So it's Goodbye GBR; and the le defi Areva is now the le defi depart... Two more challengers have gone, two more teams whose collective dreams have been dashed.

Britain's elimination has robbed the competition of any chance of seeing just what GBR78 had below of skirt. Well, seeing how it performed at any rate.

The boat never raced. Indeed she only sailed for a handful of days: in late August after she was airfreighted at huge cost from the UK and then displayed horrible tendencies to round up into irons; and again for a few days after Round Robin 2 when remedial action was carried out to the keel/mast location to try and restore some balance to the boat.

GBR Challenge's Peter Harrison is the most curious of any of us to see if the yacht can be made to work and is keeping the rump of his team, about a third of the 120-strong staff, to carry out two-boat testing against GBR70 until near Christmas.

Even in defeat, the GBR Challenge won't say what GBR78 has under the waterline but no one inside the team disabuses the notion that it is a tandem keel, like an upturned goalpost a keel bulb slung between two steerable fins. GBR general manager David Barnes knows all about NZL20, the Bruce Farr-designed boat in Sir Michael Fay's last Kiwi challenge of 1992 which utilised the same idea.

Without exactly acknowledging it is the same, Barnes says this: "I believe the concept has enormous potential. It could win you the America's Cup."

Barnes was tactician on NZL20. Curiously the man who actually steered NZL20, Rod Davis, now in Prada's aftergaurd, is just one of many who can't believe that a small, tightly-funded team like GBR, whose stated aims were to get into the Cup and learn as much as they could, should have tried the tandem keel. It sucked money and management away from more fundamental aspects of the campaign, particularly rigs and sails.

"It just doesn't work in the real world," says Davis. Doug Peterson is another sceptic. "It's one of those ideas that can good look in the tank," he says, confirming that most of the big teams have investigated but discarded the concept over the past 10 years.

Harrison is unapologetic: "I always came here with the view that this was my secret weapon which I could pull out. GBR70 was going to get us through so far. We did get a very, very strong indications from the tank with the design that we came up with for 78. Being the entrepreneurial man that I am, I've been used to taking the risks. To have any chance of winning this, you've got to have some sort of radical element. So I decided it was a worthwhile, calculated risk. Unfortunately, in the water, it did not show the same gains."

Skipper Ian Walker offers the rationale for the team to stay on: "This was a very important project to us and we ran out of time. Peter is very clear that the loop between design and full scale reality is closed. Otherwise, should Peter decide to challenge again, it would take a lot of time and resources to basically check out what we could do relatively easily down here."

One has to hope the results come good. It would be too easy to dub GBR78, Wight Magic, a White Elephant.

Tim Jeffery, 19 November 2002