Opposite: veni vidi vici doesn’t come close, more ‘I’m here you’re screwed’. In the very capable hands of 2017 Mini Transat winner Ian Lipinski (seen here) and Figaro star Adrien Hardy, Raison’s first Class40 Crédit Mutuel absolutely smashed the Class40 division in the TJV barely two months after first going afloat. Left: David Raison nears the finish of the 2011 Mini Transat and the world of yacht design is about to be turned on its head (though it doesn’t know it yet). The first Raison scow had humiliated the rest of the Mini fleet – at times outperforming them by 3-4kt. It had taken two years from launch to Transat victory, but no Magnum is still very competitive in 2019
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more than 10 per cent on the previous 24-hour mark, established on a Manuard Mach40.3 by Maxime Sorel and Antoine Carpentier when they won the TJV in 2017: 17.3kt of average speed over 24 hours compared to 15.7kt. This victory, and the pace of which
Crédit Mutuel has proved consistently capable, seems all the more remarkable as the Max 40 launched just two and a half months before the start of the race in Le Havre and so has benefited from an extremely short development period (remember that it took David nearly two years of hard work to get the original MagnumMini reliably up to speed). Of course the sailors obviously had
rivals, from designers Romaric Neyhousser (Arkema), Olivier Mousselon (Simon Koster’s Eight Cube) or Etienne Bertrand (Jörg Riechers’ Lilienthal). The closing weeks of 2018 finally saw
the birth of the first scows for the Mini Series production division, the Raison- designed Maxi built by French shipyard IDB Marine and Etienne Bertrand’s Vector for Polish manufacturer Yacht Service. But beyond the small world of the 6.50,
a wonderful laboratory for innovation in naval architecture, was David Raison’s philosophy exportable to other open classes such as the Class40 or the Imoca, both of which moved very fast to try to slam the door on these new round noses? In both classes fresh regulations intro-
duced in response to Raison’s Mini 6.50 success defined a ‘pointed bow’, with tight constraints on the deck beam a fixed (short) distance ‘behind the foremost point to determine the hull length’. Rules against hull concavities further squeezed the space for manoeuvre for the scow lobby. But with a little more of that free think-
ing Raison bypassed the problem by designing a Class40 a little shorter than maximum length, with a hull length of
about ‘11.50m to 11.80m’, says the designer (to meet rules on curvature the deck is then assessed in plan back from a ‘virtual nose’ hanging forward in space – clever). ‘The rule box,’ explains the designer, ‘defines a rectangle 12.19m long by 4.50m wide, narrowed in its front part within a defined angular area: in fact, we should think of this boat as a pentagon. ‘As we couldn’t push our bow forward
we pulled the nose back. Then to achieve enough volume in the front sections the chine is placed lower relatively than on the Mini Maximum. As for the forefoot, at standstill you will see that it sits well above the water – actually it is really only there as a structural element to receive the bobstay.’ Would this loss of length penalise
Raison’s new ‘Max 40’ against its maxi- mum-length competitors? Not really: for boats that spend much of the time well above hull speed, whether in planing or semi-planing mode, the waterline length is no longer a key factor. In the Transat Jacques Vabre Crédit Mutuel won the race more than eight hours ahead of the British- French duo Sam Goodchild/Fabien Dela- haye, and with that 415.6nm 24-hour run. The new record is an improvement of
nothing to do with the Max 40’s immedi- ate success! Ian Lipinski is none other than the former skipper of the Maximum – he won every Mini race he took part in for two years, and he is the only man to have won consecutive Mini Transats first in the Series and then in the Proto division; and Lipinski’s TJV co-skipper Adrien Hardy is one of the most talented Figaro sailors of his generation. But their competitors are not beginners – at this level of competition there are many talented people. David Raison’s design creates a revolution in Class40, just as his Minis did in their time. Moving from the Mini circuit to the
Class40 Lipinski considered it entirely nat- ural to entrust the design of his new boat to the architect of his 6.50 Maximum: ‘It was the very basis of the project, to extend this path and to continue the same philosophy. ‘The Maximum,’ explains Lipinski, ‘is a
boat that is very comfortable in strong winds and rough seas, but above all it is easy to sail: not very strenuous for its crew, not very hard on the water, never stalling, with impressive stability, almost imposs - ible to broach in either direction.’ In strong winds he goes fast carrying less
canvas than his competitors, ‘which allows me to be fast without fatigue, and without being afraid’. It was these qualities that had to be transposed to the scale of a Class40. According to Lipinski, it is necessary to
observe the Max 40 not in plan, but in profile, and to move on from this endless question of the round or pointed nose (which could end up annoying David Raison, whose talent cannot be reduced to any one single element). ‘Yes, the boat is powerful and wide in
SEAHORSE 41
THIERRY MARTINEZ
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