US YACHT Oracle scored a morale-boosting victory over Swiss rival Alinghi in the fourth race of the Louis Vuitton Cup finals here yesterday.

THE Swiss Alinghi team put on a clinical display of match racing skill to sweep to 2-0 over the US Oracle BMW Race team in the Louis Vuitton Cup final on Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf yesterday.

AMERICA’S Cup holders Team New Zealand stole the limelight from challengers Alinghi and Oracle BMW Racing, when they revealed a radical new hull design at an unveiling ceremony yesterday.

YACHTING’S America’s Cup was last night sailing into a new storm as holders Team New Zealand (TNZ) questioned the legal standing of a crucial tactic of the likely challenger.

SWITZERLAND’S Alinghi yesterday qualified for the finals of the challenge round of yachting’s America’s Cup by defeating American rival Oracle on the Hauraki Gulf.

HEAVY winds and high seas have forced the postponement of racing in the America’s Cup challengers semi-finals, with Swiss syndicate Alinghi just one win away from reaching the final.

THE BOATS, if these computer-sculpted splinters can be called watercraft at all, are utterly charmless.

DENNIS CONNER’S America’s Cup team said yesterday they would use a boat which sank to the ocean floor only four months ago for their sudden death challengers quarter-final against Britain’s GBR Challenge.

THE British crew in the Louis Vuitton Cup, the challenger series for the America’s Cup, took a step up into what has been described as the ‘middle league’ the four teams likely to tussle over the valuable fourth semi finals spot when they dispatched Sweden’s Victory Challenge yesterday by a comfortable 48 seconds.

THEY MAY have been jousting there for the last two months, jostling, sandbagging and sprinting to see whose latest boat has the edge, and whose despite the millions invested in research and development may yet be ‘off the pace’, but the real 2002/3 America’s Cup story starts to unfold in earnest next Tuesday.