New Zealand Practice Becomes the Big Show : Sailing: Test race overshadows Defiant’s victory over Jayhawk in the defender trials.

SAN DIEGO —  There was a pretty good sailboat race Thursday when America 3’s Defiant took on stablemate Jayhawk--but that wasn’t it.

While Buddy Melges was sailing Defiant to a 3-minute, 47-second victory over syndicate boss Bill Koch on Jayhawk in the America’s Cup defender trials, two New Zealand boats were having a private duel off to the south.

“We had a fine little fun race,” skipper Rod Davis said.

The Kiwis, regarded as a favorite to take the Cup to Auckland in May, were in their race mode for the day, gearing up to the start of the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger trials Jan. 25.

They were up for breakfast at 6 a.m. instead of the usual 7:30 and away from the dock at 8:15 instead of the usual 9:30. Their races will require an earlier wake-up call by starting at 11 a.m., instead of 12:15 p.m. with the defenders.

Sailing an approximation of the 22.6-nautical mile Cup course, the third New Zealand boat, with Russell Coutts at the helm, won the race by about 30 seconds over Davis on the radical fourth boat.

But much of the race was spent testing various sails and combinations. At one point, the two boats even swapped sails.

“The lead changed a couple of times upwind,” Davis said.

The No. 3 boat might never race formally. During the International America’s Cup Class World Championships last May, the Kiwis raced one of their earlier boats and loaned the other to the Spaniards. Both were built by Marten Marine in Auckland.

At the time there was speculation that the third boat, built by the Cookson yard in Auckland, was faster than the first two, but when anybody asked, the Kiwis just smiled.

“We have a lot of respect for No. 3,” Davis said. “We think it’s a good boat. If we had sailed it in the Worlds we might have won the Worlds.”

As it was, they won the fleet racing phase of the Worlds, then ran second to Il Moro di Venezia in the match-racing finals.

If anybody asks the obvious question now, Davis says, “We think No. 4 is faster than No. 3.”

More obvious Thursday was that the defender trials will be interesting about every fourth day, when Melges sails Defiant against Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes, which whipped Jayhawk by 4:10 the previous day.

Jayhawk might be an automatic victory for Melges and a punching bag for Conner.

In winds of 7 to 11 knots, Melges led comfortably throughout to finish the first round-robin rotation 2-0 to Conner’s 1-1. Those two will meet again Saturday, after a day off today.

Thursday’s winds weren’t as wildly erratic as Wednesday’s but did clock 50 degrees from west to northwest during the race. Melges simply got in front and controlled the right side of the course to take maximum advantage of the shifts.

There had been some question about how hard Koch’s boats would be trying against each other.

Dave Dellenbaugh, tactician on Defiant, said, “We viewed it as a race. We had talked about whether we should stop at the leeward (downwind) mark and re-start but decided to treat it as a regular race.”

Dellenbaugh said there was no radio communication between the boats during the race.

“You aren’t even allowed to have a radio on board,” he said. “But we did some things--testing different sails and so on--that we wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t had a good lead.”

After two lopsided losses, it appeared that Jayhawk is off the pace.

“That certainly leads you to that conclusion that Jayhawk isn’t as fast,” Dellenbaugh said. “But in our camp it’s hard to tell how much to attribute to boat speed and how much to the conditions.

“Jayhawk did OK against Stars & Stripes for a while the other day, and Jayhawk had been doing OK against us (in trials).”

Koch has committed to sail Jayhawk through the first round-robin, which has six races for each boat. But America 3is due to have its third boat delivered for the second round, when Jayhawk probably will be retired and the crews reshuffled.