What to do with the ORMA 60 trimarans?

We talk to some of the main players about how to stop the rot in the world's most exciting race boat class

As was the case following the Route du Rhum three years ago, so after last month's Transat Jacques Vabre the ORMA 60 class finds itself once again in turmoil.

During the recent biennial two handed race from Le Havre to Salvador de Bahia of ten 60ft trimaran starters, there were just four finishers, admittedly a better record than the Route du Rhum when of 18 starters only three completed the course. In the TJV four ORMA 60s capsized: TIM Progetto Italia due to an autopilot failure, Groupama II when her rudder disengaged combined with wave action, Foncia when she was hit by a gust while preparing for a tack and Orange Project following the breakage of one of her beams. In addition, the centre hull on Brossard nearly split in two and on Sodebo the port hull broke causing her to dismast.

While the class had some excuse as their boats were lashed by winds ranging from 40 to 70 knots in the Route du Rhum, during the Transat Jacques Vabre conditions were tough but far from extreme. None of the boats on this occasion were new as they were in the Route du Rhum, leaving ORMA with no plausible excuses for the carnage. One can only conclude that the boats in their present form are unfit for oceanic racing and it is essential the class takes steps to remedy this before it kills itself off or someone dies.

With this in mind we have had the distracting launch over this last weekend of the MultiCup, the transformed ORMA circuit as inspired by Benjamin Rothschild, owner of the two Gitana trimarans, happily two of the four Transat Jacques Vabre finishers. This may not offer all the solutions, but at least it should help to halt what many, including ourselves, believe to be the world's most exciting class of race boat destroying itself.

Analysing the problems in the TJV, they largely boil down to two causes - structural failure in the case of Brossard and Sodebo and the capsizes due to operator error through the power generated by the giant ORMA 60 rigs becoming too unwieldy.

While mast height is limited to 30m for the 60ft trimarans sail area is open and over the last 15 years we have seen sail areas ever increasing (taking the published figures with a pinch of salt...):

Year	Boat	Mainsail	Solent	Gennaker
1990	Fleury Michon	137	62.5	218
1990	Primagaz	149	60	170
1992	Primagaz	170	80	200
1993	Primagaz	193	92	260
1997	Fujicolor II	176	91	270
1997	Primagaz	221	115	288
1999	Broceliande	189	110	270
2002	Groupama 1	195	110	240
2002	Geant	207	110	250
2004	Groupama II	175	120	250
2005	Foncia II	185	125	245
2005	Gitana 11	200	120	250
		sizes all in square meters

While these numbers don't show a massive increase in sail area over the last five years, compared to say the wholescale leaps that were made in the early 1990s, what the numbers don't show is how the roach profiles have changed recently with the advent of extreme square topped mainsails where the batten at the head of the mainsail now exceeds 4m in length on some of the boats.

"The area you are putting there is so fantastically engineered now that is has got brutal power and all the power is all high up. The boys risk being out of control now basically," assesses designer Nigel Irens. Should the top of the mainsail stall downwind or through a gybe for example there is a now a 30m high lever arm urging the boat to pitchpole once the top of the mainsail fills with wind.

Thus for offshore events it would be a sensible move to reduce sail areas or at very least mainsail top batten size back down to something less grunty such as 1m.



At present it can be argued that sailing such overpowered boats shorthanded in the Route du Rhum or the TJV is not really racing, it is more an exercise of sailing hard enough to get ahead of your competitors without destroying or capsizing your boat. As Geant skipper Michel Desjoyeaux points out: "It is very frustrating to sail alone on big multihulls, because you have a boat that is very powerful and very fast and because you are alone you only sail it at 60%. The rest goes to the designer and builder and you can’t use it. That is not acceptable." Reducing mainsail roach might help to make offshore events more competitive.

The broader reason for all the problems the ORMA 60s have been having in recent shorthanded oceanic races is due to their gradual evolution over the last decade from being primarily offshore race boats into being increasingly optimised for Grand Prix round the cans racing. Mainsail centre of effort moving higher and higher is just one aspect of this. So cockpit layouts have evolved from 10-15 years ago when they had a small offshore-friendly layout in the centre hull where a crew of five maximum at a squeeze could be accommodated for Grand Prix to the massive modern affairs today operated round the cans by 11 crew, and featuring more and more winches and grinders and twin helming positions out on each of the beams away from the sail controls in centre of the cockpit over the mainhull.

Nigel Irens believes that many of the structural failures experienced in the Route du Rhum and more recently in the TJV have been the result of using honeycomb cores. This is not a case of teething problems, but simply use of the wrong material. "My feeling is that there was a headlong precipitation into carbon fibre prepreg construction with a honeycomb core and I am of the opinion that wonderful stuff though it is, it is totally unsuitable for what we are doing. The stuff is wrong - we’ve always had breakages but we’ve never had the propogation of damage that’s like this - it attracts so much load on wave impact and as soon as something goes wrong it just tears itself apart." Irens adds that if he were to build a new boat the areas suspectible to slamming would have a foam core, as they have for example of Ellen MacArthur's B&Q Castoramatrimaran. However - what to do with the existing carbon/honeycomb boats?



Since the last Route du Rhum the circuit has been in decline and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the dwindling number of boats. In the 2002 race there was the potentially outstanding competition between 18 boats which only 10 made the start line for the last TJV. Aside from the carnage issues, another reason for this is escalating costs. Teams such as Groupama, Geant, Gitana and Banque Populaire are playing at a much higher level than they were just five years ago and with more R&D being carried out on boats, with the increased emphasis on Grand Prix where there are crew to be paid, fed and housed and increasingly complex boats with curved foils in the floats, rigs that not only cant sideways but fore and aft too, trim tabs on centreboards, etc so campaign costs are soaring. And this comes at a time when the ORMA class hasn't had an overall sponsor for two seasons and partly as a result of this media interest particularly in the Grand Prix has been getting smaller as has return on investment for the sponsors.

One simple way of both curbing costs as well as bringing cockpit layouts back to where they are more appropriate for short-handed racing would be by reducing the number of crew allowed in the Grand Prix to say seven. However this would not be in line with the class' desire, as indicated by Sunday's announcement, that the emphasis within the case is to swing to an even greater degree towards Grand Prix.

Geant skipper Michel Desjoyeaux says the Grand Prix are a good thing and he takes the view that sailing fully crewed helps him develop how he sails his boat offshore shorthanded. "I am sure that if we are able to go so fast on such big boats that is because we sail enough with crew all year long. I did the Route du Rhum as my first race with Geant in 2002 and two years later I win another race [The Transat] alone but with a completely different way of sailing. There is no comparison. When I did the Route du Rhum, forget the result, I was a beginner, I didn’t know how to do this, how to do that. And during the Transat I was efficient. That was all."

An additional problem at present in the Grand Prix is that there is clearly one dominant boat - Franck Cammas' Groupama II. Launched last year, Cammas' green 60 is the newest boat in the ORMA class.

Desjoyeaux thinks that part of the reason why Groupama II is so superior particularly in light to moderate conditions is the time they took to create the boat. When a new sponsor arrives in the class then it is hard to immediately take a year or more to carry out R&D and then design and build a new boat. "At this time you have to go fast to make a boat for them to get started," he says. Only when you build a second boat for an existing sponsor so this pressure is reduced. "If you decide to make a new one you can take more time to study the boat, prepare it, to build it, to test something on the old boat like Groupama did. That is very clever. When we made Geant it was absolutely not a story like that."

Compared to the budget of his Sodebo campaign, skipper Thomas Coville reckons that Groupama annually spend at least twice what Sodebo do. " Groupama is making a very big step compared to the other teams, but it is also a big step about money and after money, speed and so on and so commercial return."

Coville's preference is very much towards offshore racing and this year foresook ORMA's Grand Prix series in favour of undertaking a number of singlehanded record attempts. His view is that there needs to be a longer season and better planning of the circuit by ORMA. "We need to be able to satisfy our partners so they will know where to go and plan what they can do commercially so we can organise our teams."

He feels that while the 60ft trimaran fleet has grown exponentially (up until the last Route du Rhum at least), ORMA as an organisation haven't kept up. "It is like a company when it is growing too fast and you aren’t controlling your development. I think we weren’t expecting eight years ago that we would have 18 boats starting the last Route de Rhum and so nothing was really prepared in the organisation to receive such a circuit."

He is wholly in favour of internationalising the class and to get it accepted outside of France, but it is hard and he can't pinpoint why this is. "I guess they don’t want to pay to learn. I am sure 100% that a lot of guys coming from Australia, New Zealand or England they would love it and improve and get to the top level very quickly." In fact we are told that for the first event of the circuit in 2006, a tour of the Mediterranean, each team will have to take a non-French sailor - although presumably only high profile names need apply.

Coville has proposed increasing the duration of Grand Prix to four days in order to incorporate a longer offshore race into the format, although we understand this hasn't been taken up. "For example if we have a Grand Prix in Fecamps we could go to Great Britain on one race," he says. "It will take the day but it will be more interesting to show it to other people." He would also like to see more VIPs or media being brought on board during races.

Coville agrees that the French press have become jaded by the ORMA circuit, but this is purely because the class haven't come up with anything new to re-enthuse journalists. "On the Scandinavian circuit [Nokia Oops Cup] they are saying 'this is amazing - why haven’t we sailed on such boats before?' When Knut [Frostad] was on board he was saying I spent so much money on the Volvo and with the money for the Volvo I could have 10 boats like this."

Loick Peyron is proposing something altogether more radical. "We don’t need an evolution we need a revolution," he says. He advocates moving to a simiilarly sized one design catamaran, an odd view for someone who was the golden boy of the trimaran class throughout the 1990s, yet Peyron makes that the point that he suggests this without being currently being involved with the class and carrying any baggage.

The principle reason for his enthusiasm for a one design cat is to curb escalating costs - campaigning such a boat would take around one third current budgets. "I have crossed [the Atlantic] many times on cats, but I am of this generation. The young guys don’t know how cats are offshore, especially singlehanded. Everyone says 'that’s too dangerous', but it is very interesting on a cat, not only because it is cheaper but it is more interesting in terms of tactics. And you can park them in smaller harbours and that is a big problem with the tris. With a cat you could go to Deauville or Marstrand. You might be more spectacular - for example you could imagine the crew using trapezes for Grand Prix."

Watch out later in the week for our interview with ORMA President Gilles Cambournac about his take on the latest developments in the class