Offshore racing, and the Vendée Globe above all, never rewards the sailor who is merely the fastest. “The challenge is to perform over the long haul,” says Justine Mettraux, who holds the fastest Vendée Globe time by a woman (76 days and 1 hour). To get there, sailors must “know how to position themselves relative to weather systems that are constantly shifting,” adds Loïs Berrehar. It’s up to them to judge how much risk to take, how close to get to a low, or where best to cross a front. “The aim,” as the Banque Populaire skipper puts it, “is to find the shortest route with the most favourable winds.”
Then there’s the boat itself. Sailors have to master it and keep it in one piece, no easy task given the beating these monohulls take. “To keep maximum potential, we have to fix technical problems and know how to preserve our boat,” Justine Mettraux confirms. Reliability matters most during those gruelling weeks in the Southern Ocean, when skippers can be battered by successive lows for days at a time. For Loïs Berrehar, performance comes down to “a balance between speed, weather phenomena and the boat’s reliability.”
A headache for design offices and naval architects
Raw speed is far from the only consideration at the design stage, as Justine Mettraux and Loïs Berrehar can testify: both of their future IMOCAs are still under construction. “We didn’t try to push the design towards one extreme or the other,” says the Banque Populaire skipper. “We may not be the best in certain conditions, but we want to avoid weak points.” He wants “the most versatile boat possible”, able to handle whatever a round-the-world race throws at it. “My boat is also designed specifically for the Vendée Globe,” adds Justine Mettraux, who insists on the need for an IMOCA “to always be at the peak of its performance level.”
For design offices and naval architects, that’s a real headache. Skippers dream of a boat that copes well with big seas, gets up on its foils early in light airs, and is quick downwind while still efficient upwind. You might as well go looking for a unicorn in the Atlantic. In reality, the thinking is more nuanced. Antoine Koch’s design office, involved in building three sisterships* (Malizia 4, Banque Populaire 14 and TR Racing) as well as Paprec, set out to keep the downwind performance of its previous-generation boats while getting them foiling sooner. The goal? Greater versatility, to cope with everything a lap of the planet can bring and stay as efficient as possible whatever the weather.
Naval architect Guillaume Verdier, by contrast, puts more emphasis on handling the sea better and being more comfortable in the Southern Ocean. One visible result is the “buste”, a rounded shape running the full length of the hull. All of Verdier’s new-generation designs feature it, including Kojiro Shiraishi (DMG Mori Global One) and Sébastien Simon’s new boat, Groupe Dubreuil II, and soon Justine Mettraux’s monohull, Teamwork-TeamSnef.
Every team has to decide where to strike the balance, according to its skipper’s choices and approach to the race. They have been working on these questions for months, and the sailors all share one goal: to know their boats inside out, in as wide a range of conditions as possible, so they can keep pushing all the way round.
*Sisterships: boats built to the same design.
