If at First. . .

America's Cup yacht racing is one of the few sports in which the losers are often better remembered than the winners. The most famous figure in the 116-year history of the cup is Britain's Sir Thomas Lipton, who tried five times to wrest it away from the U.S. Australia's Sir Frank Packer, 60, is obviously cast from the Lipton mold.

Packer is the owner of Gretel, the Aussie 12-meter that lost ignominiously to the U.S.'s Weatherly in 1962. That debacle cost Multimillionaire (newspapers, radio and TV) Packer an estimated $675,000--hardly enough to dent his enthusiasm. Last year he spent about $150,000 to have Gretel rebuilt for another try, but that came to nought (TIME, January 27) when a brand new Aussie challenger, Dame Pattie, convincingly trounced Gretel in a series of shakedown races off Sydney. Nothing would do then except to rebuild Gretel yet another time. Back she went to the yard, where, at a cost of $44,800, shipwrights stripped off all her double hull planking, altered every frame, shortened her keel and covered her again with single splined planks.

Last week Gretel was back in the water with her new look--sharper in the bow, smaller in the keel, wider in the beam. All her crew got was the same old look: a view of Dame Panic's transom. Five times the two boats raced, and five times Pattie won--by margins ranging from 2 min. 12 sec. to 5 min. 22 sec. Owner Packer tried switching skippers; that did not seem to help either. Gretel finally did manage to win one race--when Pattie split three jibs at the seams--but experts agreed that her cause was still hopeless. Pattie had proved conclusively that she was the faster boat and deserved the right to represent Australia against the U.S. next September. Packer, typically enough, did not concur. He asked for a fortnight's layoff to modify Gretel again and a whole new series of elimination trials.

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