News Around the World
Having been the dominant force in the Class40 for more than two years, Italian sailor and naval architect Ambrogio ‘Pirelli’ Beccaria is now inevitably turning his attention to the Imoca fleet, taking his first major step towards a 2028 Vendée Globe entry by purchasing Thomas Ruyant’s Koch-Finot design Vulnerable – now renamed Allagrande Mapei – and a design-sister to Yoann Richomme’s VG runner-up Arkéa Paprec. To help fast-track his way to the top, Ruyant will join Beccaria for several of this summer’s Imoca events, while Ruyant will simultaneously be working up his own new Finot-Koch design which is currently being fitted out at the CDK yard
Nivelt and Samuel Manuard, arrived with her very voluminous bow and a spatulated stem as never seen before in IRC world! Bernard said at the time: ‘In the last 10 years of IRC we have overlooked just how forward volume is underestimated when accounting for dynamic length. We penalised aft volumes but not forward volumes. ‘Yet adding volume forward combined with a wide deck provides
a substantial increase in power and without penalising displace- ment… When I saw the waterlines of Sam Manuard’s hull heeled at 20° it was perfection.’ Lan Aël 3’s powerful yet light hull is propelled by a generous sail
area. The cocktail proved its worth on the water despite a ‘high’ IRC handicap (1.084), more typical of bigger yachts, which many predicted could not be ‘saved’. Jean-Pierre Kelbert, racing the 2023 Spi aboard his latest boat,
the JPK 10.30, had a front-row seat from which to appreciate the superiority of Didier Gaudoux’s boat. He explains: ‘We had been too cautious in 2019 to make a more radical Scow version of our 10.10… However, Jacques Valer [the architect of all the JPKs] had already started a new boat to replace the 10.10, and as the project progressed he became a little more confident and by the end was worried he may have gone too radical. ‘But the 10.30 was a success, midway between a Scow and the
10.10:a good boat, but which needed breeze to perform at its best. It doesn’t have enough canvas but at the same time if you put more sail on it, it is not powerful enough to exploit that. In short, last year we had to come up with a new boat with longer overhangs at the bow and stern, as Lan Aël 3 showed us, and able to quickly add sailing waterline as soon as it heels in order to accelerate.’ The result is the JPK 10.50 (10.44m), launched early March. ‘It
is a new concept for us: a lighter boat with a lot of canvas, a lot of power and, as a result, an expensive handicap under the IRC Rule. So for a shipyard like ours (with 50 employees) it was also a big risk, starting with the high cost of completely new tooling which is around ⇔300K. Soon we will see if we made the right choices!’ A little further west in Brittany, at Combrit, the Structures Shipyard
(now with almost 100 employees) is famous for Pogos, fast ocean cruisers and also some one-off custom racers. Because Minis are no longer in production (the class has restricted the number of new builds) and demand for Class40s is slowing down, Structures turned to the designers of Lan Aël 3to maintain its presence in competition, this time under the IRC rules. A major first!
22 SEAHORSE From this meeting sprang the outline of the Pogo RC, a 10.26m
scow, eligible for the biggest races like the Transquadra (max IRC TCC 1.051) and even more so for the Cap Martinique (max 1.081). It is surely the case that Structures, with their considerable expe- rience with Class40s in particular, and now working with Lan Aël 3’s designers Nivelt/Manuard, have all the ingredients to produce a highly competitive IRC boat at their first attempt. The two new boats, one from JPK and one a new Pogo, are barely
20cm different in length with a similar general appearance. They share characteristics of the spatulated bow, light displacement, vacuum-infusion foam-vinylester resin sandwich construction and also similar rig configurations. Both boats feature carbon masts with a single spreader set and carry a large amount of sail. Jacques Valer explains further: ‘The two boats belong to the
same family, optimised to IRC, with the corollary of increasing the DLR, reducing measured waterline and an exaggerated spoon stem.’ However, Valer notes that the Pogo’s hull is more V-shaped,
whereas the 10.50’s is rounder and has less wetted surface. In fact, the Pogo has less freeboard and also water ballast – 200 litres on each side for righting moment and a 200-litre tank aft to help lift the bow running into waves (a problem with the original Lan Aël 3). For the same reason Bernard Nivelt concedes that another dif- ference between Lan Aël 3and the Pogo, besides a straight ‘French keel’ on Gaudoux’s boat, is a fuller ‘spoon’ at the front of the Pogo. In summary, there are more differences between the JPK 10.50
and its predecessor, the 10.30 (heavier and under-canvassed), than with the Pogo. Two 10.50s and two ‘RCs’ will race the 2025 Cap Martinique in the two-handed division, both with expert crews.
A global 40 The only two-time winner of the Vendée Globe has retired from the big ocean tours but he has not left offshore racing. Proof of this is the current construction of a Class40 for his friend Alex Le Gallais, already the owner of two other 40-footers, no115 and 190. The new boat carries the number 210. She is designed by Olivier Mousselon, one of the first people to join Mer Forte, the naval engineering and architecture office created in 2009 by the ‘professor’ with Denis Juhel. The new 210 is being built at Port La Forêt at Mer Agitée, another
company owned by Michel. When asked about his approach to the project, ‘Michdej’ replied: ‘Our boat will compete in the Globe40 race around the world and so we looked afresh at how the Class40
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