Michael: We can’t afford to get complacent with 5 events to go

Wing trimmer Michael Menninger writes exclusively for fans of the U.S. SailGP Team

Published 08/11/2026

It’s been a little over a year since I joined the U.S. SailGP Team in New York last June – and it was cool to reflect a little bit on that recently.

We're still in a phase of learning, and we still have a long way to go. SailGP is a really challenging league and it’s been a highly competitive season, where we're all trying to do our best to learn as much as we can.

At the end of the day, we're still pretty limited with time on the water. So we're doing everything we can to improve. It's totally normal to have hiccups along the way, and we're slowly trying to refine and get better.

The way we're working together as a group is improving as well. We have five events left so, at this point, we're just trying to do as well as we can going forward.

Setting targets

People often ask about our goals as a team. I remember talking to our Team Principal and CEO Mike (Buckley) at the end of last season, and I told him my personal goal was for the team to finish mid-fleet in the season and that'd I’d consider that a massive success.

So as things stand, we’re doing really nicely by being sat P4 in the Championship after Portsmouth. But the message is clear: We can't get complacent and think we'll finish where we are right now because nothing is given to you in this league. We have the mentality that it's just one race at a time, and we can't get caught up with the results we get or we won’t be where we want at the end of the season.

Fine margins

The Great Britain Sail Grand Prix in Portsmouth was the perfect illustration of the fine margins in SailGP. On Saturday, we sailed pretty well, and we started well. It was great to get a race win, and we were right in the mix going into Sunday – which is all you can really ask for.

Then Sunday was just a bit of a challenging day. Mentally we were prepared, and we came away from Saturday with some really good learnings that we wanted to implement.

The start box was very confined and tight. We had a bit of a tough time getting off the line and, unfortunately, we had a couple of mistakes during the racing, and that was enough to miss out on the Final.

Overall, we've missed out on getting into the final race - barely - a few times this year. The good news is that when we're making mistakes, we're still getting points, and we're right in the mix with the whole thing. So we're still very positive, still doing our best to learn, and hopefully we will put it all together in the final race soon.

Splitting the field

Portsmouth saw the introduction of split-fleet racing more permanently and I think it changes the racing ever so slightly. It opens up the racing maybe just a little bit more and makes starting a little bit easier.

That said, it also puts a lot of pressure on you to string together a lot of top-threes to be able to get into the Final. In general, the way we approach the races should be pretty much the same between split fleet and full fleet.

We're really focused on boat handling; on sailing our own boat internally as well as we can. I think results will come. In general, it seems like the fans are enjoying the split fleet just as much as the full fleet, which is good news.

We’re onto Sassnitz shortly which is another great venue for fans. We saw top-end conditions there last season in what was my first event on the boat – hopefully it will deliver something similar this season.

Talk soon,

Michael

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