Elevating Imoca
Foiling Week creator Luca Rizzotti monitors all foiling developments fastidiously so he was inevitably going to go in search of a just completed report on ‘full flying’ conducted in private by the VPLP office for the Imoca class association. What he learned, well, how does 40kt and steady flight sound to you?
We all appreciate the sight of fully powered Imoca yachts pointing their bows to the sky with gigantic foils spreading out either side and their sterns barely touching water on the leeward side. They seem like a 747 ready to take off and lifting its nose on an infinite runway, but never quite letting go of the ground. These ocean-going machines are the
peak of current technology… almost. But you watch them sailing in this rather inelegant attitude and there does seem to be a missing element allowing them to display their true potential. The Imoca class is in a very healthy state,
with over 30 boats getting ready to start this year’s Vendée Globe. One of the reasons for this success has been the ability to grandfather boats, with some older hulls
44 SEAHORSE
participating in three or even four solo races around the planet. However, these boats are now being
completely left behind in terms of outright performance (but not of course the Vendée Globe ‘adventure’) – as the new foilers are sailing 5-10kt faster on a consistent basis. Plus there is the cost. The introduction of
foils in the last edition has dramatically changed the cost of construction. According to Thomas Gaveriaux, a member of the Imoca technical committee and director of operations at Persico, the time needed to build a new Imoca has grown from 25,000 to at least 40,000 man-hours, not to mention the increased cost of the many new systems. Then there are those very clever but very very expensive foils, with the big teams building at least two complete sets during their Vendée Globe preparations. So the class is dividing clearly into two
divisions. All is not lost, however, because while we all watch the exciting develop- ment and spectacle of the front of the fleet on their foilers, the Vendée Globe will con- tinue to offer a magical life experience for first-timers racing older Imocas on much smaller budgets. But for this front third of the fleet where
to go next? What is this missing element that could grant full flight permission to these semi-flying Imoca ‘racers’? As Guil- laume Verdier puts it, ‘Current Imocas are like aeroplanes without rudder elevators.’ Or as Paul Cayard wrote rather directly in a
recent edition of this magazine, ‘The current Imocas go very fast but why do they all have to drag their arse across the oceans?’ When a designer sees those dramatic
pictures of boats almost jumping off the water all he can think of is this moment of lost performance, like a Formula 1 car inefficiently drifting out around a corner. For an Imoca 60 the rudder elevator
would be a game-changer that will propel boat performance forward with another leap in speeds… but is it right for the class or would the extra cost hinder the partici- pation of even current or previous-genera- tion foilers, let alone leave those older non-foiling boats even further astern? For Verdier the main advantage of the
elevators is increasing the longitudinal stability and opening up the Imocas to the amazing possibility of upwind foiling, with the idea of retracting the windward foil and achieving a greater speed in the 50-55° TWA range, the current optimum upwind VMG angles for the latest designs. So still sailing low upwind but now potentially (much) faster still. Verdier has already developed his
Super60 project, a full-foiling Imoca-like boat that was proposed in 2017 as a new one-design class for the Volvo Ocean Race, but failed at the time to gain sympathy from either the existing Imoca class or the Volvo race organisers worried about fund- ing another new fleet of expensive boats. On top of this previous experience
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