Sailing: Walker's tiros eager for their tilt at Conner and history

Britain will take on America in a contest that will mine the depths of sailing history on Tuesday. Peter Harrison's GBR Challenge finished sixth in the Louis Vuitton Cup group stages, which cost them the privilege of choosing their opponent in the quarter-final group. Instead, Sweden's Victory Challenge finished fifth and picked the eighth-placed French, leaving the GBR Challenge to meet Team Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes in a best-of-seven race knockout contest.

However you look at it, the match is charged with symbolism. Britain are racing the New York Yacht Club, the swanky American institution that created the America's Cup when its representative, America, won the original match-race against Britain's finest off Cowes 151 years ago. Then there is the intellectual battle between Peter Harrison, the newcomer and plotter, planner and chairman of GBR, against Dennis Conner, still one of the best sailors in the world and arguably still the wiliest America's Cup campaigner in the game. And finally there is the youth of the novice GBR Challenge – average age 29, previous Cups nil – being thrown in against a hugely experienced American team in which no fewer than eight of the sailing squad have won the America's Cup.

But the GBR skipper, Ian Walker, and his team will not be thinking of such matters when they head for the start-line on Tuesday. Their focus will be much more onthe facts that the two teams stood at 1-1 in their personal meetings at the end of the round-robin stage, that GBR won the last encounter and finished a place ahead of the Americans on the round-robin scoreboard.

Certainly, the Americans are taking a great deal of respect for the British sailors into the match. "I think they sailed better than us both times we met," confessed Peter Isler, the long-term Stars & Stripes navigator who was with Conner when he so spectacularly reclaimed the Cup in Fremantle back in 1987. "These guys taught us some lessons about how to match race, especially in shifty conditions. They played that game better than anyone we've seen."

No one is expecting this to be over in four straight races. In theory one or other could be out of the competition and into wound-licking mode by next Saturday night, but there appears to be very little to choose between the boats – Stars & Stripes beat GBR by 20 seconds in the first round-robin; GBR won by 46 seconds in the second. But nothing would please Harrison and his team of young guns more than to put the team who are almost synonymous with America's Cup racing out of the competition.

"The atmosphere on our boat is really good," said the tactician, Adrian Stead, who will have a critical role to play if the two teams do prove equal in speed. "We're always hungry for beating people," he said. "We know we're not the fastest boat out there, we know we've got to sail really well to beat people but we're also learning, also trying to make our boat go faster all the time. I think we can beat them. We've sailed them twice, they beat us by 20 seconds the first time and the second time we passed them, they passed us and we passed them. We've got some new sails, we're learning and we've just got to keep at it."

While Stead is counting the elements that tip the balance in favour of the young upstarts, he sees a final plus in the fact that the GBR Challenge have been training in Auckland for two seasons while Stars & Stripes arrived just a couple of months before the start of racing. "We're young, we're fresh, we're ready to go. And we've been sailing out on the Hauraki Gulf longer than they have."

Quarter-final line-up: Group 1: Alinghi v Prada; Oracle v OneWorld. Group 2: Victory v Le Defi Areva; GBR Challenge v Stars & Stripes. Matches over best of seven races. Winners of Group 1 through to semi-finals; losers face winners of Group 2 in repechage. Losers of Group 2 eliminated.