Under the skin of Gitana X

The latest Rothschild yacht is the first 60ft trimaran to have come from Gilles Ollier & co in almost 15 years.

Gitana X

The Gitana series of boats has been associated with the Rothschild family since 1870, the most famous perhaps being Gitana VI, the 65ft S&S maxi that was a regular participant in offshore races during the 1970s. The latest Gitana X represents something of a departure from this tradition...

What is significant about Gitana X is not only that it is a 60ft trimaran, but it is the first to come from the hand of Gilles Ollier and his team and to be built at Ollier's Chantier Multiplast since Jean Maurel's lack lustre Elf Aquitaine in the late 1980s. Ollier and Multiplast have in recent years been synonymous with the giant catamaran of The Race, such as Club Med, and also as builders of the yachts for the French America's Cup team.

In fact although Ollier and his chief designers Yann Penfornis and Franck Martin and Jack Michal handled the bulk of the design, also heavily involved in this process was American C-Class specialist Duncan McLane and Sebastien Schmidt, one of the designer's of Ernesto Bertarelli's lake racer catamaran Alinghi, recent winner of the Bol d'Or.

Coming into a circuit where three designers dominate, Ollier and his team were bound to be subject to some scrutiny in terms of which ideas they had borrowed from other boats. But Yann Penfornis told madfor sailing that they started from scratch, went back to first principles and looked at many different solutions before coming up with the final design.

"When we designed this hull we didn't try to copy the other ones, even if it is the first 60ft trimaran we have designed since Elf, we didn't want to pretend to do a van Peteghem boat designed by Ollier. So it is the Gitana design team. Duncan McLane, specialist for the Little America's Cup. He worked a lot on the appendages. The mast is Herve Devaux. The other designer was Sebastien Schmidt, who was in charge of the deck plan."

Being an entirely new design she is the only trimaran built recently to have a completely new set of female moulds made for her, including her mast. Although Multiplast deny it, she must therefore be considerably the most expensive of all the new 60ft tris launched.

True to their word compared to the Irens and van Peteghem/Lauriot Prevost-designed majority, the new Gitana X is technically different in many ways and in a class that may be open but has become quite type-forming over recent years, she even looks different.

The most talked about difference to the other 60 ft tris is her X-configuration cross beams (hence Gitana X - geddit?). These were not simply stuck onto the main hull with some structure thrown inside the mainhull. The uni-directional carbon fibres in the beams were fed through the main hull to form one of the most intricate composite cats cradles ever seen in boat building.

Yann Penfornis explains: "The idea of the X-beam is for distribution of weight, stiffness, no torsion in the main hull, weight in the middle of the boat. The disadvantage is we need another beam for the [mainsheet] track and to have a real X it takes a real long time to build, because you have to cross all the U-Ds of the beams in the same spot. And that point is very difficult to build, it takes a very long time to build. If anybody else wants to do it - good luck!"

Penfornis estimates it added 20% to the overall build time of the boat. As usual there is a separate curved beam aft for the main sheet track.

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The X-beams - you wouldn't want to make this at home...