Left: in the last Vendée Globe Edmond de Rothschild (left) retired early and Hugo Boss (above) suffered a foil failure. With the Volvo switching to Imoca 60s there is inevitably the talk about how these light boats will be ‘destroyed’ when pressed harder by a crew. Certainly Vendée winner Armel Le C’léac’h only used the full power of his foils when he felt conditions to be sensible. Hugo Boss was the narrowest and lightest of the 2016 boats and also the fastest, significantly so downwind – expect all the new boats for the next race in 2020 to push further in the same direction… as well as gaining the much bigger foils we have now seen on Charal, the first new boat afloat (pg3). And while the ‘Vimoca 60s’ will indeed need to be beefed up and adapted for a full crew, especially in terms of interior space, against that there should no longer be need for the ultimate ‘crash resistance’ every singlehander dreams of
new CEO with the relevant experience with the race about to start. We had a good conversation and after giving it some thought we decided to take it on!!! We started at the same time as the fleet
left Lisbon for Cape Town. We spent the first month working out how the organisa- tion was running, what was going on and getting to know the staff. We were fortu- nate to find a great base, and a lot of good people with good plans and execution already in place. We soon recognised we now had to concentrate on three things: 1. Supervise the running of the current event – always a big task even if there are a lot of great people there. This is such a dynamic event, things do not always go as planned and there are always issues to deal with. 2. Prepare for the sale of the race – a month after we started we learned that Volvo had finally decided they wanted to sell the event. This was managed by an internal M&A group; eventually we ended up acquiring it. 3. The longterm strategy – Mark Turner’s plan for two new one-design fleets was relatively well known but it was made clear when we started that this would not go ahead. Details were not really discussed at that time, but the reality was the future of the race was a blank sheet of paper. Over the past 30 years we had often
debated what the best path should be for the future for this event, so it wasn’t exactly starting from scratch for us. In terms of the current race, however, we were suddenly responsible. To keep momentum going for whatever
was coming next we had to deliver as successful an event as possible. By far the biggest problem with the race over the last few editions has been the struggle to get enough quality teams to the startline. The last race had seven great teams but it was a real battle to get there. You can survive on that number but it is not sustainable. Big entry numbers for ocean racing
events aren’t impossible. A quick look at some of the French races, the Vendée Globe, for example, with its 30-boat limit is just one; and there are a lot more than 30 projects preparing for the next race. As an organiser when you are in a position to require selection for your event you are in the driving seat. When there are few teams each team has too much influence in deci- sion making. The whole event is weaker. At the end of the IOR era and over the
years that followed, the Whitbread Race and the Volvo Ocean Race introduced three new classes: the Whitbread 60, the Volvo 70 and the one-design VO65. They were all great boats with great qualities but it has
always been difficult for a team to offer continuity to their sponsors, because the boat was built for one event and it’s almost impossible to make good use of the asset commercially before the next race three years later, when often the boat is obsolete. It makes a huge difference to a team’s
balance sheet if a boat that costs 5m euros to build can be sold at the end of the opera- tion for 3m euros as opposed to 500,000. The VOR teams need something to do with their assets between movies! For me investigating the Imoca option
was natural. And the further we looked the more we realised there was realistically no other low-risk way forward than col- laborating with this big fleet of Imoca 60s. Seahorse: And so the phone on the desk of Imoca class association president Antoine Mermod rang. Antoine, how did that call from ‘the other race’ go? Antoine Mermod: Very positively. But in fact this wasn’t the first contact between Imoca and VOR. Six months earlier in the VOR’s Persico Super 60 project, in May 2017, Mark Turner had talked to us at length. Mark tried to convince us that his one-design Imoca 60 replacement project for the VO65s, where eight of these boats would be built in 15 months, offered a win-win for everyone.
SEAHORSE 35
w
CLEO BARNHAM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
