Opposite: by 2006 Imoca sails had moved on from those terrible old baggy things with uncontrollable leaches. Alex Thomson’s first Lombard Imoca 60, seen here, was lost during the Velux 5 Oceans following a keel failure – this was the era when keel flutter first became an issue on these boats. Thomson then built a new Finot design followed by Juan K’s ‘Imoca Maxi’ (right) which proved hard to sail consistently fast – especially solo. But it did feature proper leach control…
offshore sailors from time to time to help with concepts and ideas. Guillermo Altadill and Neal McDonald, for example, spent many hours sailing on the boat with Alex, Richard and the team and so the speed was a massive team effort. SH: And during that eight-year working relationship those long-distance race sails have certainly evolved… MS: To be honest the real change has been the level of involvement in the team. We all know from the Volvo race and the AC of years gone, when it was all about boat and sail development, that having the key designers and fast sailors involved in the whole process is the key. The last Hugo Boss campaign compares much more so than Vendée programmes of the past with a Volvo-style winning campaign, for example an Illbruck, ABN Amro, Ericsson- style set-up. There was a big team effort developing the hardware but with Alex’s buy-in throughout; that was followed by him working at his ability to then sail the boat as it had been created. So one overall improvement package rather than lots of individual segments. SH: But still a wholesale change in the underlying sail concepts? MS: Well, the boats have just changed so much that from a sail standpoint it has meant another big adaptation to suit the latest designs. These are now apparent wind machines, far closer to a non-foiling multihull than an Open 60 of 10 years ago. Out on the ocean now these boats are
basically too fast for ‘soft’ sails – Alex did carry an A2 gennaker, but in reality they just never get used. It’s pretty much a light- weight back-up for the A3. The boats need enough power to get the foils working but then it’s all about reducing drag – in partic- ular how well the boat is balanced. SH: Inventories… MS: One of the things I think the HB team did very well was refine the inventory so that Alex was quick to change gears. From a lot of the footage of the race you can see Alex often had multiple furling sails up at any one time. This was a strategic decision made early on in the campaign that the gains from having the key sails hoisted, furled and ready to deploy far outweighed the extra aero drag and weight aloft. So this was a very well thought-out
strategy and again is much closer to an offshore multihull philosophy. This did, however, push the team to
reduce sail weight anywhere we could as the gains are so much bigger if multiple sails are going to be in the air at any one time. This was a fine line of risk-reward but, with thorough testing and an inven- tory that was built also on the experience of the previous eight years, the guys got it right. We are very confident that Alex’s inventory was the lightest of any of the leading boats but the sails still held up amazingly well… in fact, they have now been serviced and are back on the boat. SH: Construction. MS: Alex’s sails were all constructed using
Stratis technology. The wonderful thing about Stratis is that for Richard [Bouzaid] designing the sails he has so many options, fibre and outside surface-wise, so literally every sail was 100 per cent customised for Hugo Boss; even the gennakers where we use what we call Radial Stratis, which is a proprietary method of building reaching gennakers with fibre-aligned curved panels. So we get the best of both worlds: uninter- rupted fibres with vertical shaping. Also, for Alex’s sails we used an early
version of our Sail-Art technology, where we can now print graphics onto the sails at wall canvas clarity. The first set of sails for the new boat were printed using an early version of the process; to show how well disciplined the team’s become, even though by the Vendée start we had a new and better process up and running for the Hugo Boss race sails we stuck with the older tech- nology. Keep in mind that we knew that with the original process the colour would steadily wash off around the world! And that with the new system we would have saved another 8kg off the mainsail alone… But that is what was tested and so that’s
what had to happen for the race. And no one disagreed – even though we knew it wouldn’t be a great look for us when the sails crossed the finish line with all the ink falling off. SH: And dealing with the higher top speeds of the foilers, as well as the more violent motions… MS: As we were part of the design team
SEAHORSE 45
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MARK LLOYD/DPPI
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