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News Around the World


FRANCE Beyou and Thomson: two masters of the Vendée Globe Most of the Imocas have been relaunched after winter refits – but, with the boats so complicated now, everything is taking much longer than ever before. There have been more and more mea- surement checks, load checks and short voyages simply to check the changes made during the winter. Other sailors have to wait a while before heading back out to sea. Generally speaking the Vendée Globe is already in the mind of everybody. Work in the yards was more or less able to continue during the lockdown, but at a much slower pace than usual. As this is a round-the-world race year reliability has become the


top priority. All the boats were completely taken apart and key individual parts examined in detail and if necessary replaced.


Jérémie Beyou: ‘The race is not controllable, the preparation is’ Seahorse: You’ve made some very substantial changes this winter with Charal, including the front part of the hull… Jérémie Beyou:We modified the overall balance aboard the boat, the bow, the volume of the ballast tanks, how weight is distributed and the weight of the bulb. We have closed the cockpit off a bit more, looked at everything to do with energy and electronics, built new foils and the housing that goes with them, built a new mast (as a spare) and got new sails. We also reinforced the boat structure around the upper part of the keel so that we can avoid what hap- pened on Hugo Boss when she had her severe collision during the TJV. So, in every area, we have pushed things all the way to make gains in performance, without ever sacrificing reliability. Our new foils are VG optimised with the race models reviewed


again to check the preferred gains. But to hold our target speeds more easily we had to improve the attitude of the boat. One can


20 SEAHORSE


imagine a boat flying horizontally 70cm from the surface of the water, on flat sea is the best. But if you add the dynamic coefficient the boat will dive every two waves… How you deal with this dynamic coefficient is everything and we worked a lot on it. Flying earlier, faster and increasing the versatility of the foil and above all having a better attitude are the fundamentals of our V2 foils. The boat nosed up well before but lacked stability. We have done


a lot of work on the subject by using simulators to get a boat to lift her nose and maintain this attitude. The shape of the foil, the location, the (keel) cant contribute strongly to a satisfactory configuration. There is also the allocation of water ballast volumes, the weight of the bulb and the longitudinal allotment of the weight – as well, of course, as the setting of the sails! The simulator is fed by the bank of our polar speeds, and there


we see the differences. I hope that it will be confirmed on the water… The simulator allows you to try a much larger number of configu- rations than running individual VPP calculations. You then multiply the loops by changing the parameters of the boat. The simulator is the reference tool if that tool itself has a reliable


reference (preliminary work was carried out by Adrien Letourneur at VPLP and Nicolas Andrieu belonging to our team): in other words, all the recordings made over one year of navigation on Charal in her initial configuration. This way you can analyse and possibly validate the slightest modification. Personally, I found attitudes of the boat on the simulator as in real life on the water. The new foils are made by C3 Technologies in La Rochelle (like


all our appendices). The company does not yet have the autoclaves for foils of this size, so the cooking was done at Airbus Industrie. With those new foils we hope to stabilise the attitude of the boat reaching/running in strong weather within a ‘bow-up’ flying mode and also to gain a small edge sailing upwind compared to Apivia. SH: Would it be possible to go back to V1 foils?


GAUTHIER LEBEC/CHARAL


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