5 EXPERT TIPS

TERRY HUTCHINSON ON COMING BACK FROM A POOR RACE

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You learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. But when you've had a bad result, how do you get past the negative emotion and start turning that into a positive to take forward into your next race?

Terry Hutchinson has been grappling with this challenge for more than four decades. He says he's still learning. Even for someone of Terry's deep experience at the top of the sport, every day brings up new scenarios and new lessons, sometimes painful but always useful if processed in the right way.

But how to learn those lessons and improve teamwork without resorting to finger pointing and ending up in the blame game? It's a tough job but it's vital to the overall mission, not to mention making sure everybody is enjoying the process.

“Good communication creates clarity,” says Terry. "How do we communicate so that we keep our focus on the details and the process of racing well? The goal must be clear decision making without emotion. When you can make a decision without any emotion, you tend to make a higher percentage decision."

Easier said than done in the heat of battle, which is why you need to read and absorb Terry's best five tips for rallying the team after a bad outing on the race course.

1 OWN YOUR MISTAKES

When training recently on the TP52 we had a boat handling mistake which ended up with the spinnaker going underneath the bow — the worst possible thing that can happen.