Daily Echo columnist James Stagg has had time to reflect since GBR Challenge were knocked out of the 2003 America's Cup competition. We weren't good enough, he admits candidly but the defeat was still a bitter pill to swallow...

It was a long sail home back to the GBR base after our loss to Stars and Stripes in the quarter-finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup.

We were, as always, met by the familiar faces of shore crew but in addition to this were the entire team and families. We were ordered off the boat by our shore manager Ed Danby and up into the yard for a compulsory beer or two, for once it looked like the boats were going to spend the night in the water.

It's now just over a week since we were knocked out of the 'Sailing World Cup', we have all had a well earned few days off and time to reflect on the whole experience.

I still have a very empty feeling in that we have been working hard at this since March 2001 and now suddenly we are out of the event, it is over as quickly as it began. We are now back at work and have started a month of testing to evaluate our second boat GBR 78. It is not nice to watch each morning the remaining boats tow out of Syndicate Row and out on to the race area.

Ever since GBR 70 was launched back in July we have devoted all our time to learning about the boat and making it go as fast as possible. This days of time both on the water and ashore in debrief and design rooms.

The biggest factor at the back of everyones mind throughout the whole testing period is "are we quick enough"? It was not until September that we managed to organize some unofficial racing with the French and Mascalzone teams, we did well in all of these races and by memory lost only one race.

It was a good opportunity for us to see how fast/slow we were. We concluded from these races that we were OK pace-wise but realized there was little room for mistakes.

It was time to check in with the bigger teams and see how we were faced up against them. Oracle and OneWorld were both keen to sail us but we were only able to set up one race against Oracle. They beat us, we missed some shifts but acknowledged that in the conditions we raced in they had a speed edge upwind. We knew that true to the bookies' odds we had our work cut out.

Ultimately it is very fair to say we were not good enough to have made the top four, but we are very disappointed to have been knocked out without making the repercharge round.

So what's next for GBR Challenge? Currently we are evaluating everything we have done in this campaign in all departments and at every level, be it good, bad or ugly. We want to make sure we take away as much as possible from this campaign so any subsequent challenge by GBR Challenge has a better platform to prepare from.

We are continuing up until December 20, concentrating on testing GBR 70 against GBR 78 and trying to seek out as much information on both designs before the base is closed down.

I will leave New Zealand with mixed emotions, pleased to get back home and catch up with friends and family but at the same time know I will miss everything that went on at GBR Challenge. Despite it being so close to our exit from this event I am definitely keen to do another, whether or not it is with another British team remains to be seen.