The AC....

They think that I’m just part of the entertainment,” said LaLa Hill-Courtney, wearing a red America’s Cup outfit accented with a pair of golden sneakers and a blue sun hat adorned with a patriotic ribbon and a button that says, “Ask Me.”

Her job as the America’s Cup “event ambassador” is to make visitors feel welcome. She does this by barking through a megaphone while sitting atop a 6-foot-tall chair that’s been dubbed LaLa’s Perch.

LaLa is part of an army of volunteers doing their best to make sure fans have a worthwhile experience at the $120 million America’s Cup Park that commands Piers 27 and 29. She’s showing special dedication to her work, climbing that chair – she’s been doing it with a broken ankle, suffered when she slipped doing the can-can down a set of marble stairs at the Trick Dog Saloon in the Mission last month.

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Handicap racing arrived in the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger series Sunday. And the handicap didn’t make a lick of difference.

No jib sail? No problem for Emirates Team New Zealand.

At this point, the Kiwis could put a posse of portly tourists in the back of their catamaran and still beat Luna Rossa Challenge.

Team New Zealand beat the Italian team by 2 minutes and 19 seconds even after losing its headsail, apparently because a clip broke, halfway through the race.

“It’s amazing how stuff like this has a way of happening when you’re racing,” Kiwi skipper Dean Barker said. “We’ve sailed with this system for 40-50 days, back in Auckland and here the whole time. And we’ve never had that failure before.”

His team took a 6-3 points lead over Luna Rossa and clinched the round-robin, gaining the right to bypass the challenger semifinals and go directly to the finals.

It was an impressive show of force. The jib may not help on downwind legs, but it aids considerably on upwind maneuvers.

“The balance of the boat changes quite dramatically in the amount of pitch,” Barker said. “The boat’s a lot more unstable and harder to manage.”

The Kiwis were about 280 meters in front on the third of seven legs when the jib broke free and fluttered in the wind. Bowman/strategist Adam Beashel struggled feverishly to pull it down. His team hoped to bring down the halyard – the line that holds the sail up – and rehoist the jib. But the crew was unable to gather it in before the zipper holding it blew apart.

It was jettisoned at that point, and a support boat quickly moved in to pick it up, forcing Luna Rossa to tack to avoid a collision.

There was never any thought of withdrawing, Barker said. “We could have gone straight into another race after that,” he said.

He lauded his team for dealing smoothly with the adversity, especially wing trimmer Glenn Ashby. “It’s easy to overload it because it’s now taking all the drive force,” Barker said. “You’ve got to be careful you don’t cause more damage by being too clever.”

For Luna Rossa, a minor solace was that it narrowed the deficit by just over three minutes from last week’s race against the Kiwis. However, that’s like losing a baseball game by 10 runs after previously losing to the same team by 20.

“We knew we could sail better than last week,” skipper Max Sirena said. “That was the reason why we were so upset.”

His team tweaked its daggerboards and changed some of the aerodynamic contours of the boat, he said. Now it’s up to the crew to get better if it faces New Zealand in the finals.

Luna Rossa will face Sweden’s Artemis Racing in the semifinals. Artemis is due to put its new boat in the water early this week. It isn’t expected to race until the semis, although there’s a chance it could reappear for a late round-robin race.

New Zealand and Luna Rossa have another race at 12:15 p.m. Tuesday. The Kiwis won’t be doing any tactical experimenting, even though the race has no bearing on the rest of the competition.

“We know we’ve got a long way to go to get to the level we want to be at,” Barker said.