As well as confirming the arrival of a new member into the uppermost echelon of Imoca skippers (no surprise there) the latest edition of the Vendée Globe also confirmed the return to the podium, in equally formidable style, of a famous name in Imoca design. Thomas Ruyant’s big team had already started research with the new design pairing of Antoine Koch and previous four-time VG winners Finot when Yoann Richomme signed on for a shared package. The two teams did a lot of things differently, interiors, deck layouts, systems and sails, but they shared a novel new approach to Imoca design which proved to be on the money from the very first day of sailing
project and by the time we came in a lot of the design choices had been made. (Note that, like his friend Charlie Dalin, Yoann is also a trained naval architect). ‘So we jumped right in and did not
really influence those early decisions, due to the timeframe. We let Antoine Koch guide us throughout the process.’ The boat was launched, it felt, ‘very
soon after we sealed the deal on the campaign’, so its Southern Ocean-friendly characteristics were already set… the first baptism of fire in the Vendée coming when the frontrunners charged towards Good Hope riding a low, breaking 24-hour record after 24-hour record. Yoann, who we all know is prone to set-
ting a very demanding pace, was neverthe- less the first to explicitly question whether such a flat-out approach for over a week was sensible. ‘We had not previously sus- tained such average speeds for that extended a period. A one-day sprint we’re used to, and I broke the 24-hour between the Equator and the Doldrums – a quick stint. ‘But to carry on, and on… you have to
imagine that the boat is constantly on the foil, bouncing and slamming around, hence the need to maintain a certain flight height. You just lie there not being able to do anything but stare at the ceiling, count- ing screws as a distraction. Eventually you realise that you can endure this longer than you initially thought, but at first it
42 SEAHORSE
seems mad. It’s about who takes the foot off the accelerator first, and in that situa- tion nobody wants to be that guy. ‘My analysis is that beneath South
Africa a decisive gap had already started to appear between our group and Nico Lunven and Jérémie Beyou. That also motivated the mad run down the Atlantic, as it’s a classic of the Vendée: be in the lead when entering the Southern Ocean, and manage from there onwards – this was the clear brief according to which Macif had been designed, actually. ‘Beyond their differences in approach,
our boats share one thing: that is they all have huge amounts of power, which puts considerable strain on the mast. We have alarm systems for all sorts of stress points, and these were ringing often. It does not mean something is about to break every time you hear them, but what we inflicted on the gear felt unprecedented.’ Yoann points out that this was revealed
by the serial failures of halyard hooks, including one of his own, which escalated from Cape Horn onwards. This was reve- latory of the level of mechanical fatigue reached during this edition, and that specific weak point is ‘something we’ll need to understand and deal with. ‘More tests will have to be carried out:
these parts had not shown weaknesses so far, we X-ray them every six months, otherwise we’d have upgraded before the
start. Breakages happened on a lot of boats, including non-foilers, and all of this tells me we’ve entered a new dimension in terms of mechanical stress: we’ll have to rethink the design of those hooks and swivels – for example, Paul Meilhat broke the swivel for his J2, and that’s something that simply should not happen.’ Yoann is quick to point out that this is
not a criticism of the gear manufacturers. ‘We choose the parts with them from their catalogue, and if I’d said that I wanted the next size up they would have obliged of course. And it’s also wrong to imagine that we chase weight indiscriminately – proof of that, in our case, is the weight of our boat which is on the heavy side, because above all we wanted to finish.’ The visible consequences of pushing the
boats hard will be the easiest to assess, and Yoann already knows that his mainsail hooks were very close to failure. ‘We dodged a bullet by not much there,’ he says. But an awful lot is also hidden in the
data generated by an army of sensors, which the team will have to make sense of – helped by experts from the America’s Cup as currently no one in the team is capable of interpreting this volume of information. ‘We end up with 1.5 giga- bytes of data per day, and the idea is to look at the combinations: what is the load on various parts of the mast, for example, when the foil is working at its hardest?
JEAN-MARIE LIOT/ALEA
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