of practice rounds. Wednesday the match race qualifiers start at 4 p.m. PT, with match race quarterfinals on Thursday starting at 12:30, followed by a Blue Angels flyover. The cool thing is for online viewers the races can be watched live Thursday through Saturday on the America’s Cup YouTube channel; locally in the Bay Area the races will be on NBC. (Here’s the full schedule). On Sunday, the only live viewing is on NBC, but it will be broadcast nationwide, beginning at 1:30 p.m. (PDT).
Friday will see additional match race quarterfinals as well as the start of fleet racing, starting at 4 p.m. Saturday has the match race semifinals and then the finals as well as additional fleet racing. Sunday wraps up the event with an event called Super Sunday Fleet Race.
The races take place during San Francisco’s annual Fleet Week so that viewers will also be able to see, and in some cases visit, U.S. Naval ships. [editor’s note: It also means that downtown traffic and parking, never good, will be even worse.]
The America’s Cup races are part of the AC World Series, a set of races that use a boat that is specifically designed for these races, the AC45 catamaran, a much smaller ship that those used for the actual cup, which are in the AC72 class.
The events are match and fleet races and currently the Oracle Racing 4 team is ahead of Luna Rossa Piranha by a point, 86 to 85, after the first round held in August. After this week’s racing the event moves next year to Venice on April 16-21 before finishing in Naples the following month with the races being sailed from May 14-19.
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