William Tiller and his ‘Full Metal Jacket Racing’ have won the Asian Match Racing Championship. The win gives them an entry into the Monsoon Cup, the final World Match Racing Tour event of the year.
Tiller won 9 out of 12 races in the round robin, then beat Chin Yew Seah and ‘Zoke Kiwi Match’ 3 – 0 in the semi final before claiming the final over David Gilmour with 3 wins from 4 races.
Team Gilmour won the first race in a fresh seabreeze of 8 to 10 knots. In Race 2, William Tiller was given a penalty for a port/starboard incident in the pre-start but didn’t give up as they led off the startline. Tack for tack, up the windward beat saw Tiller rounding a couple of boat lengths ahead but still had a penalty. Tiller extended the lead to 10 boat lengths on the downwind and wiped off the penalty at the finish line to make it 1 – 1 by 29 seconds.
Racing was tight, but Tiller came out the winner, preventing the chance of a ‘Gilmour versus Gilmour’ match up at the Monsoon Cup.
Tiller commented:
“David pushed us hard. We had a bad first race start but we came back in the next two. We felt we had a slight edge in the prestarts. The last race was close but we split him at the mark and that two length lead allowed us to break clear.
“It’s awesome to reach the World Tour, a good opportunity for us. I want to thank the Full Metal Jacket crew for a great regatta – Harry Thurston, Jono Spurdle, Shaun Mason, Daniel Pooley and Brad Farrand.
“We are all graduate’s of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron Lion Foundation Youth Training Programme. Upon graduation from this programme we have decided to further our sailing by forming ‘FMJ Racing’. We are the youngest team in the ISAF top 20, we are 19th now and now we have a chance to lift it further.
“The long term goal of the team is to win the World match racing tour; we would like to achieve this by 2013.”
David Gilmour was obviously disappointed, as for the second year he had fallen in the Finals:
“We know the boats sailing the same design in Perth and we know the venue. We were just not on our game when it really counted.”
