Andrew: We know we need to keep winning to make the Grand Final
U.S. SailGP Team strategist Andrew Campbell writes to fans after winning the Spain Sail Grand Prix
Published 09/10/2026
It's not a cliché to say that every single person on this team contributed to winning the Spain Sail Grand Prix in Valencia this weekend – and it's going to continue. It's going to have to continue to be that way if we're going to keep making a run toward the Grand Final in Abu Dhabi.
The win moves us back into P3 in the Championship with three events to go – but the message does not change. I'm happy to let those outside the team talk; we’ll just focus on ourselves and our processes.Â
We know the entire fleet will come out guns blazing in Geneva, ready to tackle whatever comes at them during the final part of the season. So there’s no chance of us letting our guard down, or celebrating this win too much. We know this was an important statement to make: that we are not going away. It's something we needed to do regardless of whether it moved us into P3, or kept us in the hunt.Â
We know we need to keep winning in order to make this Final – and we're going to do it fighting and scratching the whole way.
I’ve talked all through the season about putting a whole weekend together. We even talked about it in our debrief before the weekend started.Â
We've had a lot of podium days this season, and only really in Sydney did we have two podium days in the same weekend, so we needed to figure out a way to repeat that. After Saturday, we were definitely in the hunt, and definitely capable of being in the top group.Â
To come out and just spear that first race on Sunday was huge – none of us, on the chase boat or on the F50, knew that the format was going to be shortened. So we were all in the mode of, ‘OK, we've got another race here to really lay this down and put us in the Final for sure’. Then they came through on the radio and said, ‘OK, you're in the Final’.Â
I think that's a good representation of how we should keep going. We were so focused on the process that we didn't realize we'd made the result we wanted, and then we could go out in that Final and just keep the momentum going.
Read More
In races like that, when you're behind at Mark 1, you have to really pick and choose your moments where you're going to attack. You have to wait for the other team to make a mistake if the conditions are not really variable. And that's probably the worst team in the league to wait to make a mistake because they are not prone to making mistakes.
But you saw flickers of it on that second beat, when we followed them because we wanted to keep the pressure on them, and we knew that was the right place to go. When they took off and tried to foil up that beat, that was a real indicator that maybe they had a different idea of how they wanted to choose their modes for the rest of the race, and they were willing - I think rightly so - to sail their own race regardless of what we were doing.Â
If they were going to leave the door open like that for us to sail our own race, then we had an opportunity. But we still need to be a team that's ready to grasp at an opportunity when it presents itself. We haven't always had the capability to snag every one that came our way. Right now, we are a team that's ready to take opportunities when they present themselves. And I think that's a huge transition this team's made in the last few months, during this season.Â
We can act like we've done it before, because we have. But we’re not getting ahead of ourselves either and the best part about how we celebrated on Sunday night was that we had the entire team together.Â
I'll reiterate what I said earlier: it goes to the team in New York, it goes to our marketing team and beyond. Our entire squad had a piece of this weekend. There are a lot of teams out there that thought Sydney was a fluke, and I think we are continuing to surprise people. If nobody believes in us but us, that's okay with us. We're just going to keep pressing on and keep working.
That work continues in Geneva next weekend as the European leg of the season concludes. Hopefully, we’ll see you there.
Andrew
Collect now
2026 Valencia Race Poster
Sign up to collect
Support
Contact
Powered By
© FanCapital LLC