Making it four wins in a row for Finot-Conq in 2004 is Michel Desjoyeaux’s 2000 winner PRB modified and lightened for new skipper Vincent Riou. Riou had worked for Desjoyeaux as shore manager in 2000 but now the roles were reversed with the first management project for Desjoyeaux’s new company Mer Agitée
Desjoyeaux returned from the Orma 60 tri circuit to win the 2008 race with the first (and last) Imoca design from Farr, featuring a flat hull with relatively boxy sections above the water, outward canted and very deep daggerboards, the first reaching struts plus a light chamfered hull to deck join. The saucers were done…
at it as the combination of a box above the waterline with a shallow hull underneath. As Juan happily explains, Stamm’s hull
also has a slight inflection approaching the transom. He claims that the resulting trough promotes the elongation of the stern wave that dictates the speed of a sail- boat, artificially creating a longer flotation length. But with more speed the sailboat trims up by the bow and lifts out of the water more like a powerboat. Juan is inspired by the hull shapes he has been watching in the Formula 18 multihulls. Building on the experience of Hugo
Boss, the former Pindar, his previous enor- mously powerful but rather sticky 60, Juan sets the beam at 5.97m, which makes Stamm’s Imoca the widest and potentially stiffest boat in the 2012 Vendee Globe. Cheminées Poujoulat does show some
good signs of speed (later she will win the Barcelona World Race) but unfortunately Bernard Stamm receives outside assistance in the Vendée when he runs aground while repairing his hydrogenerators in the Pacific Ocean and is disqualified. François Gabart wins the 2012 race on
Macif, lowering the record time below 80 days (the winner of the first Vendée Globe took 109 days). He enjoys a close battle for much of the race with his friend Armel Le Cléac’h on Banque Populaire VII, a very similar design to Gabart’s race winner. The hull of Macif is actually built in the
same moulds used for Marc Guillemot’s first new Imoca Safran, launched back in
44 SEAHORSE
2007 and co-designed by Van Peteghem- Lauriot Prévost and Guillaume Verdier. Built under the control of one of the world’s top aerospace companies, Safran was the lightest Imoca to date. However, for Macif the vertical topsides
of the Safran design are sliced off at mid-height and along the length of the boat a wide ‘chamfer’ is introduced to connect the lowered topsides with a nar- rower, lighter deck. The effect is to reduce the shell surface and thus weight, lessen windage and lower the centre of gravity. For the same reason the deck is hollowed out forward. The coachroof gains a sliding canopy to protect the skipper from spray. For the 2016-2017 edition the one who
wins is the best, no one doubts it. So congratulations to Armel Le Cléac’h on Banque Populaire VIII! Yet second-place finisher Alex Thomson on Hugo Boss has put up a great fight and the performance of his different boat from the same designer is clearly remarkable – Hugo Boss battling Le Cléac’h to the end in spite, it seemed, of losing one of her DSS-style foils during the first half of the course. However, by midpoint in the last
Vendée Globe the architects realised that the four foil-equipped skippers who were still racing were using their foils only sparingly. Le Cléac’h in particular was very careful throughout the long race to try to win while putting the least possible strain on his equipment. Even more reason that our main interest here is in the striking
difference between the two hulls of the top two boats. One would have thought the two sail-
boats commissioned from the same archi- tects, VPLP and Guillaume Verdier, would be close to the point of using the same mould. But that’s not the case. OK, Alex Thomson wanted an extreme hull but Armel Le Cléac’h certainly didn’t ask for anything less than a hull to win. First observation of the two boats dur-
ing their rollover test highlighted a number of differences. Banque Populaire VIII is identified as 20cm wider. This may sound a small difference, in the context of Hugo Boss’s 5.6m beam, but it’s still significant. The rear view of the hull of Armel’s
sailboat perched on its side in the basin at Lorient shows a small step which reminds us of Pen Duick V and Eric Tabarly’s inge- nious innovations. Considering the speeds reached by these boats, taking inspiration from motorboat hull shapes can’t be a bad idea. Looking along the longitudinal axis, one can spot that the bottom of the hull is almost horizontal in the forward part, then a slight curve before going in another straight line back to the transom. While we’re at the back we notice that
the topsides above the chine flare slightly outwards in a conventional style. They then become vertical towards amidships, and then reverse forward to end in a bow that appears completely inverted. Over the forward half of the boat the sheer is smoothly radiused for at least the
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