To misquote Crocodile Dundee, ‘Now that is a hydraulic ram’. A nice touch is the transparent access panels for both maintenance inspections and to simply watch the beast perform. The two compact drive motors can be seen beyond the bulkhead at the bottom. Right: Magic Carpet’s longtime captain Danny Gallichan and project manager Ed Bell have just pulled off something extraordinary


here. So getting it to the finish is quite a challenge. We all became very good friends and placed huge trust in each other. Danny especially is very patient – that’s his beauty.


Delivering – Danny Gallichan, Captain Sir Lindsay decided that he wanted a new boat – and there were several triggers for this. Hybrid was part of it, then we started looking afresh at design and Guillaume put forward early renderings of what was and is a pretty beautiful concept boat. It certainly looked the part but there then followed a lot of discussion with Guil- laume to ensure that we were going to get a boat to do the racing that we like doing. Our design brief was that it had to


perform on the racecourses we compete on, in 10-12kt of breeze, and very often less. As Guillaume rightly pointed out, to get a boat to go well in 8-12kt you have to get it to go well in 6… He has been involved in some fantastic designs, and one of them of course is Comanche, but that is hellishly sticky in light airs – and we defi- nitely didn’t want to go in that direction. We hadn’t worked with Guillaume


before, but you just have to look at him as he is a serial winner! Everything he is involved with does well, ETNZ, Imocas in the Vendée. We did look at several design- ers, but his ideas were so different and so interesting – you just have to talk to Guil- laume to realise he thinks a bit differently. And he really is a joy to work with. He has quite a large team around him,


all deeply intelligent, and they have a great deal of independence yet with a wonderful way of working together. Guillaume is very free-thinking – he is the artist among them and is incredibly intelligent, un-ego- tistical, very freely admits mistakes if he makes them. Something Sir Lindsay partic- ularly liked was the way that Guillaume would quickly sketch something out to help to explain it. Guillaume and his team were keen to


62 SEAHORSE


look at things right up to the deadline – we almost had to tell him to stop designing hull shapes as he had done so many! It is pretty well known that Sir Lindsay asked him how fast could you go if we just asked for a 100ft yacht, no rating considerations, and Guillaume came back with something pretty crazy! A real case of be careful what you wish for! We scaled that back but that really showed the genius of the team. The yacht’s hybrid concept was very


much our idea, with help from Helix and Williams. This meant we pretty much had it covered and when we presented it to Guillaume’s team they saw the potential and grabbed it. We did also consider a deck-sweeping mainsail, but for what we do that is probably too much. A new concept can mean a complex


concept and innovation and reliability don’t always go hand in hand, so a great deal of thought has gone into this boat. You try to think of redundancy, but often that creates more weight, and so you try to anticipate what could emerge as an issue. But you have confidence in what is possible, or you would never move forward. Persico were pretty standout as a builder


and a great choice. They have a fantastic track record, their composite work is out- standing and with their ATM robots their laminating was incredible. Another key was working with


Williams Advanced Engineering. Together we did a lot of analysis of past data to try to understand energy consumption, as our goal was to get to a whole day’s racing fully electric… but not to have excess. Helix provided all the electric motors in the system, which is all new, so the battery is coupled to the electrics, then that is coupled to the hydraulics from Cariboni, meaning everyone has to be talking to each other openly and clearly. Plus there are multiple smaller contribu-


tors who are also vital. Furlanetto is a family-run marine electronics business that has worked on every Magic Carpet,


meaning we do have a family of suppliers and they are all at the top of their game. Traditionally we have always had a


good relationship with North Sails and Southern Spars. North provided a lot of R&D data long before the rig was designed so we could have accurate aero power numbers for Guillaume to work from. Tom Whidden races with us and is also a great friend of the team, but sail design was led by Jeremy Elliott in the UK, who put a fantastic amount of work in. Conceptually, we didn’t want to get into


soft sails at all and the traditional dousing of those sails, so our headsails are all furling; with the speed of the boat the apparent wind keeping everything flat enough, so not many surprises there. There are a few interesting points in


terms of sailing the boat that we are still learning about. The adjustable canard is new to us and there is so much to under- stand about that. It is also our first canting- keel boat – canting is not new but raking the keel 60° aft was a new concept. We do cruise in the summer and like to be on the dock racing and cruising, so that solution was so innovative and elegant. The hybrid component is fascinating.


That story goes a long way back – chatting with Ed in the car just after the launch of Magic Carpet 3! We had heard of a new small electric motor with the power of a Golf GTI, and that must have been 10 years ago. We kept an eye on that to see when it would be the same weight as a thermic engine onboard. But finally, the biggest overall learning


for me is about co-ordinating everyone. When you do a project like this as a team, and bring in so many different people, it is absolutely vital to keep everyone singing from the same song sheet, that everyone believes in what they are doing and they also have confidence in everyone else. This means you have to bring good people together. And when you do that success- fully, it is just a really cool thing… q


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