Sailing's Formula 1 equivalent? A Sunday with SailGP

Let's get the disclosure done properly, because it's rather the point of the day. I was a guest of Tourism Western Australia at Sunday's Great Britain Sail Grand Prix in Portsmouth. There was a good reason for this. Perth stages its own round of the championship at Fremantle next February, and they'd quite like companies like ours to bring British fans over for it. So the question I carried into the afternoon with me was the same one you'd ask: is this an event worth travelling for?

I should admit I arrived as a sailing novice and left having barely watched any sailing in the traditional sense. That's not a criticism. It's the most interesting thing about SailGP. This is a spectator sport built along Formula 1 lines, and it wears the influence openly. You watch a lot of the racing on the screens, where the course overlays make sense of what's actually happening, where the boats sit in relation to each other, who's about to pounce at the mark. Then you look down, and your own eyes give you the thing no screen can: a true appreciation of the speed. These boats genuinely fly, and there's a moment when one carves past close to shore that recalibrates what you thought sailing was. Screen for the tactics, eyes for the visceral bit. F1 fans will recognise the rhythm exactly.

The hospitality had the same borrowed DNA. It felt unmistakably Paddock Club. The good kind of borrowed, I should say, and the day was dressed with the sort of extra events and showbiz that tell you this league has ambitions well beyond the sailing crowd. Craig David made an appearance, and not a distant, waved-at-from-a-stage appearance either; you could get really quite close. It's a small detail in reality, but it's the tell. Sports that are content to be sports don't book Craig David. Sports building themselves into a travelling show. A Grand Prix with salt water absolutely do, and the clientele in the room reflected it: less yacht club, more the crowd you'd meet at a race weekend or a big final.

It's not Formula 1. Nothing gets close to that weight of history or its global pull, but as an attempt to bottle the formula in a sport with little of either, it's a decent one. It's a similar crowd, and there are options for general admission grandstand seating with a great view of the action in a more traditional event experience setting, alongside high-standard hospitality spaces to appeal to the corporate and high-net-worth guests looking for the same experience but at a more cost-effective price point. I have to say too, the agency staff pulled in for the weekend were absolutely outstanding. That's a difficult thing to pull off when you are drafting people into a temporary facility with little to no time for training.

So, the Perth question. Would I put someone on a plane for this? As a standalone spectacle, SailGP is a brilliant day rather than a pilgrimage. It's young, and it knows it. But that's not really the proposition. The proposition is a world-class sporting show staged on Fremantle's waterfront in the middle of the Western Australian summer, wrapped in everything else that corner of the world does well. February in Perth versus February in Britain is not a difficult sell. The event doesn't have to carry the whole trip on its own; it has to be the centrepiece worth building one around, and on Sunday's evidence it comfortably is. The league clearly agrees. Perth's return comes with a bigger grandstand and expanded hospitality after the first edition sold out.

Watch this space on that front.