Taylor: An Awesome Result On The Craziest Racetrack We’ve Had!

U.S. SailGP Team driver Taylor Canfield writes to you following the Rio Sail Grand Prix

Published 04/30/2026

Reflecting on Rio a week out, P4 was an awesome result for the team. In the moment, we were a little bummed about not making the final, but it’s another good step forward in some really challenging conditions.

Overall, we sailed quite well and started strongly, which was nice to see after the work we’ve put into that area. Seeing that translate into real progress in the starting game was promising.

Rio Delivers Challenges

It was a tricky racetrack - one of the craziest we’ve had! Racing under Sugarloaf Mountain with the breeze switching on and off made it difficult. We were also in a tougher configuration with the wing size and small rudder foils, which added another layer of challenge. It’s a setup we haven’t really sailed in before, so there was a lot of learning on the fly. We just made a few too many mistakes on Sunday.

The 27.5m wing was only introduced at the end of last season and there’s only one jib selection, which is quite large and overpowered for the conditions we had. On top of that, we were using the light-air main foils and high-speed rudder foils.

At times, we were running out of range on the lift we could add to the rudders because they were so small, combined with the lower boat speeds needed to generate proper pitch.

It was a challenging configuration, but everyone was dealing with the same thing. Looking back at the data, we probably didn’t make enough adjustments during the day and could have sailed the boat slightly differently.

Starting Right

One thing we were particularly pleased with was how we controlled our destiny in the starts and managed the boats around us.

A big focus has been creating space for ourselves on the line and controlling the boats around us as best as possible. The final trigger pull was strong in a lot of races - getting the bow down early toward Mark 1, accelerating well, and getting onto the foils quickly and efficiently.

We’re more of a low-risk starting team at the moment, building slowly toward the line before a final acceleration onto the foils. Some teams take a higher-risk approach with a fast run from further back in the box. That can pay off, but it also comes with risk. We saw that in Rio - the Australians collided with the Swiss, and the French picked up a black flag.

We’re happy with our approach, but we still need to expand and explore higher-risk options when needed. Overall, we’ve done a good job developing our strategy.

Process Leads To Progress

Incredibly, we’re already five events into the season and we’ve made some really good steps since last season. In fact, we started to see that toward the end of last year, even if it didn’t translate into full weekends of results.

Now, we’re passing boats around the racetrack and consistently giving ourselves a chance to make the final, which we didn’t see much of last season. It’s very promising.

I know I must sound like a broken record saying this but I firmly believe there’s still more to come from this team. We’ve already debriefed Rio and identified some straightforward improvements heading into Bermuda.

It’ll be exciting to see the next step and where we can get to on the leaderboard.

Catch you soon,

Taylor

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