Prada turns around America's Cup campaign with two wins
Steve McMorran Associated Press Auckland
Italian challenger Prada won two races Wednesday on a day of dramatic shifts in wind and fortunes to turn around its troubled America's Cup campaign.
The challenger champions beat Italian rival Mascalzone Latino by 4 minutes, 28 seconds in the morning to finish its prolonged first-round program, then opened its second round with a 1:55 win over Oracle of San Francisco.
The team which challenged New Zealand for the America's Cup off Auckland two years ago started the day with three wins from seven races and finished with five from nine.
Prada is now tied with Oracle and Britain's GBR Challenge in third place on the nine-team leaderboard.
Its form improvement Wednesday seemed to vindicate a decision to make substantial changes to its race yacht Luna Rossa during an enforced break in racing over the past seven days.
Prada grafted a new bow section to the yacht and made undisclosed sail and configuration changes in the hope of finding boatspeed which was absent in the first round.
Conditions on Auckland's Hauraki Gulf were more than difficult Wednesday as the wind wavered between 0 and 10 knots and explored all points of the compass.
"It was as tricky as it can be," said Prada tactician Torben Grael.
Prada beat Mascalzone Latino comfortably in an all-Italian match which concluded an elongated first round - begun on Oct. 1 - and then beat the powerful Oracle team by almost two minutes. The loss was Oracle's fourth in its last five starts.
Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison sailed Wednesday as designated skipper in an apparent reshuffle of on-board leadership. Ellison had previously said that world match racing champion Peter Holmberg, from St. Thomas in the American Virgin Islands, was skipper on the water.
A team list released by Oracle on Wednesday listed Holmberg as helmsman and Ellison as skipper as Australian navigator Ian Burns returned to the crew after injury.
Ellison sat alone at the rear of his boat when Prada exploited a 120-degree windshift on the third leg to take the lead and the race.
He was caught by television cameras after the race with his head cradled in his hands.
The Seattle-based OneWorld Challenge of cellphone pioneer Craig McCaw and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, kept up its unbeaten run with a 4:01 win over Mascalzone.
Mascalzone led OneWorld around the first two marks, threatening an upset, but the blue Seattle yacht overtook and streaked ahead on the second upwind leg, controlling the race from then on.
In other races, Britain's GBR Challenge beat New York's Stars & Stripes by 46 seconds, reversing the outcome of their first- round meeting which New York won by 20 seconds.
Stars & Stripes had been leading by 42 seconds when the race was first sailed Wednesday - before the wind died on course Juliet and forced the race to be abandoned after its halfway point.
The New York yacht led around the first mark in the re-sailed race but GBR passed on the first downwind leg and held that lead around the third mark.
Stars & Stripes regained the lead, by 12 seconds, at the fourth mark but was penalized for failing to keep clear of GBR, which had approached the mark on starboard tack.
New York conceded the lead after completing a mandatory penalty turn and GBR led from then on, by 38 seconds at the final mark.
The match between Switzerland's Team Alinghi and Le Defi of France was also re-sailed after being abandoned at the first attempt, with Alinghi leading by more than 5 1-2 minutes. Alinghi dominated the re-sail and won by 5:54.