News Around the World �
Most of his Imoca 60 rivals concede that Vincent Riou’s previous-generation Verdier/VPLP-designed PRB will be the best-tested and therefore – in theory – the most reliable boat on the startline in Les Sables in November. However, for those of a betting inclination, it’s worth remembering that while the Hugo Boss team wisely opted for reliability over ultimate pace in the last race, finishing a good third, Boss skipper Alex Thomson trailed home nearly three days behind the two frontrunners on their latest-generation designs
FRANCE No foils, thank you very much
Following last month’s story about the foils installed on Jérémie Beyou’s previous-generation Imoca 60 Maître Coq, we now give you a different view from Vincent Riou, skipper of PRB. Winner of the 2004 Vendée Globe, Vincent has been unlucky
in the last two editions. Seven years ago he rescued his friend Jean Le Cam from his capsized Imoca near Cape Horn, but then lost his mast heading north up the South American coast. Four years later he was among the leaders entering the South Atlantic before his boat hit a large steel buoy, damaging the rigging to the deck spreaders and forcing him to retire once again. In 2016 he is back with the same VPLP/Verdier design, which is said to be the best-optimised 60-footer from the last generation. Very soon after the Transat Jacques Vabre (Vincent and Sébastien Col won ahead of Banque Populaire VIII – the only foiler to finish), Vincent had to decide whether to add foils to his boat. The answer came in March when his orange boat, now with a much bigger Mercedes star on its hull, was relaunched in Port La Forêt. Vincent is enthusiastic about his decision. ‘My own engineering and design team worked closely on this critical decision with designer Juan Kouyoumdjian. I could not go to the original designers of my boat because they were now designing new boats for my competitors and moreover they had signed an exclusivity agreement regarding foil development. So it was necessary to find somebody else who could offer us design and evaluation tools of a similar high standard.
‘I have wanted to work with Juan for a long time. He is a guy I respect very much. In terms of talent he is up there next to Guillaume Verdier. But Juan has a different approach to monohull design and of course he loves to “experiment”. ‘Through his work on the Cup and in the Volvo he has become one of very few designers with the tools to accurately evaluate new work. With Imocas the variables are so big that properly modelling performance is now beyond most design studios. ‘Juan came sailing with us for the first time just before the 2014 Route du Rhum [Vincent was an early retirement]. He is of
12 SEAHORSE
course a very good sailor, a former high-level racer, and he has super intuition about how a boat moves through the water. He gave me many interesting ideas to make my boat go quicker even before we started talking about design. I really appreciated his helpful approach.
‘At the start of our investigations we did not really know what
our competitors were planning to do – though we made some pretty good guesses. We started with the existing polars of PRB before running studies using the new foil types. Actually, we tested all sorts of strange things!
‘Quite early in the process both Juan and I realised that adapting
PRBto foils would be complicated, and that the gains were not very obvious – however, we still wanted to pursue that avenue of development further. But our conclusions stayed the same and so we decided to stop investigating foils at least until we had seen the new boats sailing.
‘The results were less than impressive. There was certainly progress, but we never thought they were that much faster. In light airs at the start of the TJV the foilers were slow, but later the one surviving foiler did get the reaching conditions they wanted and they were quick… But we won the race. ‘Next we carefully compared PRB’s known polars to how we “read” the foilers and then extrapolated the comparison around the world.’
On modelling the Vendée Globe course, he says: ‘In a great number of cases we were faster. We then focused on trying to calculate how much the foilers had to improve post-TJV to be faster than a non-foiler for at least 50 per cent of the time. Analysed globally, margins between the boat types were generally narrow. ‘However, with the changes to the Imoca rule the newer foilers are lighter and sometimes more powerful, and in certain conditions they are definitely quicker than us. But, on the other hand, there are so many other conditions that are unfavourable for them. ‘In the far south the foilers should in theory be faster but it still depends on how the weather fronts move. It is still about timing. The reality is that we could not convince ourselves that we were more likely to win with foils than without them. That is not to say
BENOIT STICHELBAUT
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