Maxi photo finish

Idea pips My Song to the post in the 243 mile Giraglia Race

Raffaele Raiola was celebrating a last-gasp victory with line honours in the Giraglia Race, after his brand new maxi Idea crept past My Song just before the finish line in Genoa, in a nail-biting climax to the Giraglia Rolex Cup.

Raiola's blue 82-foot Reichel-Pugh design took the winner's gun just three minutes in front of the bigger My Song, after almost 28 hours of racing from Saint-Tropez to Genoa via the Giraglia rock off the coast of Corsica.

The result will be hugely disappointing for Pierluigi Loro Piana, the owner of the 85-foot Reichel-Pugh maxi which had led the 243-mile race for so long. Although the biggest of all the 122 starters, My Song is a cruiser/racer and was not expected to beat some of the more race optimised yachts in the offshore event.

For Raiola, however, taking line honours in such a dramatic fashion was just the tonic he needed after suffering damage to his brand new yacht during the inshore races at Saint-Tropez earlier in the week. On the first day he saw a $40,000 lightwind headsail explode under excessive pressure, and on the next day his multi-million dollar yacht ran hard aground, thankfully with only minimal damage. Finally, it all came good for the Italian engineering and property tycoon.

"We were simply faster than My Song," he said. "Our guys worked harder and everything on these boats is about how you work in combination. There was a bit of luck too. The wind headed and we went through them."

It was an unusually good race for the maxis. Normally the Giraglia Race benefits the smaller but lighter flying machines such as the Open 60s which are capable of planing downwind. However, with a lot of upwind work, the lighter flying machines did not get a chance to stretch their legs against the bigger but heavier maxi yachts, whose sheer size and horsepower gives them the advantage when the wind is forward of the beam.