Making the impossible, possible (and more sustainable) for SailGP

The global sailing league SailGP joined forces with Kuehne+Nagel in March 2021 to help accelerate its goal to be powered by nature on water and onshore by 2025.

Kuehne+Nagel’s Expo & Events team provide SailGP with an end-to-end logistics solution for 105, reducing to 80, 40ft high-cube containers: forming a temporary technical area for the event, providing race teams with a base, support areas and wing hangars where repairs can be made.

This involves customs clearances, management of 40ft High Cube (often referred to as goods passports), and assistance with the scheduling to make sure proposed race locations are viable.  

We move the event by a variety of transport modes including dedicated charters, carriers, road and rail to ten races a year across multiple continents. The requirement for the infrastructure and team equipment to be at each location for three weeks, means that on paper this timely movement of goods, and therefore SailGP’s race calendar, may seem impossible for some logistics organisations…  

How we make it possible

Mike Priestley, Director of Expo & Events, says “We have a dedicated team of people who travel with the event. Not only are they typically planning for three events ahead, but they are in place to deliver the on-site operation, manage last-minute shipments, and react to unforeseen challenges.

“The races are broadcast live meaning there is no slack in the agenda, things must move on-time, every time. It’s a monumental effort to make sure it’s all planned and every detail is checked. For context, normally a container that arrives at a port on a Monday might not be delivered to their final destination until the following week. Ours arrive on Monday – sometimes even Tuesday – and we’re delivering them to the venue by Wednesday. To put it bluntly, if we deliver on Friday, it’s too late. It's high stakes stuff, but we thrive off it.”

A successfully sustainable partnership

Driven to reduce carbon emissions, sustainability sits at the heart of SailGP and our goal is to transport the equipment to where it needs to be in the most efficient way possible.

To do this we have leveraged existing technologies and have implemented solutions such as using HVO fuel in trucks and insetting biofuels to vessels. We also use our industry-leading software, myKN, to not only track documents and where goods are, but to put a CO2 figure on each transit.

The next step in the partnership and CO2 journey is to use new technology that predicts the transit times and CO2 emissions. This visibility, combined with the historic data from previous events, will enable SailGP to make conscious decisions on where future race events will take place based on the logistics, transit times and on its CO2 output. The video below gives more detail on our sustainability statistics for Season 3:

Season 4 of SailGP is now well underway. While the Expo & Events team is looking forward to going back to some familiar venues, they can’t wait for the excitement and challenges that new, iconic, and spectacular locations across the world present.

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