Andrea Cucchi, the man behind Point7 looks back at the development of their new formula windsurfing sails, which are sure to send more top class sailors to more race wins.
Andrea Cucchi ‘Personally I love formula windsurfing. Formula was big at the time I was at the top of the worlds rankings. Still now even if I’m not sailing everyday on the Formula board, it’s just amazing how everything comes back in few minutes. Feeling the same motivation and challenge as those times, where all the pros were on Formula Boards battling each meter upwind. The feeling of how the board planes over the water is great. This feeling will keep this discipline alive! Could be that the come back is around the corner. In some countries it never died, but in others it had slowed down due to the slalom hype. We believe in it, we love it and we will push for it full time. ‘
Before starting the development of the Formula sails, we felt we needed some targets for 2013.
After having won the Master World Championship in Denmark in 2011, 2012 was a bit slower in results for the Formula international scene. Our riders had clashes with other events, there was more focus on slalom events and so on. We still won some national titles, as the Italian Championship title of Malte Reuscher, but now it was time to get back on it again at full focus.
So we sat down with our Black Team riders to make a plan for the development schedule of our Formula sails. We knew that having Alberto Menegatti and Maciek Rutkowski in the team, guys who were born with the Formula boards could have brought us great results at the next international world events, so… there was nothing to wait for but to start focusing getting them the best.
We took out all the protos we had done starting from those where Andrea had won the world title in Denmark, all the different curves masts we had asked from our supplier, spent few days in the loft looking at all the combination, working on the batten gradings and took each corner of the sail under examination. We started doing the first testing already in the middle of the summer on a slow motion pace, and by September once the slalom sails were approved from the team and could be registered for the PWA deadline, we emptied the vans from the small gear and made space for the 1m boards.
Sailing out from Lake Garda with Alberto and Andrea, the testing was a dream. Took little time to get all the tuning and setting to test, both with the same feedback on all the combination they tested.
