The 35th America’s Cup Match will be “won or lost” with the tweaks defender Oracle Team USA and challenger Emirates Team New Zealand make to their boats over their five-day layoff, according to Oracle trimmer Joey Newton.

The Kiwis jumped out to a commanding 3-0 lead in the best-of-13 series with a superior boat that points higher to weather and sails deeper on the run to the leeward gate.

This enables the challenger to make fewer tacks and gybes at both ends of the track and travel less distance to the finish line.

“Black Magic?” Hardly.That the Kiwis have managed to achieve this owes much to their daggerboard foils, the submerged appendages that lift the boat out of the water to reduce drag and thus increase speed. It is for this reason that much of Oracle’s emphasis over the next several days will centre around their own foils.

“The foils in these boats are the thing that’s producing most of the speed,” Newton, a six-times America’s Cup campaigner, said.

“The thing the Kiwis seem to be going well at is getting their foils up and down the range a little better, and always having a little speed edge, so that’s where our team will be focusing on.

“The boards are incredibly complicated to build. There’s about 80 days of work in each one of those foils and something like 1,500 separate pieces of carbon fibre, so it’s not like you can snap your fingers and make new ones.

“But if you’ve got the components on the shelf ready to put on, then it’s another story, and I know with Oracle we’ve got a lot of those pieces in place and we will be trying them this week to get some more speed.

“This America’s Cup will be won or lost in this next week in the changes each team makes and the Kiwis will be the same; they are not going to sit still. They will have changes coming and ideas on how to make their boat faster, so it will be the development that will come out in the boats this weekend that will win or lose this America’s Cup.”

Jimmy Spithill, the Oracle skipper, added: “Clearly, we need to now put everything back on the table. These next five days will be the most important five days of the campaign.

“They’ve [Kiwis] obviously got speed and had a little bit of an edge sailing a lot of the manoeuvres. They are a very, very strong team and have been in the America’s Cup repeatedly for a good reason.

“They’re a strong group but having said that, we’ve got a strong group as well. We’ve shown we can respond and that’s exactly what we are going to plan to do.

“There’s still a lot of boat speed to be gained and when you are pushed against one of the best teams in the world, it’s probably the best way to develop. And when you have five days, that’s a lot of time to make some changes. The learning is still vertical, I feel, in this game.

“We’ve got a lot of great boatbuilding resource. We’ve got design engineering and a very, very good group up here and we feel with the resources we’ve got here we can make changes that’s going to have to improve the boat and give us more speed.”