Peter Burling can see the positives of a scratchy opening day for the New Zealand SailGP Team in San Francisco.

This weekend’s event is the final stop on the global sailing league’s third season, which culminates in a one-race shootout between the season’s top three teams for a US$1m prize.

Coming into the event, the Kiwis were at short odds of being in that final race and furthered that claim in Sunday’s three fleet races.

Needing to be in the top five overall after the five fleet races in San Francisco to contest Monday morning’s grand final, the Kiwis finished Sunday’s races in fourth, seventh and third to sit third at the end of the day’s action.

But while the results were more good than bad, helmsman Burling said the New Zealanders know things could have gone a whole lot better.

“We’d definitely prefer to have a day like [this] today rather than tomorrow,” Burling told the Herald. “We’ve got to go back and look over and review now to try and get a better performance out of it tomorrow.

“We said all along we wanted to go and really set the standard in this event; to push things hard. That’s what we tried to do today, which is pretty positive because we can then go back and actually have a good look at it and figure out what we were doing and make some changes.

“We’re pretty happy with our performance today looking forward to the final, but probably a little bit disappointed considering we feel like we could have scored a whole heap more than we did.”

Heading into the weekend, the team could have been overtaken by France and Great Britain and missed out on a spot in the grand final race, but while Great Britain had a phenomenal day on the water, France struggled and are at risk of dropping their spot in third on the overall leaderboard – the last spot in the grand final race – to Great Britain.

The crews will have two races on Monday to decide their final placings for the San Francisco event before the top three teams on the season ladder contest the final race of the season.

The New Zealanders look set to be one of those three teams but will want to tidy up their starts in the final two fleet races. It was an area of concern for the Kiwi team, as they found themselves towards the back of the fleet across the starting line in all three races.

That gave them work to do in every race to make up some ground, and on a day where many of the teams struggled with unforced errors, the Kiwis were able to get around the course with some clean sailing.

Their one glaring error came late in the second race when they were given a penalty for being too close to the Switzerland boat which meant they had to fall behind Switzerland as they rounded the final marker.

That not only saw them move behind Switzerland but having to drop speed opened the door for the Denmark crew to sneak past them too, dropping the Kiwis from a possible fifth-placed finish to seventh.

Australia, the only team guaranteed to contest the US$1m shootout on Monday, were in fine form in the fleet races as they won two of the three, with Great Britain winning the other.

After the opening day, those two shared the event lead with 28 points, ahead of New Zealand on 19. The San Francisco event will be decided with two fleet races on Monday. The final standings will then be added to the teams’ season tally, with the top three then sailing in the race for US$1m.