Alfa Romeo takes 74th and final win!

Alfa Romeo has sailed its last race in Europe, ending its second season with a win in one of the most remarkable yacht races in history. In winning the Mediterranean's classic offshore event, the Rolex Middle Sea Race, the Alfa Romeo crew suffered gastric flu, being becalmed for hours on end, a man overboard and finally being capsized and destroying over US$200,000 of sails. Despite it all, the all-star crew overcame all obstacles and brought the boat home first.

The Rolex Middle Sea Race has been held annually since it was first run in 1968.

Originally conceived as the Mediterranean's answer to the Rolex Fastnet and the Sydney-Hobart race, the 607 mile long course takes the boats from Valletta harbour across to Sicily, and up it's east coast. Here they are likely to fall into the wind shadow of Mount Etna – which at 3,350m tall is one of the world's largest and most active volcanos.

Alfa Romeo was the favourite for line-honours and was attempting to break the present course record of 64 hours, 49 minutes and 57 seconds set by Bob McNeil's Zephyrus IV in 2000. Her 21 crew included Skipper Neville Crichton, Australian sail maker Mike Coxon,Volvo Ocean Race Skipper Neal McDonald and America's Cup legend Grant Simmer from Team Alinghi. Despite the stellar line-up, illness had taken hold, and the day before the event Crichton reported, “most of the crew are 'crook' - all but three are now suffering from gastric flu”.

The event starts from Malta's historic Marsamxett Harbour. Then the boats must negotiate the course's most tactically complex part: the Strait of Messina. Located between north east Sicily and the 'toe' of Italy, here the channel narrows from 10 miles wide and 1,000m deep to 2 miles wide and 100m deep. Current, both favourable and adverse, can launch boats through this channel or stop them in their tracks.

The boats then round the island of Stromboli, where there is another active volcano, before turning west to leave Sicily and its outlying Aeolian and Egadi islands to port. They must then continue south, leaving the islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa to port before returning to Malta and the finish line.

This year the race had a record fleet of 50 entries. While the bulk of these are from Malta and Italy, others come from further afield, including the UK, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Czech Republic, New Zealand and Croatia. “The best thing about this race is that there are lots of challenges the whole way round. No legs are longer than 100 -110 miles," commented Stead, strategist on board Neville Crichton's Alfa Romeo. "There are plenty of snakes and ladders around the course. It is like a Rolex Fastnet Race, but everything is different the whole way round.”

In the finish it was a race that contained every sailing challenge and tested both crew and yacht to the extreme.

Alfa Romeo finished her second European season as she started, with total domination and a line honours win in both the supporting races and the Rolex Middle of the Sea Race.

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