The chances of racing on the Great Sound in Bermuda yesterday always looked slim, but despite his efforts of the day before, Jono Macbeth’s name was down on the crew list for Land Rover BAR’s scheduled races against Emirates Team New Zealand and Groupama Team France.

A three-times America’s Cup winner, Tuesday’s match against Artemis Racing had been the 44-year-old’s first competitive race since the final race of the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco, where he was part of the winning Oracle Team USA crew.

Macbeth is the Land Rover BAR team manager, the first man Sir Ben Ainslie called three years ago when he set out to build his own team, but he was always ready to step on to the boat when needed. After four successive defeats, the decision to call him in came on Monday and both Ainslie, the skipper, and David “Freddie” Carr, the grinder, hailed the contribution of the man the rest of the crew like to call “The Bear”, even if Macbeth was keen to play down his own part in the victory.

“Ben and I have been sailing together for a long, long time, there’s obviously an understanding there about how we deal with competition and pressure situations, so really I just got on board and did what I do,” Macbeth said. “I have been in this game a long, long time now. You’re obviously learning all the time. Also it probably coincided with the team really coming together and sailing a good race.

“Ben has been starting really well last weekend and into this week, and again he did that yesterday. Giles [Scott] had a really good race tactically. And all the guys managed to get the boat around the track in good shape.

“You need good people in teams, and we’ve got that. But unless everyone is working together, then you don’t really get far.”

There are few more experienced America’s Cup sailors here than Macbeth. His career started when he worked in a kayak shop in New Zealand and was asked for help carrying a fridge freezer. The person who asked him was so impressed with his strength, he thought he would be ideal for sailing. That person was Sir Peter Blake, the head of Team New Zealand who had just won the America’s Cup.

Macbeth sailed for New Zealand in the victorious defence of the Cup in 2000 and their defeats in the next two editions of the America’s Cup, but was then brought in by Oracle for their wins in 2010 and 2013, where he sailed alongside Ainslie in the American team’s remarkable comeback against New Zealand.

As a grinder, the AC50s are the toughest boat he has ever had to sail; no surprise, then, that grinding is becoming a young man’s game — Neil Hunter, who has sailed in two races for BAR here is half Macbeth’s age. But Macbeth is still a crucial part of the crew.

“The 72s were obviously a lot larger and more cumbersome, but on these boats the grinding is more continual,” he said. “It is a relentless beast to get around the track. If you slip up or make a mistake, you are really punished for it. You get down on oil and from there it’s all downhill real quick.

“These boats are super physical and I don’t think there are any secrets about my age — I’m in the autumn of my career. But we’ve got an incredible strength and conditioning team — Ben Williams and ‘Hoppo’ [Alex Hopson] — who have managed to keep the old boy rumbling along and got me to a level where it’s not a disadvantage physically to have me on the boat.

“This regatta is going to go on for a long time, and these boats are punishing physically, so we are going to need a strong rotation.

“We’re seeing that across the fleet, probably more so than ever before in an America’s Cup.”

BAR’s two wins over Artemis have come in similar wind conditions, but Macbeth is confident that they can be strong in other conditions, too, with the key to being successful down to eliminating mistakes

“Either way up and down the range, we do have our strengths,” he said. “Not only did we have good boat speed [against Artemis], which we will be able to carry on down the range and up the range, but we just sailed well.

“I don’t know if you can see a pattern in the fleet at the moment; it is all over the place. But I’d say the real pattern that is there is the teams that are sailing well and making the least amount of mistakes are the ones that are winning. That is true all through the wind ranges.

“As this regatta is evolving, we are seeing sailing teams improving and identifying their own mistakes, which is certainly something that we have been not shy about doing.

“Everyone is making them and, if you don’t learn from them, you are not going to go as far as you want to in this competition.”