Six German boats started the revival of the Admiral's Cup in three teams 22 years after the last edition. After the unfortunate mast breakage On the TP52 "Red Bandit" there are still five. Dirk Clasen's team-mate "Ginkgo" has to climb the England summit alone from now on because "Red Bandit" is out of the race.
Commenting on the bitter "Red Bandit" exit the day before, Dirk Clasen said late in the evening after his own intensive debriefing with his crew: "Those were not pretty pictures. We saw it live. They were qusai in front of our windward mark. That's where it happened. The starting cross for the large AC 1 class is always a bit longer than for the AC 2s. So there are two windward markers. They didn't even get up to theirs. They lost the mast in front of ours. We had to sail round it once. That didn't bother us, but we got relatively close and could see what was going on."
Sad mast breakage on "Red Bandit"
Ginkgo" owner Dirk Clasen from Rellingen near Hamburg said in the Admiral's Cup harbour in Cowes: "This is of course first and foremost sad for the 'Red Bandit' crew. Fortunately, our team partner's crew remained unharmed. We were very happy about that. Nevertheless, such a mast breakage without short-term options to get back into such a series is simply a great misfortune. We wish the 'Red Bandits' a mast on deck again as soon as possible."
Without a partner boat, the "Ginkgo" crew has no chance of achieving the good team result they had hoped for in the Admiral's Cup. Accordingly, the team has set itself new goals. After tenth place in the Channel Race and eleventh and ninth place in the first two short races on Tuesday, Clasen knows that things can be better. At times during the races, "Ginkgo" has even made it into the top five.
We would like to improve a little more within our AC 2 group." Dirk Clasen
The next opportunities to do so are offered by the two short races that have been running since Wednesday afternoon. Click here for the tracking of inshore races 3 and 4. "We want to do as well as possible in class 2. And preferably become the best non-professional team," is Dirk Clasen's new motto. It would also be important to him "that the two JPKs don't finish ahead of us". "Let's see if we can manage that," says the owner and helmsman with cautious optimism.
New Admiral's Cup targets for "Ginkgo"
This refers to the Italian JPK 11.80 "Django JPK", which is in seventh place after the Channel Race and the first two short races, the "JPK 11.80 "Garm", which is one place ahead of "Ginkgo" and starting for Great Britain, and the JPK 11.80 "Sunrise", which is in 14th place behind "Ginkgo" (10th in AC 2). "These are the kind of marks you can put on the scaffolding and see if you can climb over them. Let's see...", said Dirk Clasen.
GPs, on the other hand, are difficult to crack, says Clasen. "They are very light and have a high righting moment. When they glide off, they are just really, really fast. It's difficult to catch up with them again," explains Clasen. Does the IRC compensation help? Clasen says: "Yes, they have to give us something. But they can sail well out of it, because they really slip from 14 knots of wind. We only start to sail really well at 17 or 18 knots. At 14 knots we're doing about ten or eleven knots. But by then they're already doing 13, 14 knots. It's a bit of a different game."
On the second day of the three-day Admiral's Cup phase with short races, the crews are expecting slightly less wind than on the previous day, when the first race was sailed at around 16 knots and the second at around 20 knots. The two other German teams will continue the series in the Solent from twelfth and fifteenth place.
Admiral's Cup favourites in the battle of the seconds
In the team from Regatta Verein Greifswald (91 points), the crew on the GP 42 "X-Day" can look back on eighth and 13th place on the previous day. Team partner "Imagine" had contributed 13th and 9th place to twelfth place in the team ranking. The Hamburg Sailing Team (118 points) with Daniel Baum's beautiful single "Elida" and Thomas Reinecke's Millenium 40 "Edelweiss" was in 15th place after three races.
At the top of the field, however, the expected battle of the favourites is raging as if in another world. In the Admiral's Cup standings, Peter Harrison's potent team from the Yacht Club de Monaco (26 points) leads ahead of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club (27 points) and - tied on points - the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda and the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron (both 34 points).
The professional teams don't give each other anything. This was very easy to observe in the short races, in which every successful move was rewarded and every small mistake was directly penalised. The IRC-corrected time differences were so close that even podium places were decided by mere seconds - a full-throttle battle on the water that also thrilled Boris Herrmann. His team-mates Will Harris and Cole Brauer are stepping on the gas on the Carkeek 40+ "Jolt 6" before they head to Kiel for the start of the Ocean Race Europe with Team Malizia on 2 August after the Rolex Fastnet Race.
The Admiral's Cup interim results
The winning boats on day one in class AC 1 were Stefan Jentsch's Botin 56 "Black Pearl" and Peter Harrison's TP52 Jolt 3, while in class AC 2 Jim Murray's B&C 42 "Callisto" dominated both short races of the day. The crew kept their clean slate with three first places after their opening victory in the Channel Race. To the interim results in AC 1 here, to the Classification in AC 2 here. The Team ranking in the battle for the Admiral's Cup is shown here by the host Royal Ocean Racing Club.
From offshore endurance to inshore intensity - the highlights of the first day of inshore racing in the Admiral's Cup 2025:
"This is cool! This team event has been missing from the sport for a long time" - voices of the Admiral's Cup sailors after the first day of the inshore phase:
