American Magic Forced to Retire Against Orient Racing Due to Pre-Start Issue

On Day 3 of the Louis Vuitton America's Cup Preliminary Regatta, American Magic was forced to retire from their race against Orient Racing due to an issue in the pre-start. Despite a strong warm-up, a failure in the pre-start led to the team’s disappointing withdrawal.

Terry Hutchinson, in a post-race interview, shared his thoughts on the setback:

"It is a frustrating day for American Magic here in Barcelona. As always, we're balancing the reliability of our race shot and performance. And so when we have an issue with some of the equipment and developing that reliability, we have to take a good, hard look at it through the program, we continue to reinforce that, that methodology of checking the systems and going through the boat and making sure that everything is as reliable and as performance-oriented as possible.

And so when we, you know, give up a day and a race to the yacht not working properly or with the sailors, we always go straight to the root cause and get a good understanding of what the issue is.

We'll let the engineers get to work. We have a big day up against Team New Zealand tomorrow, so we have to get on to the next play, and at the same time, we need to understand what failed and why."