SailGP is about to kick off a US double-header, with back to back events in Los Angeles and San Francisco, starting in LA this weekend (March 15-16). Currently topping the leaderboard is Emirates GBR, ahead of previous series winners Australia and Spain.

It was little surprise that, after his history-making performance as co-helm to Ben Ainslie on INEOS Britannia in the 37th America’s Cup, the vacant helm seat on the British F50 catamaran went to Dylan Fletcher for the 2025 SailGP season.

Fletcher was originally the very first British SailGP helmsman (or ‘driver’, in SailGP parlance) having taken the wheel in the inaugural 2019 season. He was soon replaced by Ainslie, with a new team branded under INEOS sponsorship, and Fletcher didn’t return to the circuit as a sailor – though after last October’s Cup he told Yachting World that SailGP represented ‘unfinished business’.

After Ainslie retired from F50 sailing, and Giles Scott moved to the Canadian team, it was announced that Fletcher would helm, with Hannah Mills as strategist.

Fletcher and the British team hit the season running, taking podium finishes at the first two events in Dubai and an extremely windy Auckland, before winning a nailbiting final at Sydney. We sat down with Dylan ahead of the US events to get his thoughts on the SailGP season so far. Read on for the full interview:

So, how did you jump straight to the front of the fleet?

“I guess I still have Season One under my belt – although when you look back at Season One, it was so bad in terms of how we were sailing the boats, and it’s progressed so much. But everyone [else] in our team was consistent. It was just me stepping in and I’ve worked with a lot of them before.

“Me and Han, we’ve known each other forever. Her coach was my mentor [Joe Glanfield], so there’s so many similarities with how we talk.

“I was super-happy with the start of the season, but certainly none of us were expecting it. We also know that we will have our tough moments, but we’ve been, I guess, pleasantly surprised that in light winds, then windy, then medium, we seem to be up there in all three conditions, which is nice. AND we have plenty of mistakes that we’re making, especially myself, so it feels nice that there’s still some headroom.”

How much have the boats changed since that first season?

“The wings are new. There’s obviously three different sizes now, but the whole wing itself is new. So in Season One, we were basically using wings from the America’s Cup that were all different. So there were some performance differences in reality, whereas now they are all the same.

“The [wing] twist is much faster, so you can basically sail the boats better. It was quite hard for the two grinders in season one because the twist was really slow, so you’d struggle to ‘catch’. So you’d have to sail the boat quite differently.

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“The other thing – outside of T-foils – has been lots under the hood. So the systems have massively stepped up. The way the accumulator and oil and pump and valves and all the technical sides have all improved massively, which you don’t see, but effectively allows us to sail the boat better and more accurately.

“As soon as I got on [a new generation F50], you can feel the difference. But in reality, I guess they’re all relatively minor changes compared to the T-foils. They really have – not exactly thrown a spanner in the works, but they are a big learning curve for everyone now.

“It changes [how you sail the boat] quite a lot. There’s some oil management we have to do. Because you’ve got the same amount of pumps and everything on the boat, but you are using more oil. You can move the cant in and out in the same way you could on an AC40 . So that certainly changes things.

“And the T-foil can pierce the waves occasionally. If you are below a certain boat speed and you pierce the waves, you crash. With the previous foils if you got a little bit too high, you just generally would slide sideways and then come back down. Whereas with these foils you crash. I think you see the helms flying the boats a little bit lower when the pilots are crossing. Just being more conservative, a bit more worried about not crashing – well, certainly I do.

“And because of the cant, we get more righting moment. As you cant out, you lower the bow effectively for the same rudder average. Generally speaking, all the teams are running more bow-down pitch than we were previously.”

Do you think the rankings – who’s got the hang of the T-foils and who hasn’t – will be changing a lot over the next events?

“I think it feels like it’s stabilised slightly. We’ve seen in the data that teams were not all sailing the boats the same. It was quite wild at the start in New Zealand when we did our training, and now there’s a reasonable amount of similarities.

“There’s also some different styles – like you see the Aussies obviously started incredibly well and sailed really well in all the qualifying races. But the flip side is you don’t need to win every race. You just need to win the last one.”

At events like Auckland – decent breeze, crazy small race tracks – how strategic are you being compared to just getting around the course?

“Yeah, really strategic. It’s almost slightly less reliance on the computer systems and that sort of thing because [everything] is changing so fast that you do have to just go off your gut effectively.

“But it is incredibly tight. We haven’t actually sailed with 12 boats yet, but it’s felt incredibly tight with 11, and there have been some moments that were scary, but in reality, so far, it’s been good and clean.

“The racing is, for me, incredible. I’ve really missed that tight fleet racing. Where you’re racing against Pete [Burling] and Diego [Botin], who I obviously raced very closely with [in the 49er]. But then also people like Ruggero Tita, who went to the Olympics in 2016 [sailing the Nacra]. For them all to be together, it’s really, really good fun.

And how do you run it with Hannah in terms of strategy calls? Presumably, you just have to be incredibly fast in terms of communicating?

“Yeah, I think what’s amazing with Hannah is we’ve got a lot of trust straight away with each other. There were some moments in Sydney, for example, when it was really hectic. And I was just trying to focus on managing the lane ahead, but I had an idea of what I wanted to do. It’s too hard to go and explain what I want. But I know I can just say to Hannah, ‘What do you think?’

“The other thing is because of her experience, in the final, we gybed, did a gybe turn-up, and I didn’t get to the other side. So she’s helming the boat in the round up, and I’ve got complete confidence that she can deal with that side. So, there’s a lot of trust with our roles and she can do a really good job.”

And when it comes to traffic management, how do you handle that? Because there are boats coming from every direction at some points.

“Well, we’ve got the coaching booth who are looking at ‘issue boats’, as we call them, on the 2D map. We got Ben Cornish and Rob Wilson. Ben Cornish is making sure that if there’s a port-starboard and they haven’t heard anything [from the boat], they might [tell us]: ‘There is an issue boat on port.’

“It’s Hannah’s responsibility to look, but then also the booth is a backup. Obviously, we don’t want to have a crash. So Han will say, ‘We’ve got an issue with this boat. Might be crossing. What do you think?’ Then, like any normal boat, I make the final call on a duck or a cross, basically.”

Are those close calls as close as it looks?

“It’s incredibly close. The racing in Sydney, especially on the first day, where the first beat was very changeable with the shifts – then you’re coming into a boundary, you’re going to come out on port, and it’s like, ‘are we going to be in the zone of protection?’ It’s ever-changing very quickly.

“I think for me, that day in Sydney really highlighted how intense the season is going to be. Every day we get off the water and we are just like, ‘Wow, that was wild’.”

The penalty system really pushes avoiding collisions, doesn’t it?

“Yeah. So if the boats come together, then there’s penalty points. And if they believe that even the right of way boat could have done more to have kept clear, then you get penalty points, and they are severe.”

So keeping out of trouble becomes a huge part of the strategy?

“Yeah. In the last two races in the fleet racing, we’d almost guaranteed our spot for the final. We were 15, 16 points ahead of 4th. We were thinking, ‘Okay, just two solid races’. Just stay out of trouble because if you go and get a penalty point, then you’re not only out of the final, but then you’ve got the season penalty points. We see now the Germans with negative season points and the Americans and the Brazilians on nothing – going into the fourth event of the season. It’s unbelievable, right?

“And that this is something we’re discussing as a team – it’s a long season. It’s about managing risk, and the finals are going to be up and down. But if we can just try and keep plugging away and be in the final or thereabouts, then that’s where we need to be at the end of the season.”

Going back to the coaching booth – is their primary role collision avoidance? Can they communicate much else to you?

“So they can communicate with us whenever they want. Some teams run it differently, so their booth might be a bit more of a strategist effectively, maybe depending on their experience.

“For us, we’ve got Rob who is obviously really experienced at coaching in SailGP. Then Ben and I actually did all of the two boating in AC40s together, so we’ve got a really great relationship. Their role is really to help us with the bias on the course or the gate bias, which changes quite a lot. I guess they’re almost a backup for anything that we’ve missed. They might turn around and tell us: ‘You must have left turn!’ Although they’ve never said that yet!

“Or there was an incident in Sydney where the software wasn’t working properly, and we didn’t have any laylines or anything, and they would be backing us up. So Hannah would go to leeward and have a little look, and we’d go back to [doing it the] old fashioned way – which is fine, but not knowing where the boundary was was quite concerning!”

“In between the races is where we really use it a lot. I guess it’s similar to the race engineers you’d have in Formula One. Ultimately, because it’s so fast-paced, it’s hard for them to actually have space to talk to us. They really struggle to get the time.”

Do you get information overload at some point? Where you just need to look at where you’re going?

“There are times like that. But I think we’re quite good as a team at trying to not talk too much. The team have done a really good job of integrating me because obviously there’s things that I’m not as good at or learning, and they’ve given me the space rather than going ‘Do this, do that’. Because then I’m just listening to them and I’m not doing what I’m actually quite good at. And so we don’t do anything well. They’ve allowed me the space to do what I do well and I will learn from my mistakes.”

Was it quite hard to adapt to sailing with another voice in your ear from the coaching booth?

“Not really! It’s quite interesting. It’s just another piece of information. You get used to it. But then with this [high performance] world, it slowly just builds up more and more and more, so you become more accustomed to it. But the flip side is I was out sailing my Moth last week and absolutely loved being on my own.”

Nobody to talk to!

“No, but I do occasionally talk to myself before the start of a race to go through my checklist. Otherwise, I sometimes forget things!”

Looking ahead to the US events, what are you expecting?

“I’m always hopeful of San Fran. That’s going to be good. And I’m really excited to be going to race in LA. I think a different venue, flatter water, then followed by San Francisco, where we’ll have maybe slightly longer courses, more open racetrack where we can see some longer runs, it will be interesting to see where teams are with the T-foils.”

The Rolex Los Angeles SailGP takes place from March 15-16, followed by the Oracle San Francisco SailGP from March 22-23. Visit SailGP.com
Tickets for the UK event, the Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix Portsmouth, are on sale now, with early bird pricing available until Monday, March 17. See sailgp.com/tickets

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