Left: the 2007 Farr design on which Michel Desjoyeaux won the 2008/09 Vendée Globe was in its 7th season when Riechers’ sponsor Mare purchased it for a 2016 Vendée Globe campaign. The German skipper then drew up a dramatic but well-implemented package of major modifications that included grafting on a new bow in an aggressive effort to keep the two generation-old design competitive. Riechers’ thinking proved correct and the boat went on to win the 2014 Barcelona World Race… but sponsored by Renault and raced by Bernard Stamm and Jean Le Cam, Riechers’ own sponsor having pulled out. The boat then finished 6th in the last Vendée Globe. Above: after losing both his Imoca and his sponsor a long fallow period for the German skipper finally ended with a last-minute 2017 Mini Transat project, throwing together this Etienne Bertrand scow in Tunisia in seven weeks and launching barely in time to qualify. A lot of corners had needed to be cut to make the qualifying deadline but Riechers finished the race runner-up in the Proto division
A lot to win So what’s next – a scow Imoca? Normally yes, but you have to find the money for it and not every sponsor wants to take the risk of building a different boat from all the others, so he is following the herd… a move that is understandable with the money involved in a Vendée Globe campaign. But what if a sponsor does take the risk
to build a scow Imoca? Well, he has a lot to win. At the very least he has the boat that everybody talks about and there is a very big chance he has one of the fastest boats in his hands. I remember when I first saw David
Raison’s Mini scow in 2011 (I was the conservative type of person at that time). I said to myself this ugly tennis court-type boat could never be fast. I kept this view until the first race against the ‘Tennis Court’ where David overtook me upwind with 1kt more boatspeed. Reaching he was 2kt faster. That changed my attitude profoundly. You have to be open to every- thing new and especially to new paths of development. David was right. He won the Mini Transat that year by more than two days!
Can’t stop the fire On top of a fast boat and a vision, to keep going you need this fire burning inside you and the voice in your head saying, ‘You have to do the Vendée Globe… and
you have to f***ing win it one day.’ The Mini Transat 2011 and the experi-
ence of being so outperformed by a supe- rior design concept was a bit of a turning point in my career. Up until then I thought that spending more time sailing and doing better manoeuvres and pushing harder than the others are the key to winning races. From that Mini Transat on I was aware that to win races you have to test every limit and every new idea in your design work, you literally do have to turn over every stone to find that extra bit of speed no one else has. When my former sponsor Mare bought
a 2008 Farr-designed Imoca in 2012 we knew the boat was not competitive any more and so we searched for ways to allow us to compete with newer boats. Against the advice of nearly everybody my sponsor and I (and the voice inside my head) decided to cut the boat in half and put a very full ‘Macif-type’ modern bow section onto it. Something very common in the America’s Cup world but new to class Imoca. The result was amazing. Unfortunately Mare then ended their
sponsorship of my programme before the Vendée Globe – which therefore stayed the blank spot in my career. But our design ideas and Mare’s confidence in making such drastic changes were rewarded – I was quite proud when the boat won the Barcelona World Race 2014 and finished
sixth in the Vendée Globe 2016. Exactly the performance goals we set ourselves when we modified the boat.
Restart with the Mini 6.50 But the fire keeps burning all the time, which pushed me into another Mini Transat in 2017. A last-minute campaign with a boat designed by French Mini designer Etienne Bertrand who had already designed my first Mini in 2009. Together with Martin Fischer, Etienne
and I had been imagining a new foiling scow design for a long time. Finally we got the funding eight weeks before the first qualifying race… We built the boat in seven weeks in Tunisia (normal building time of a Mini 6.50 is four months). Building the boat was a crazy experi-
ence, but preparing the boat for the first qualification race was more like some insane ‘road trip’ than the careful build-up to a potential winning ocean-racing project. The boat was finally ready to sail 30 minutes before the start of the first race. The rest of the qualification for the Mini
Transat was not without drama. In the second qualification race I was T-boned hard two minutes before the start. Even with a badly damaged hull I finished third against all the Proto hotshots. Sadly any further development was
minimal. Our funds had run out and we could not afford to build the new foils we
SEAHORSE 33
CHRISTOPHE BRESCHI
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