AMERICA’S CUP UPDATE : NOTEBOOK : Red Star ’92 Won’t Comment on the Absence of Its Boat

Today is the deadline for the challengers to have their boats in San Diego for official measuring, and Red Star ’92 is apparently going to miss it.

The Russian syndicate’s boat is still waiting at a military base in Tartu, Estonia, for transport to San Diego, but local representative John Sawicki isn’t returning phone calls or accepting visitors in his Coronado offices to give a progress report on the travel plans of Red Star’s boat or crew.

“We don’t know anything,” said one of Sawicki’s associates. “When we do, we’ll contact you.”

Remember the IACC World Championships last May, when Dennis Conner had to borrow sails from Jim Kilroy’s maxi-boat and kept blowing out spinnakers like Kleenex?

He’s a little better off for the current defender trials, but not much. He didn’t blow out a spinnaker in the first race Tuesday.

“We haven’t built a whole lot of sails, but we have enough to be competitive downwind,” tactician Tom Whidden said. “We’re hesitant about building too many sails at this point.”

Conner explained, “We don’t have a lot of sails now so we can conserve our funds to build sails when the scoring gets more important.”

Wins in the first round of the defender trials count only one only point, then two in the second and four in the third. Conner would rather wait until it becomes clear--partly by watching other boats--exactly how sails should be cut for the course and the conditions.

“The old Dennis Conner leapfrog method,” Whidden said, “to improve as we go along.”

Conner: “We’re gonna let New Zealand and Italy and Mr. (Bill) Koch do a lot of our sail testing for us.”

won’t say how many sails they have--probably a third or fewer than America 3c,8.5 --but an IACC boat is allowed to carry five jibs, five spinnakers and one main during a race.

“We probably have enough sails to do that,” Whidden said.

Offhand, it seems odd that Team Dennis Conner should have problems getting all the sails it needs, since Whidden is president of North Sails, the largest manufacturer of racing sails in the world.

Guess again. It’s still a business, and North provides most of the other Cup teams, as well. The company is neither sponsor, supporter or complimentary supplier to any.

And the sails aren’t cheap. Retails prices run about $25,000 for a jib, $30,000 for a spinnaker and $40,000 for a main.

Whidden said, straight-faced, that the challengers were helping Stars & Stripes lately.

“A lot of the challengers are pretty reticent about showing us what they have,” Whidden said. “But because we are a one-boat program every once in a while we like to go out and see how they’re doing, and whenever we try to sail at all near them we seem to attract a lot of power boats doing circles around us.

“We’ve learned a lot about how to sail our boat in rough water.”

Il Moro di Venezia hasn’t even raced its new, fifth boat--the one it will enter in the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger trials--but already has had a broken rudder and a hole in the side.

The incidents have left the boat more a mystery than New Zealand’s radical new boat, which at least came out for some of the challengers’ practice races.

The Italians, long seen as the lead challenge, with their sprawling compound and carbon fiber assembly line, already were slipping into a lower profile when attention shifted to the Kiwis last month.

“It’s good that the attention is now on them rather than us,” syndicate spokesman Stefano Roberti said.

Instead, the Italians have been keeping to themselves, quietly sailing No. 5 with their No. 3 boat, which has become the benchmark.

“What we test on No. 3 can be applied to No. 5,” Roberti said. “The system works. It’s quite reliable. We’ve never found ourselves with a problem where projections were very far from reality.”

So, how fast is No. 5?

“Boat 5 has already proved to be what we expected,” Roberti said, smiling.

Il Moro probably knows more about New Zealand’s new boat than vice versa.

Skipper Paul Cayard slipped into the challengers’ race about two minutes after the start last Saturday and worked his way up to third place before dropping out.

He had planned to race seriously Sunday before the pre-start incident with the jury boat that left No. 5 with a starboard hole.

Now it seems the two powerhouses are consciously avoiding each other. New Zealand didn’t even takes its boats out last weekend. Skipper Rod Davis spent Sunday sailing in a Star class event off Coronado--practice for his Olympic campaign.

If the Kiwis have replaced Il Moro as favorites, the Italians don’t mind.

“Maybe it’s good for them to think they have the special boat and are strong, or maybe it’s bad,” Roberti said. “The Kiwis are supposed to be our strongest opponent. But we feel we are ready.”

Since its mast fell down in the IACC Worlds last May, Nippon Challenge’s unofficial ranking has slipped among Cup watchers.

“We’d be naive to put ourselves on the top of the list,” skipper Chris Dickson said. “I certainly don’t.

“The Nippon Challenge team is new to the America’s Cup (and) doesn’t have the experience at this level of yacht racing that some other teams have. It doesn’t surprise me that we’re not ranked in the top few.”

Early ratings of Nippon as a powerhouse were based not only on Dickson’s credentials as the top-ranked match racing skipper in the world--that’s official--but on Japan’s technological capabilities.

But the first two boats--the best of which Nippon used in the Worlds--were slow. The Japanese beat America 3’s two boats but qualified for the semifinals only because Dennis Conner dropped out.

“I didn’t expect we would have a boat that was rocket fast,” Dickson said. “There were too many things fundamentally wrong.”

The eight months since have seen a lot of changes.

“The Worlds told Nippon Challenge this was the level we were at and we had to come up,” Dickson said. “We have a completely new boat, new philosophy, new faces. We’re at a different level.”