Bruno Peyron interview - pt1

James Boyd caught up with the world's most experienced big cat sailor and organiser of The Race

Since then Peyron says he has been looking at The Race to establish where his organisation succeeded and where it failed, to help him decided which way the event will go as, yes, he wants there to another event and has many ideas for improvement.

Improvements include wanting to hook The Race into the four year program of international yachting events. To do this he has The Race II scheduled to start in January or February 2004, a year after the America's Cup and the spring before the Vendee Globe's autumn start. "We want to keep the spirit, philosophy and image of The Race," says Peyron.

Several key players in the last event felt that The Race would have benefitted from stops to allow the fleet to regroup and make for a tighter more competitive race. Peyron says he wants to keep the non-stop purity of the event, but as with all things to do with his event he is the ultimate democrat and will put it to the all-powerful skippers first.

Peyron wants to keep the "no limits" philosophy so there will be no physical restrictions or rules placed on the boats. At the time of the interview we were sitting near the Volvo fleet, where campaign budgets have extended to more than $20 million, and for this fee Peyron points out you could have run almost three campaigns for The Race and he added "you get a lot less innovation with a Volvo boat". The complete budget for Grant Dalton's Club Med winner of The Race, for example, was $7.5 million. So, although building a 110ft catamaran was more expensive than a 64ft Volvo Ocean 60 monohull, there were less crew involved and no stopovers.

Peyron maintains that with "no limits" campaign budgets are substantially less than when rules are introduced. "If we limited it to 120ft, as soon as we did that then the maximum dollars will win because they will spend millions in development," maintains Peyron. "We know now that a 'no limit' rule is probably the only way to allow a syndicate with less money a chance to beat a very rich syndicate."

One wonders whether last time round it was more a case of there being no time to spend large amounts of money developing sails or the boat along Volvo or America's Cup lines. When I asked Grant Dalton about how he would approach the event, he, quick as a flash, admitted he'd build two boats for sail development, as he has with the Volvo Ocean Race.