SailGP is about to kick off a US double-header, with back to back events in Los Angeles and San Francisco, starting in LA this weekend (March 15-16). Currently topping the leaderboard is Emirates GBR, ahead of previous series winners Australia and Spain.

It was little surprise that, after his history-making performance as co-helm to Ben Ainslie on INEOS Britannia in the 37th America’s Cup, the vacant helm seat on the British F50 catamaran went to Dylan Fletcher for the 2025 SailGP season.

Fletcher was originally the very first British SailGP helmsman (or ‘driver’, in SailGP parlance) having taken the wheel in the inaugural 2019 season. He was soon replaced by Ainslie, with a new team branded under INEOS sponsorship, and Fletcher didn’t return to the circuit as a sailor – though after last October’s Cup he told Yachting World that SailGP represented ‘unfinished business’.

After Ainslie retired from F50 sailing, and Giles Scott moved to the Canadian team, it was announced that Fletcher would helm, with Hannah Mills as strategist.

Fletcher and the British team hit the season running, taking podium finishes at the first two events in Dubai and an extremely windy Auckland, before winning a nailbiting final at Sydney. We sat down with Dylan ahead of the US events to get his thoughts on the SailGP season so far. Read on for the full interview:

Winners in Australia. Photo: Jason Ludlow for SailGP

So, how did you jump straight to the front of the fleet?

“I guess I still have Season One under my belt – although when you look back at Season One, it was so bad in terms of how we were sailing the boats, and it’s progressed so much. But everyone [else] in our team was consistent. It was just me stepping in and I’ve worked with a lot of them before.

“Me and Han, we’ve known each other forever. Her coach was my mentor [Joe Glanfield], so there’s so many similarities with how we talk.

“I was super-happy with the start of the season, but certainly none of us were expecting it. We also know that we will have our tough moments, but we’ve been, I guess, pleasantly surprised that in light winds, then windy, then medium, we seem to be up there in all three conditions, which is nice. AND we have plenty of mistakes that we’re making, especially myself, so it feels nice that there’s still some headroom.”

How much have the boats changed since that first season?

“The wings are new. There’s obviously three different sizes now, but the whole wing itself is new. So in Season One, we were basically using wings from the America’s Cup that were all different. So there were some performance differences in reality, whereas now they are all the same.

“The [wing] twist is much faster, so you can basically sail the boats better. It was quite hard for the two grinders in season one because the twist was really slow, so you’d struggle to ‘catch’. So you’d have to sail the boat quite differently.

Article continues below…