“If someone gave you a lottery ticket with a 33 % chance of winning $2m, you’d snap their hand off!” said Dylan Fletcher, helmsman of the Emirates Great Britain Team during last weekend’s SailGP Grand Finale in Abu Dhabi.

And certainly for a lot of the Mubadala Abu Dhabi Sail Grand Prix Season Grand Final – an event title which took almost as long to say as it took the F50s to get to the top mark – luck seemed to be playing a significant part in results, with zephyr-light winds and exceptionally short course plunging the season’s most consistent performers down the leaderboard.

At first watch even the final looked to come down to a ‘Hail Mary’ decision when the British team, who were third – or last – off the line split from the leading duo of Australia’s Bonds Flying Roos and New Zealand Black Foils to hook into a convenient shift and come out on top.

But, as Fletcher explains, that’s not quite how it happened.

SailGP leaders play it safe

Abu Dhabi was a new venue for the SailGP final, previously in San Francisco, and first impressions frankly weren’t great. Racing on the first day took place in very light winds – often just 5-7 knots – with the teams deploying the newest 27.5 wing rig, extra large light wind T-foils and just three crew onboard to make racing feasible in the very marginal conditions.

Fortunately the waters off Port Zayed were undisturbed – there was a notable lack of spectator boats. The race village was also smaller than some previous venues, with no giant grandstand packed with the roaring crowds of Auckland or Portsmouth. This was not a showcase of the stadium-filling, crowd-pleasing racing that SailGP can deliver – though it was a marker of the financial appeal of the league, with the event sponsored by the Sports Council of Abu Dhabi.

In the light, sub-foiling conditions and super-short courses, winning the start became everything, with Denmark, Switzerland and Germany having the best of the first day. At the end of four races three of the the top four teams – Emirates SailGP, Australia and Spain – were the sitting firmly in the bottom four on the leaderboard. The Kiwis only slightly redeemed themselves in 8th.

What, I asked Dylan, was going on?

“I think, honestly, you could have called it before the event,” Fletcher says.

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“There was a lot of teams who had couldn’t go up or down in the season championship; the points were basically closed off. Then you also had a bunch of teams changing people. And they were going to take risk. They were going to push it really hard.

“And I think we were all just so focused on doing what we needed to do to get into the Grand Final. As soon as it was that light, in reality, we want to win the actual Abu Dhabi event itself – but actually we don’t really care! We just want to make sure that we win the season points. So we inevitably ended up watching the other boats.

“We stopped taking as much risks as you don’t want to crash. We saw that the Kiwis got a rudder written off because the Swiss just sailed into them. And the Italians nearly took our rudder off with their foil. So there’s no wind, and there’s all these other boats pushing it, effectively.

“But it was funny, wasn’t it? It was like, oh, we’ve had a worst day of the entire year, but so have the other top four. So it doesn’t matter.”

The British had effectively pre-booked their slot in the Grand Final, though there was still a chance for the Spanish to fight their way back in. “I think the Spanish will feel obviously annoyed they didn’t make it, but the opportunity was there. All the other teams are doing terribly. They just needed to have a normal day and they would have been in very good shape!” points out Fletcher.

Super SailGP Sunday

On Sunday there was slightly more breeze nudging the F50s back up onto their foils and four crew back on board. Fletcher and the British squad came out firing, winning the first race. Was there a big team talk to reset the night before?

“I think we were very pragmatic about it, as we always are. We know that in reality, not foiling H2 [mode, two hulls in the water] there’s always more jeopardy, there’s more luck. You just got to do things a bit differently.

“[For Sunday] we came up with a different starting strategy. And from looking at the data on the other boats, came up with some things to make the boat go faster if we weren’t foiling. Although it was obviously foiling conditions, but we did actually adopt that start approach for the first two starts. I think there’s no doubt that our team is more comfortable when we’re foiling. And I think it showed on that Sunday.”

The teams had sailed with both the larger wings and foils previously, but not together. “It was new for the event. So we’d got one day. We’d used the foils before – they were from Geneva, and we used them in Cadiz. So [the change] was mainly the weight and the extra power of the 27.5m wing. You feel the extra weight, and it changes some of the moding. Once foiling, it’s a little more similar. But you do end up sailing a little higher, slower upwinds, and a little lower and slower downwind, basically.”

Sailing the F50s three-up also requires some ninja-levels of multi-tasking. “There are certain manoeuvres which you can’t do or it gets exceptionally challenging. And four people is a lot easier than three. Having someone to be able to grind, and then having effectively the pilot back to being a pilot really makes a difference.”

The $2m lottery

On the live broadcast on Day 2 Fletcher made a comment to his crew about the ‘lottery’ conditions. The SailGP commentary team took umbrage, but there was clearly a roll the dice element to the course.

“I guess there’s always an element of luck, and yes, it’s probably a little bit larger [in those conditions]. But interestingly or not, we had the best finish positions. You could have scored it any way the entire year, and we would have won. So there is a lot of jeopardy in that final race – and I think I said on the start of the final, ‘Welcome to the $2 million lottery’.

“But the idea behind that was that, yes, we won the points season. And yes, we’re sailing very well. But just because of that, that doesn’t mean that we are in any better position than the other two boats.

“If someone handed you a lottery ticket with a 33% chance of winning, you’d snap their hand off. So it’s just trying to see it as a massive opportunity and be open to enjoy it, basically. Enjoy it.”

Getting angry

But the fluky conditions didn’t play to everybody’s strengths. How hard was it for Dylan and co to keep their head in the game with this level of unpredictability?

“I think that was a real testament to the team on Saturday. We had obviously a challenging day. And we were still the same team. We were still smiling. We didn’t fall out. We weren’t getting angry… other people from some of the other teams were getting quite angry! And we didn’t get angry.

“I think that’s why I think we won, because of that is how our team operates. And we consistently are able to continue to solve the problem. We’ve had bad times this year, in America, where we didn’t do a very good job of that. And the results followed, basically, because we weren’t doing a very good job as a team.

“And I think that’s what I’m really proud of how the team operated.”

Final showdown

In the final itself it all seemed to come down to one key manoeuvre. GBR lagged off the start, then split at the leeward mark. But that decision was far from a fluke, Fletcher explains.

“We’d been working on it for seven weeks on how to win the Grand Final.

“For the start, we obviously didn’t want to be late, but we did want that approach. We just were trying to be on time. And we were happy to throw some risk at potentially being late. But we’d done a lot of analysis on, ‘Okay, well, if we don’t lead at Mark 1, what’s our next opportunity?.’

“We’d already discussed that we wanted to take the right turn at the bottom, if nothing had changed significantly from the racing beforehand. So we set ourselves up deliberately early on that gybe out to get a really good fast layline into the bottom. The Kiwis went round, but they were really slow. And we’d practised that ‘JK’ [manoeuvre] in some of the races, actually. So we’d set that up.

“Effectively we were using some of the fleet racing to try and practise a few things that we might do. So I felt pretty – not happy, but I felt very much when we went around the leeward and tacked, it was, okay, all the boats are level at this point. It’s completely even.

“I was actually surprised we weren’t further ahead. When we tacked back onto starboard, and the Kiwis were on port, I thought we would potentially be ahead. I was kind of annoyed that we weren’t, to be honest! But we also had decided that, again, if nothing had changed, we wanted the right turn at the top. So how we tried to orchestrate that up the beat [was] to be out of phase, set up for the right turn at the top with the other boats probably having to take the left, and they would have a difficult decision to make.

“That’s the key for me. They had a difficult decision if they wanted to take the right turn off us. And to be honest, as soon as we bore away, I was like, ‘it’s ours to lose’, because we took the bias mark and we were already faster.”

Fletcher’s make or break moment

To go from new ‘driver’ to SailGP champion is a remarkable feat. What were the team performance goals when he took over the wheel a year ago?

“It was to be in the Grand Final. So it was to win, but the actual goal was always get in the grand final.

“I’ve still been nicely… maybe surprised isn’t the right way of putting it, but I always felt like in my career, when I’ve been doing well, you’re not expecting it. You know you’re capable of it, but you don’t think it’s just going to happen. You always feel slightly on edge. I very much felt like that this whole year. And the team has just done a good job of learning all the new kit and giving me the opportunity to make mistakes, having come back in.

“I felt as though after America, then when we came to Portsmouth, I thought that was make a break for me, that event. If we didn’t go and get on the podium there – or maybe not even on the podium, but if we didn’t have a very good event, get the team back together, then that would be it. We would just be in the middle. So delivering there [was key]. And then I think also delivering in Sassnitz after the disappointment of getting the boat cut in half and everything, and the team really pulled together.

The biggest prize in sailing

SailGP’s famous $2 Million final prize is a great headline. But how important is it for Fletcher to be racing for serious cash?

“I think it is important, but I also think that we all care more about beating the others than the money. Yeah, the money is great, don’t be wrong. It’s obviously lovely. But the reality is, you just want to beat the others.

“I think Jensen Button said one time, all he wanted to be was an F1 world champion, and he’d trade everything. He didn’t care about his salary, he just wanted to win, be a world champion.

“I think that it’s a good amount of money in terms of it does raise the stakes, it does change people’s decision making. It adds quite a lot of extra spice effectively to it.

“But I also would probably say I’d like to see a bit more money for the season points because that is the traditionalist in me, that still thinks that valuing the points over the entire season is – maybe not more worthy because this is SailGP and SailGP has always been about winning that grand final. But the [overall] points to me is also quite important.”

Fletcher’s winners’ Rolex watch, however, is treasured. “I’ve been trying to win one of these for 37 years!” he jokes as he tried it on.

Transfer season

The flip side of all the money apparently sloshing around is SailGP are trying to ramp up interest in their ‘transfer season’. Have the Brits guys put a target on their backs for being poached?

“People have been chasing!” He laughs. “But Ben’s done a good job and we’re in a really good shape going forward. And I think that as people are getting longer contracts and getting locked in a bit more, to be honest.

SailGP now has a brief ‘off-season’ before the 2026 circuit kicks off in Perth in January.

“It’s six weeks to the next event. It’s less time between the Grand Final and the first event of the season than it was between Cadiz and Abu Dhabi,” points out Fletcher.

Though the break is welcome, “We’d rather be sailing!” He says, adding, “I guess for myself, because I’m still new into it.

“Experience means that when you take a break, you come back and you’re still at that same level. So I work quite hard, do what I can between the events to try and ensure that I’m as sharp as I can be. Even before the Grand Final, I was Moth sailing, 49er racing, and just doing anything.”

It’s a fair bet Fletcher will be coming back sharp and hungry in January.

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