SailGP’s technical manager faces sleepless nights after catamaran collision at Auckland SailGP

“It’s definitely a hair-raiser every day,” Taylor said. “We are at these events for a week, and there’s not much sleep during that time.”

Anything salvageable from New Zealand’s catamaran will be used to fix the lesser-damaged French boat, and the rest will go back to Southampton, England – a second journey there for the boat in as many SailGP events.

Before this crash, Taylor had spent four weeks orchestrating repairs on New Zealand’s boat after a collision at the season opener in Perth.

Taylor had the catamaran flown to the SailGP workshop and then back to the Southern Hemisphere in time for the next race in Auckland. Similar repairs on a civilian boat would take months. But one day before the catamaran was due to sail again, it was in the water in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour.

“A lot of the public thought we were dragging it out,” he said of the repairs. “Hand on heart, we were down to the wire.”

It would be in the water for one more day before being craned out as a wreckage.

Even if all the boats are working, Taylor’s job involves walking another wire – shipping all 13 catamarans to 13 events in 13 different cities. He uses an app that tracks cargo ships across the world, watching as his cargo crosses oceans, sometimes on time, sometimes late.

When each vessel arrives in a new city, it comes packed in four shipping containers. Taylor then choreographs their reassembly and craning back into the water while keeping them in one piece.

“Sometimes we do have to think on our feet, and we do have to do things we wouldn’t normally consider doing,” he said. “A prime example of that was in Sassnitz [Germany] … We actually cut into the USA boat because they were at fault, and we took a section of that boat and placed it into [Great Britain’s] boat and glued it in for the next day of sailing.

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“It’s not often that we go into a perfectly good boat and cut something out, but that’s one of our playbook moves now.”

Even when the boats are operating as planned, and Taylor has no fodder for nightmares, he has another objective to chase: how to make them even faster.

“The big one is the 100 club. So, 100km/h,” he said. “Every boat is trying to get into that club.”

A SailGP boat officially broke 100km/h midway through 2024 with the addition of T-foils to Canada’s boat, later added to all boats for the start of season five last year. But with more boats at greater speeds, Taylor’s job becomes harder.

This masthead travelled to Auckland as a guest of SailGP.