After two championship wins with his previous smaller Italia 9.98 this year the Italia/Polli team opted to push right up against the upper limit of ORC Class C, where in the hands of skipper Sandro Montefusco’s Estonian crew the brand new 11.98 Sugar III won the worlds at their first attempt in Croatia in May
… is a fair way to describe a ‘genuinely competitive genuine cruiser-racer’. But designer Matteo Polli is making steady progress in his mission to disprove the adage that, as far as high-level competition goes, such a concept remains the stuff of fantasy and adverts…
A rare beast indeed
on top of the already unachievable displace- ment figure provided by the designer. But fortunately nothing is for ever and
there are glimmers of hope – including those emanating from the Italia Yachts shipyard in Venezia who work hard to break the mould (sorry – ed). Their philosophy has been to identify the essential features of what makes for an attractive yet functional cruising yacht, but where the basic essentials of com- fort are achieved through clever design and not excessive plushness and thus weight. The boats in their Sport Line range are
Italia 11.98 It has been a while since production builders have found a successful design niche for the true performance cruiser-racer. As they have for decades, many have tried to employ a handful of trendy features copied from current raceboats to hint at performance, but in reality they never quite get there since their real mission is to sell to the larger cruiser market. These boats may look fast in the brochures, or sitting next to more unassuming cruising designs at the boatshows, but one look at the hull lines, deck layout, rig and above all the displacement numbers reveals there’s no way for them to win on the racecourse. A long options list is another giveaway, with hun- dreds of kilos of variance waiting to be piled
not ultra-light by any means, but they do exhibit a suitable balance of length, power and stability to be more competitive than most under today’s two principal rating sys- tems, ORC and IRC. Certainly their newest Polli-designed Italia 11.98 demonstrated its potential in winning the Class C title at this year’s ORC Worlds in Croatia… which surely warrants some further examination. Matteo Polli is a Southampton-trained
naval architect who is now installed as Italia’s in-house designer. However, Polli first appeared on the international racing radar several years ago for his optimisation work on existing ORC Class C designs, earning podium finishes in several world and European championship events in both
the Baltic and the Mediterranean. But it was in 2015 at that year’s ORC
World Championship in Barcelona that the brand-new Polli-designed Italia 9.98 Low Noise struck gold, getting everyone’s atten- tion and setting a new design benchmark for Class C for several years to come. Subse- quent examples took gold again at the 2016 worlds, silver at the 2018 worlds along with medals at nearly every ORC European championship since being launched in 2015. This outstanding success, earned in what
most regard as the most consistently crowded of the three ORC classes (at 35-50 boats), is made more remarkable given this boat is not at the head of the class in rating or size: she is 34ft long – 3 or 4ft shorter than most of her top-tier Class C rivals. Not exactly David and Goliath, but in these crowded fleets size often matters. With their new 11.98 Polli design Italia
now have a new Class C weapon that sits at the top of the class. Two metres longer at 39ft but still just sneaking in under the Class C limit, winning the world championship crown in Croatia this year was achieved across a good mix of both breezy and light conditions. Polli was aboard for that event, and offers some more background. ‘The 11.98 was actually a concept that
SEAHORSE 67
PHOTOS ANDREA CARLONI
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