BRITAIN’S two young aspiring match racers had contrasting fortunes at the Toscana Elba Cup yesterday. Ben Ainslie was knocked out in the first-round repechage having won four matches, while Iain Percy went through in the other half of the draw with only three victories.

Ainslie, sailing with four crew from Emirates Team New Zealand, including Andy Hemmings, of Britain, started in impressive form, beating Francesco de Angelis, of Team Luna Rossa, and Hamish Pepper, of Team Capitalia, to give the triple Olympic medal-winner four wins in six starts.

However, Ainslie, having tied with James Spithill, Ed Baird and Magnus Holmberg, was forced into the repechage and found himself in a sail-off against Team Shosholoza, from South Africa. What could have been an easy win went awry at the start, when Ainslie and his crew misjudged their approach to the line and were at least two seconds early. By the time they had spun their boat and recrossed the line, the South African boat was away to a five-length lead. It proved a deficit they could not make up.

The mathematics of the draw were far kinder to the +39 Challenge syndicate, skippered by Percy, as he added a win over Team Shosholoza to his victories over Russell Coutts, of New Zealand, and Peter Gilmour, of Australia, on Wednesday to move into today’s quarter-final round.

Last summer, in his first outings in the America’s Cup field, the 2000 Olympic gold medal-winner in the Finn class was struggling to get to grips with the new discipline, but things are starting to come together. “I look back at last summer and I know enough now to realise how little I knew then,” he said. Beating Coutts, three times an America’s Cup winner, here — albeit in very light winds — will have boosted his confidence immensely and Percy is looking forward to the next Louis Vuitton “Act” in Valencia in June, when he will get another chance to race America’s Cup-class yachts.

“There is still a lot to learn, but, come the next Act, I don’t think we’re going to be quite so much like a fish out of water as we were,” he said.