America's Cup: Behind the rise of Team New Zealand

After two days of tweaking and repairing, Team New Zealand's boat is back on the water.

The team itself is psyching up for the next race, and they're in quite a different headspace to the team of two years ago.

With the reduced crew size, team tactician Ray Davies rarely gets to jump on board the race boat these days.

But unlike his former teammate, Dean Barker, Davies has kept his spot in the team.

With rampant speculation at the time about team rifts and Barker being restructured out of his role, it was a choppy period - but one which gave the team a strong resolve.

"Once we campaigned to get up and running we had a pretty clear plan and I brought into it from day one - that this is how we should sail this type of boat," Davies says. "The helmsman should be the tactician and make the decisions."

That man was Peter Burling, along with a team of largely fresh young talent.

Outside of the team selection there were also battles going on around Oracle's re-writing of the rules, with Team New Zealand often the only team opposing them.

"It was a real tough time for team New Zealand in the early stages of this campaign - certainly the other teams weren't helping matters, and we had a tough time getting up and going, but the team is stronger for that."

In Bermuda, a reluctance to work with Team New Zealand has sometimes been apparent, Davies says.

"It's definitely been a bit of a challenge when we're here... a few of the teams didn't want to sail against us in the training races and good on them. I think they saw us as a real threat."

The Kiwis have focussed on working on their own programme.

"I think as the regatta went on they all wanted to race against us.

Softbank team Japan is one of the teams that openly supports Oracle in both a financial and information-sharing agreement.

A spokesman for Softbank's CEO, Dean Barker, says over the past week he's been too busy to comment on the future of the team because he's still caught up with the debriefing process.

Five teams have already signed on to an agreement for the future format of the America's Cup, but that excludes Team New Zealand - and the rules state that the winner of the America's Cup sets its future direction.

Newshub.