SailGP is pretty insane. The international yacht racing league has been around since 2019, when it was founded by billionaire Larry Ellison and New Zealand yachtsman Sir Russell Coutts. In contrast to other sailing races, like the America’s cup, teams in SailGP all race on the same boat: the F50. The craft is a foiling catamaran that can reach speeds of 55 knots (or 65 miles an hour). At that speed, with nine boats in the water, teams are faced with the constant danger of colliding and capsizing. On a recent excursion to take a ride on a SailGP boat, Kai Lenny and Jamie O’Brien found that one out the hard way.
The venture started off with some pre-race training that mostly seemed to involve an instructor attempting to drown Jamie and Kai while they tried to access their spare air. Once the instructor was satisfied with their abilities, or just tired of attempting to murder them, they took to the boats. Jamie’s run wen’t relatively uneventfully (for screaming across the ocean in a sailboat), but when Kai took to the F50, he experienced a fairly hairy looking capsize. “The boat started tipping and I was like ‘Oh, it’s probably gonna start coming down,’ but it just kept going and then it went over,” explained Kai.
