An abandonment on the 12 e Transat Jacques Vabre
Maître Coq, skippered by Jéremie Beyou and Philippe Legros, has started the 12 e edition of the Transat Jacques Vabre on October 25. While they are in 4 e on the day of the departure, a damage occurred on a fastening of the main forestay, the cable that holds the mast at the front.
Forced to divert to Roscoff, they decided to abandon the race. The safety conditions were not met, neither for the men nor for the equipment. The Imoca then went into the shipyard to be repaired and Jeremie Beyou was able to return to his boat for a 48-hour sail on November 13.
A flying Imoca
From now on, Maître Coq is preparing for another project. With the Vendée Globe in mind, the start of which will take place on November 6, 2016. The skipper and his sponsor have decided to equip the boat with foils. The 60-foot Imoca will enter the CDK yard on November 25 from Port-La-Forêt (Finistère.)
Credit: Beyou Racing
To achieve this, Jeremie Beyou, Stéphane Sallé, General Manager of Maître CoQ, and Philippe Legros, Head of Performance, have collaborated with New Zealand designer Nick Holroyd, a specialist in foils in the America's Cup.
Pierre-François Dargnies, Beyou Racing's technical director, has been working on the project for several months and the architect Sam Manuard has been in charge of the preliminary design and studies. The shipyard CDK and Heol Composites, who built all the foils of the new boats, except for Hugo Boss, and who are therefore used to these installations, have been selected. The designer was head-designer of Team New Zealand for years and now works for SoftBank Team Japan. He immediately found out which foils were needed.
"We have been working on it for several months: we started by making an accurate VPP (speed prediction program) of the boat in its current configuration, then simulated another VPP with the boat equipped with foils of different geometries. We then ran these VPPs on round-the-world routings, which only confirmed the figures obtained, namely that Maître Coq with foils was always faster over time, some routings giving up to five days difference. Then, we compared ourselves with the new boats launched this year: if, during the first training sessions in August, we were a little cautious, those in September enabled us to see that some of the new boats had made a lot of progress, in particular Banque Populaire, while Gitana (Edmond de Rothschild) was bluffing from the outset on certain points of sail explains Jeremie Beyou on his choice to add foils to Maitre Coq.
Credit: Olivier Blanchet / DPPI / Maître CoQ
In spite of the victory of PRB, an old generation Imoca, in the Transat Jacques Vabre, the Maître Coq team especially noticed the great performance of Banque Populaire VII. It is the only foiler to have finished the race and has achieved a remarkable 2 e place. As the boat was not reliable, the two sailors (Armel le Cléac'h and Erwan Tabarly) preferred to manage it, sailing carefully at the beginning of the race. But once the heavy weather passed, they used their foils and managed to regain the lost lead.
"With a view to the Vendée Globe, we had the choice between further optimizing Maître CoQ by adding new daggerboards or switching to foils. Jérémie was clear on the subject: his objective is to win. In our opinion, this is not possible with daggerboards alone. The speed differences between the foilers and the old boats can be as much as 3 knots on a reach. Knowing that the Vendée Globe is above all a reaching race, the gaps at the finish could be counted in days explains Philippe Legros.
