The America’s Cup has been compared – unfavourably – with a fleet of schoolchildren racing Optimists, by a top financier.

Dan Goldman, of a leading Chicago investment group, fired off a letter to the Financial Times berating the America’s Cup as a ‘drag race in a $150m boat.’

‘My nine-year-old son has raced Opis for the past two years…in my son’s races you can have 50 to 100 boats swarming the starting line, rounding the mark and sometimes tacking away from the fleet because a captain believes he has a better knowledge about tides or wind. That is a spectacle.

‘The Louis Vuitton Cup looks to have two or three boats racing for 20 minutes for five races. It is so removed from sailing that the public will have nothing more than a passing interest as a dragster roars by.’