Design
A blend of all the talents
The marriage of the champion young Italian yacht designer Matteo Polli and the strong, successful and well-proven technical team at Grand Soleil really is now delivering some remarkable yachts
A new yacht launched by Grand Soleil is bound to generate a bit of a buzz. The Italian marque’s parent company Cantiere del Pardo has enjoyed a remarkable run of popularity and commercial success over the last six years, easily outpacing the market as a whole and steadily growing its revenue while some of its rivals have declined. The shipyard’s strategy boils down to releasing one new model a year, alternating between its two parallel ranges of yachts, the Long Cruise and Performance series. This year’s launch of the Grand Soleil 44 Performance – announced back in January at Boot Düsseldorf and due to make its début at Cannes in September – has drawn more interest than usual because Matteo Polli is now involved. To back up the hype, it’s worth noting that even before the official announcement of the new model, half a dozen of these yachts were already sold off plan. Polli’s designs have dominated ORC handicap racing in recent years, often with the designer himself on board. Working first with Cossutti and then heading up his own eponymous
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yacht design agency, he has drawn the two most successful designs in ORC history with six world championship wins and podium results at most major regattas for more than a decade.
The design brief for the GS 44 Performance, Polli’s first yacht for Grand Soleil, demanded the almost impossible: a genuinely competitive cruiser-racer with the potential to beat purpose-built racing yachts in top- level competition. As any experienced racing sailor will tell you, when yachts are marketed in those terms they all too often turn out to offer the worst, rather than the best, of both worlds. Not only that, but the GS 44 Performance also had to be stylish and elegant with a high-volume hull… and in cruising mode it had to be easy for an average family crew to sail in all conditions. That was a daunting brief although perhaps less so for Polli, who has managed to do it several times before. ‘It was a challenging project,’ he admitted at the press conference in Düsseldorf. ‘But I think I have found the best possible compromise
Above: the first design by Matteo Polli for
Grand Soleil is a 44ft yacht that can be configured either as a racer-cruiser or as a fully optimised IRC or ORC racer (race version pictured above). The demanding design brief required a high-volume hull with good load- carrying ability... but without any negative impact on performance
between cruising ability and potential racing results.’ The design process involved a lot of high-resolution CFD modelling with software tools recently developed for the Luna Rossa America’s Cup team. Four different hull geometries were extensively tested to find the sweet spot between the key parameters of performance, easy handling and rating optimisation. While the latter was certainly a constraint, Polli said there was never any question of designing a slow boat for a rating advantage. The resulting hull is of course carefully optimised for IRC and ORC racing. Its key features include a long stern overhang, a voluminous bow, a flat bottom, vertical topsides amidships and a fairly narrow aft waterplane with prodigiously flared aft quarters and four metres of beam. This gives the boat a long waterline and ample form stability at moderate angles of heel while minimising the wetted area in light airs. Exterior styling is by Nauta Design, who also designed the interior. It’s an elegant enough shape to carry its high-volume
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