Alfa Romeo and Kiwi skipper Neville Crichton have taken a clean sweep of line honours wins in all five races in the prestigious Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup and capped off a fine week's sailing by taking the final race in the series on handicap as well as another line honours win on Saturday (8 September 2007). Alfa Romeo's key rival in the chase for the cup, Bob Oatley's Wild Oats, made a dramatic exit from series, which was being held off the coast of Sardinia when her mast exploded in three places, causing the yacht to almost capsize, catapulting the crew into the water as Alfa Romeo over took the Australian yacht.

The penultimate race in the series on Friday 7 September was the trickiest in the series as the wind lurched from one point on the compass to another leaving tacticians and strategists with plenty of decisions to make. Even the local knowledge gurus found it hard to keep a grip on proceedings. The race started after a 2-hour delay while the Race Committee allowed some breeze to build and settle. Build is relative, as the four divisions set off into a 5-knot easterly to a windward mark. Thereafter the 25 nautical-mile course took the yachts to Monaci rocks, down the southern shore of Caprera to a mark at Secca tre Monti before taking them back to the original windward mark, down into Golfo Pevero and the finish off Porto Cervo.

The right side of the course seemed to pay as Alfa Romeo (NZL) came back from the left hand side to pass behind Morning Glory (GER) - possibly the only time Hasso Plattner's 86-foot canting-keeler has been ahead of Neville Crichton's 100-foot canting-keeler. Alfa had edged into a sub-boatlength lead by the windward mark, where the only real difference between the yachts was the technique for hoisting the reaching spinnakers. Alfa - click, whirr, made! Morning Glory - spin, spin, spin, spin, made! Hydraulic power versus manpower. Neither seemed to have the edge - a credit to the burly grinders on the maxZ86 - as the kites popped in unison. Rambler and Titan XII followed - both demonstrating admirably that brute force is still an effective means of raising sails. Having started racing at 13.45, Alfa rounded the mark at 14.10 - it would take her another two and a half hours to complete the course as the wind began to play tricks.

As the yachts closed in on the lighthouse at Monaci, where they would make a left turn south towards the channel, the wind swung from the east to the north northwest causing a flurry of dropped spinnakers and hoisted jibs as one by one the yachts entered the new breeze. Once at Monaci, the best sailing of the day began. Unsurprisingly, Alfa Romeo led the fleet past the rocky outcrop and proceeded to reach down the shoreline of Caprera, with Morning Glory and Rambler about 10-minutes behind. Alfa arrived at Secca tre Monti at 15.10 moving like a freight train in 14-knots of northwesterly. Sliding round the hidden reef undertaking a controlled, but high speed gybe she headed off towards the gap between Isola delle Bisce and Capo Ferro - known to the crews as Bomb Alley. Crichton and crew, with three time Olympic medallist Ben Ainslie on board to help with the helming, seemed blissfully unaware of the bomb that was about to drop.

As Morning Glory and Rambler drag raced into the mark some 10-minutes later, it looked like they were in for a cracking race home. But up ahead, Alfa Romeo had come to an apparent standstill just before the crucial gap, as Michael Coxon one of the afterguard described, "we got stuck where there was a transition between the two winds which were fighting each other between the island (Isola delle Bisce) and the mainland. We were just stuck in the middle and we couldn't break from the old wind to the new wind. I think we just sat there for around 40 minutes." On board Titan XII, tactician Ben Mitchell watched what unfolded ahead with keen interest, "we could see coming into Golf (Secca tre Monti) Alfa Romeo in the cut, stopped, and with the wind 180 degrees to what we had. Morning Glory and Rambler were both holding high to go around Alfa, so we picked their lane and then when they ran out of wind we tried to split the difference between the boats ahead and aim at the next mark as much as possible.
 

Then the breeze came in from the south and we went south whilst they (Glory & Rambler) elected to go out to sea. Going south turned out to be a better track for us. We rounded Charlie (the old windward mark) a little bit behind Alfa Romeo and Morning Glory but in front of Rambler." Summarising the race, in which Titan XII finished third on the water and on handicap (15 seconds behind Loki), Mitchell continued, "it was a pretty tricky race. The wind came out of all around the clock, so it was trying conditions for the crews on all boats and certainly frustrating for the bigger boats because they got far enough ahead and then they'd stop. Being a little bit smaller boat we got a chance to see what happened and bounce of their misfortune." The fickle winds robbed Alfa Romeo of any chance of a handicap win, but she added another line honours victory to her collection.

The final day started uneventfully. A light northwesterly of 6-7 knots allowed the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda Race Committee to set a 30 nautical mile course that took the yachts to a windward mark, before they entered the channel between Sardinia and the Maddalena islands at the southern end of Caprera. A long beat up the channel led to the turning mark at Barettinelli di Fouri, where the yachts turned right and reached back along the outside of the islands to Golfo Pevero and the finish off Porto Cervo. By the end, it turned out more than eventful for some.

Race course winners were: Alfa Romeo in Racing, where the Neville Crichton's New Zealand supermaxi put in another blistering performance, haring around the track in 2 hours 34 minutes, finishing some twenty minutes ahead of George David's Rambler (USA) - both corrected out into the same positions. Romeo reached the windward mark first and headed off into the channel. Surprisingly, she was followed by Rambler, then Titan XII and then Favonius. At first it looked as though Morning Glory had encountered a problem. First she headed away from the mark. Then she executed a 360 turn as if to rectify a penalty, save there was no other yacht in proximity. Then just as she looked to be back up to speed and heading in the right direction, her headsail sheet was let off and she sailed lazily towards the channel in the wake of the remainder of the Racing Division. That is, all except Loki, with whom Glory was tied in the standings.

It was then only too apparent what the German supermaxi intended to do, as Morgan Larson, the tactician, explained, "we had two strategies today based upon the windspeed. We knew if the wind was in the upper range that we would have a great chance to beat the Loki in the race and if it was lighter they had a good chance to beat us. We did some work last night with the results and realized that their throwout was worse than ours so we just had to make sure that they had a bad race..." And that they did, stalking their opponent at the windward mark with a ruthlessness that suggested plainly that the Goliath in this contest was not to be denied by the David.

Larson described how they reached the decision to quash the aspirations of the Australian crew, "halfway up to the first mark we decided it was light wind and those guys are so fast in the light and were doing such a great job, so we took the opportunity to slow them up." And that they did too. Over the ensuing 4 hours (Alfa took 2 hours 30 minutes to complete the course), the two yachts were no more than a hair's breadth apart with the larger boat in complete control. To their credit, Stephen Ainsworth's crew did not give up. A conservative estimate would be that Loki sailed an extra 10 miles trying to find a chink in the Teutonic armour, which she almost did at the death when the wind fell so light that Loki had more speed than Glory. This display of sportsmanship in the face of a wholly one-sided match race earned the Aussies a standing ovation from the crew of Favonius as they arrived back into the dock.

From the most luxurious, through the most traditional, to simply the fastest monohulls afloat today, the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup is nothing if not an astonishing line up of sailpower. The 18th edition of the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup featured 38 yachts from 11 countries including: Australia, Cayman Islands, France, Germany, Italy, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, San Marino, UK and USA. The Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup joins other prestigious Rolex-sponsored 2007 events including the Rolex Fastnet Race, Rolex Farr 40 World Championship, Rolex Big Boat Series and the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.