Revisiting an old friend (sort of)
When Beneteau went looking for the right designers for their very much all-new First Yacht 53 the results were thought-provoking. As is the yacht...
The First Yacht 53 has a lot to live up to. There’s the heritage of the First marque, which represents more than 40 years of offshore racing and cruising. There’s the exceptional pedigree of a design team that combines 25 years at the forefront of America’s Cup innovation with the groundbreaking flair of Brenta and Wally. And there’s also the fact that nearly a decade has passed since the launch of the last offshore yacht to bear the famous brand name, the Juan K-designed First 30. It’s fair to say that this is a long anticipated and eagerly awaited boat. Indeed, five First Yacht 53s had already been sold off plan before Beneteau began building the prototype.
The renaissance of Beneteau’s First series began several years ago with a range of small, lightweight sportsboats, some with simple accommodation. It’s a big step up from them to the brand new flagship of the range. The First Yacht 53 is a return to the mainstream cruiser- racer, or “luxury performance”, territory that used to define the brand, but it’s a far cry from the Firsts of 15 years ago, which were designed
70 SEAHORSE
for a full racing crew to live on board for several weeks. Most people don’t sail like that anymore.
‘This is an important yacht for Beneteau so we held a competition for designers,’ says project manager Damien Jacob. ‘Four design teams were invited to submit their concepts. The result was three very similar designs and a distinctly different one from Roberto Biscontini and Lorenzo Argento with a very wide hull and an interesting cockpit layout.’ Biscontini and Argento got the work, Jacob explains, ‘because we felt strongly that the First brand had to offer something genuinely new and the other design concepts seemed too close to what other brands were offering.’ The Italian team’s CVs, which when put together read like a roll call of the world’s fastest racing yacht hulls and most stylish superyacht designs, must have helped, too. That said, this is actually the first time that either of them have applied their skills to designing a mainstream, mass-production cruiser-racer. Biscontini focused on perfecting the hull, keel, rudders and rig while Argento took care of both
Above: it’s a First, Jim, but not as we know it... the hull designed and styled by Biscontini and Argento is faithful to Beneteau First’s well- established brand values but from
some angles the new First Yacht 53 seems to have more in common with a Brenta or Wally than with the last generation of First yachts
exterior and interior design. ‘The hull of the First Yacht 53 comes directly from my experience of designing racing boats,’ Biscontini says. ‘The width of the boat is carried all the way to the stern and it has a hull shape that reduces and elongates the wetted area as soon as the boat begins to heel over. Dynamic length is very important.’ A huge amount of work went into precisely positioning the boat’s centre of gravity, centre of effort and centre of buoyancy. Biscontini brought in one of the world’s leading experts in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Rodrigo Azcueta of Cape Horn Engineering, to exhaustively test 25 different hull shapes in a very wide range of wind and sea conditions. ‘We also did a lot of work on weight analysis, which is a very important part of the design,’ Biscontini says, ‘especially for a cruising boat with lots of heavy interior items inside the hull.’ Production boatbuilders rarely apply such extensive CFD analysis to the design of a cruiser-racer. ‘It’s all about achieving perfect balance and the best sensations at the wheel,’
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