Hans: U.S. SailGP Team Already Benefiting From Menninger
Flight Controller Hans Henken discusses new addition Michael Menninger and the team’s preparation for New York…
Published 05/8/2025
Hans Henken believes the U.S. SailGP Team is already feeling the benefit of the mid-season addition of Michael Menninger, ahead of next month’s Mubadala New York Sail Grand Prix.
Menninger joined the team after San Francisco
and boasts an impressive CV, which includes competing in the 37th edition of the America’s Cup in 2024. He is also a Match Racing World Champion, Team Racing World Champion, four-time Etchells World Champion and two-time Governor's Cup winner.Speaking recently, Hans praised his new team-mate’s impact, saying: “It’s been awesome having Michael Menninger join the team. I guess you’d call it a mid-spring break – not quite summer break like in Formula 1, but a bit of a pause.
“He’s brought a significant amount of insight and professionalism, and it's going to be great to have him in New York and hopefully see that translate into our performance on the water.”
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Hans continued: “Michael is a very experienced sailor with a diverse background. More importantly, he also has specific experience in the kind of foiling boats we race. He hasn’t raced the F50, but he’s competed at a very high level in a lot of foiling classes.
“He’s been able to join without any real bias or emotion tied to our results or internal dynamics. That’s made him a great sounding board and a good judge of the direction we’re heading. He's helped us continue to apply what we're doing, and find ways to improve it.
“He’s been great to bounce ideas off of. He has really good instincts and insight, especially around the physics, and it’s been great having solid communication with him.”
Due to the unprecedented and unplanned 76-day break between the Oracle San Francisco Sail Grand Prix and New York, which begins on June 7, the team has been hard at work – both collectively and individually.
“With the missed time around Rio, we’ve really been working hard behind the scenes to analyze as much as possible – especially with data,” explained Hans. “I’ve been doing a lot of my own analytics work, writing some code.
“We’ve been having weekly to bi-weekly calls to hash through things and talk about how to sail the boat better. We’ve been discussing new aspects of technique that we can apply to our racing moving forward.
“One of the hardest things about SailGP is that there’s really no time to train. So the only ‘training time’ we get is in our communication – talking through things and coming up with clear, actionable plans. When we do get training days, we have to make the most of them.”
With a master’s and bachelor’s degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Hans has enjoyed taking a deep dive into the data during his down time.
He said: “Sailing is changing very fast, and data is becoming increasingly central – kind of like what you see in Formula 1.
“In SailGP, the role of data and analytics is still a relatively new frontier, but it's being pushed forward aggressively. That’s given all of us this amazing tool to dive into the details and figure out how to sail these boats better.
“The most unique thing about SailGP is that all data is open and available to every team. That means there’s nowhere to hide. We can see exactly what the best teams are doing, and it’s up to us to interpret that in a meaningful way.
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“We have to really understand the physics, decision-making, and execution strategies of the top teams – and find ways to integrate that into our own approach. That’s what we've been doing over the past 6-8 weeks: digging into the data, trying to find the small pieces that can improve our consistency.
“The hardest part is that we can’t physically execute in practice because we’re not on the water between events. So it’s about learning what we want to do and preparing to execute it when we get the chance.”
“I'm someone who's always driven by the process and performance. Right now, we’re putting in the hard work off the water. New York is going to be a test of how good our team can be under pressure and execute on the water.”
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