The Italian team, Luna Rossa, won the final Act of 2011 in emphatic style and have been crowned the Overall Champions of the Extreme Sailing Series™ 2011.

Max Sirena, Paul Campbell-James, Alister Richardson and Manuel Modena, who have raced together on the Extreme 40 all season, hardly put a foot wrong over the 35 races of the final Act in Singapore.

They went into the final day with a previously unheard of 56-point lead over their arch rivals for the 2011 title, the French team of Groupe Edmond de Rothschild. There was little Pierre Pennec’s team could do as Luna Rossa put in another strong performance and after 10 races , Luna Rossa topped the Act 9 leaderboard with a 45-point margin over second-placed The Wave, Muscat.

Despite six different Act winners during the year, coming into the final Act, only the French and Italian teams could win the overall title. After 11 months, 9 venues and 301 races, Luna Rossa finally got to lift the Extreme Sailing Series trophy.

“We’re ecstatic right now,” said British helmsman Paul Campbell-James who has become the first helmsman to win the Extreme Sailing Series twice. “The goal for the week was to beat Gitana and we had a 56 point lead this morning and at lunchtime we had 59 point lead. I was doing the maths in my head and I knew that if we finished every race in the afternoon we would still beat them and we just had to stay out of trouble.”

The 2012 Extreme Sailing Series™ will start in February in the Sultanate of Oman in February before heading back to Qingdao, China for Act 2. Istanbul, Turkey, the gateway between Europe and Asia, will host Act 3 before the Extreme 40 fleet heads to Porto, Portugal, a new host venue in 2012.

After the habitual visit to the UK in August, the circuit will return to the Sicilian port of Trapani for the third consecutive year. The iconic city of Nice will be the final stop in Europe before the 2012 finale to be staged in Brazil for the very first time.

Caption: Luna Rossa and Team TILT on day 5 of racing in Marina Bay, Singapore