Juan Kouyoumdjian’s dominance of the Volvo 70 class through its entire life was relentless and extraordinary. Every top designer at least once found the budget to give the class their best shot but none came close. Juan K had the confidence to plow his own furrow from day one, thereafter adding refinements in each cycle but never straying from his first concept: start with maximum power in breeze… then make the yacht work down the range. After struggling on his first attempt with a fragile Farr design, genius Brazilian sailor Torben Grael secured Juan K for the Ericsson campaign in 2008 and dominated the contest (top); having won the leg to Rio with ‘B-boat’ Ericsson 3, the wonderful Magnus Olsson uses his own success to get more acquainted with Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria (top). Following Ericsson’s success, having twice shown design rivals how to solve the VO70 puzzle, the third time around the world in 2011-12 Franck Cammas (above) retained Juan K to design a base boat and then added his team’s own strong technical resources to further refine the design to suit their racing style. Groupama 4 was dismasted on leg 5 but she still won the race overall
situations that are humanly impossible to manage. There is this gigantic disconnect between these infernal speed machines and competing alone around the world… which of course is why most of them are built in the first place! SH: What do you think of the 12,500nm third stage of the current Ocean Race? JK: I am in favour of a race with fewer and longer stages. The situation where you had so many stages developed in the interests of the team sponsors, and for the organisation itself because their investments are defrayed by the increased number of hosting port fees. But by the end of the VO70 then VO65 eras the logistics costs for the teams with so many stops – there were 10 in the 2014 edition – were completely out of control. I think the current race has plenty of
stages, a very long one like this third leg and a total of five legs in total seems like a good balance to me. Old school is old for a reason, because not all old is bad. My
52 SEAHORSE
vision, or rather my wish, is that in the next edition there will be eight competitive Imocas, as it seems risky to think of 10 or 12, and that this new Open class would be held with five or six of these larger beasts. Then The Ocean Race will take on a very different look… a much stronger look. SH: Some more Imoca projects? JK:We continue with the two 2020 Imocas we have out there. We did a lot of modifica- tions to Corum and it is going back on the water shortly with new foils. We are also awaiting a new project that is organised around our 2020 Arkéa Paprec design that would be further developed and updated. Thinking about the new Ocean Race,
we will see… I’m not going to do any more Imocas for solo sailing. I don’t like it: I will support my existing projects but not do any more. But crewed Imocas interest me and I will keep working in that space. The Vendée Globe and Ocean Race are distinct concepts, two boats and two very different
modes of navigation. I would like to design a boat specifically for The Ocean Race, something that I began to think about with a possible project for Xavi Fernández. SH: Speaking of oceanic designs, what about the Mini 650s and Class40s? JK: It is almost impossible to design a new Mini 650 because creating a good design now costs more than building three of the boats! It is simply uneconomic. The Class40s have a little more budget, but the proportion of the cost of an exclusive design is still very large. I have no interest in work- ing on a new design without giving it the time it deserves simply to be able to sell it more cheaply. Honestly, if I didn’t have enough other work, maybe I would be tempted, but luckily that’s not my situation. The well-perfected design of a new Mini
is almost comparable in effort to that of an Imoca. But the Imoca costs ⇔6-7 million before you add campaign expenses, so the cost of the design is diluted within the total
ALAMY
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