has had plenty of time to get an idea of the sailboat that would allow him to finally win a Vendée Globe. His choice of VPLP, which had just
designed the first Imoca of the new genera- tion for Charal, seems a logical follow-up using his approach, delivering a boat with great planing ability… but now with more reserves of power should the foils break. This happened last time around when
one of his appendages met a floating obstacle, and as a result Alex wished to protect himself from trying anything as radical this time, eschewing the approach taken by Jérémie Beyou on Charal of rely- ing mostly on the foils for righting moment with a narrow hull to reduce drag. Last time Alex also bet on his foils to
obtain most of his righting moment, choosing a narrower sailboat with less drag… Certainly Alex had the fastest hull last time but on its own it was not enough. So this time the VPLP team have pro-
vided him with a powerful new boat, with a generous beam of 5.65m, a flat bottom that opens up with parallel hull lines at the water surface when heeled, and a chine that runs aft from the bow just above the surface and then runs up quite steeply at the transom (we find the same aft shapes on the latest generation of TP52s, these ultra-sophisticated racers, but heavier than Imocas with their 7.5 tonnes of displace- ment on a length of 15.85m. These aft shapes appear to encourage the smaller boats to plane early when heeled.) If the bottom of the bow is as flat and as wide as possible, at the limit of the width
46 SEAHORSE
allowed by the rule, the flat bottom of Hugo Boss rises towards the bilge mirror- ing the section angles at the stern. On deck, and true to his image as a
slayer of convention, Alex has gone even further with the cutaway foredeck his team introduced in 2016. As Alex likes it, all of the shapes are as if sliced with a knife – Hugo Boss needs to either plane or fly… anything else is a disappointment. The Hugo Boss coachroof captured
attention when the boat first left the yard and did not fail to surprise with its length and original shape… and colour. In fact, there is no cockpit: Alex manoeuvres entirely from inside. All controls lead to the centre of the boat and are distributed over four winches driven by a single grinder. Above the winches multiple screens display data while the skipper monitors what is happening outside using a string of 360° cameras controlled by joystick. A tiller allows the skipper to steer from the inside but Alex does not expect it to be used very much during the Vendée Globe. The Hugo Boss deckhouse extends back
to the mainsheet traveller, and so the sea can flow smoothly over the boat and aft off the transom with no cockpit to fill. Knowing that the previous-generation
Imocas could carry more than 500 litres of seawater in their cockpit, Alex preferred to design an enclosed cockpit for manoeuvres and let the water and spray pass over it, removing any obstacles that could slow the boat or damage the sailing balance. Having worked so closely together for so many years (since 2007, in fact), one
would have thought the shapes of the new Imocas from VPLP and Guillaume Verdier would at least be of the same family. But there is nothing to suggest this. It even seems that there has never been so much difference between two Imocas as Hugo Boss (VPLP) and Apivia (Verdier), both of which launched in the same month. Guillaume’s focus is on wetted surface
reduction, a hull that leans on a narrow rail running the entire length of the boat (rather like a heeled lake scow), on the flow of the sea and spray, on the centre of gravity of the hull and rigging. He took particular care of the hull for light winds and the critical transition phases where the Figaro champions like Apivia’s skipper Charlie Dalin are expected to shine. The result is a narrow hull, barely
5.35m, with the maximum beam situated at the transom and a soft chine just above the waterline… The centre of gravity is set far back, even more than on the VPLP boat. The hull shape is all about smooth curves and is very fair. Apivia’s foredeck features a central
hollow which reaches 40cm of depth at the mast – as a result the rig’s centre of gravity is lower by same amount. The only common point between Hugo Boss and Apivia resides in the aft bottom sections which display a small inflection generating a very small amount of rocker. The choice of foils is just as different as
the shapes of the hulls. Hugo Boss is fitted with foils in the shape of large semi-circles, while Apivia relies on wider open U- shaped foils, the long centre span of the U
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