G-class movement

Bruno Peyron talks to The Daily Sail about his plans for The Race 2004, The Race Tour and a new 80ft one design maxi-cat

At Paris Boat Show on Friday Bruno Peyron, visionary, maverick race organiser and soon to return to his prefered role as maxi-catamaran skipper, made a number of announcements regarding the future of the G-class ( click here to see all the stories on the G-class)

Firstly to avoid a repeat conflict with the Vendee Globe, The Race 2004 will start on 29 February 2004 and will start and finish in the French Mediterranean port of Marseilles. "Obviously we are very excited to have Marseilles for the start and finish. It was exceptional for welcoming The Race in 2001 - it was a magic moment for the 45,000 people who were there," Peyron commented.

Peyron says that the general philosophy of The Race 2004 will remain the same as the original event - the unlimited aspect of the boats and the spirit of adventure. However there will be several amendments. "There are small changes to the safety rules," he told The Daily Sail. "The rule about stops, which caused a large distance between the boats - we're going to completely eliminate that." Previously under the rules if you stopped you were obliged to remain in port for 48 hours, stop again and you would have to stay in port for even longer.

Also to be decided is whether or not the course will take the boats through Cook Straight between New Zealand's north and south islands. Although this provided a natural halfway point to the event last time, it proved a major hassle for the competitors. "We are still going to have a New Zealand passage, but we still have to discuss whether we go through Cook Strait or put a waypoint to the south of South Island. It is more likely that we will move in that [the latter] direction in order to keep the pressure as close as possible," he says.

Equally Peyron is still keen to maintain the differentiation between The Race and the Jules Verne Trophy, of which he is the current holder, and tries to play down comparisons between the two events. He says he may encourage the time taken to sail from Gibraltar to Gibraltar to be used to make comparisons with The Race 2001.

At present the prospective entries for The Race 2004 are:

Maiden 2 - formerly Club Med
Kingfisher 2 - formerly Innovation Explorer/Orange
Team Adventure
PlayStation
Geronimo
Peyron's new catamaran

However the future of many of these is uncertain: Maiden 2 has yet to finalise funding for their programme, while Kingfisher 2 have the money for their Jules Verne Trophy attempt, but not The Race and Cam Lewis' Team Adventure still has a broken bow which continues to be the subject of a messy and long winded insurance claim. Similarly Steve Fossett's PlayStation does not have a sponsor at the moment (the deal with Sony has now finished) and as a result has delayed his attempt on the Jules Verne Trophy.

This leaves Olivier de Kersauson's Geronimo, the only G-class trimaran and Peyron's new Gilles Ollier designed maxi-cat, rumoured to be a slightly larger, improved version of Club Med and her sisterships. Work started on this boat in September and she is expected to be launched in November 2003 - Peyron says he will reveal more details about her in January when his sponsor is ready.

From the outset of the preparations for The Race 2004, Peyron has said he be will a competitor. Clearly he was disappointed not to sail in the The Race 2001. "I don’t deserve to sacrifice myself all the time. Excuse me..." he says. "Last time I started these boats [ Club Med and Innovation Explorer] and my babies came first and second. And I was very proud of it, but it is very clear since the beginning of The Race number two, that I am going to be racing."

He says that in the next months he will resign from The Race organisation after having appointed a new race director and someone to take over his role as event director, to be spokesman for The Race.

Regarding having the newest and potentially quickest boat in The Race Peyron says: "If someone had the balls to join me and asked to share the moulds to make a number two then I probably would have said ‘yes’. Obviously several people have asked me about a second boat for The Race Tour (see page two), because they think by then the new ‘toy’ will be efficient and I do believe it will be so. So then why not, because it will be in the global interest of everything – but I want to only discuss this with a few potential syndicates which I trust and where we can run a two boat programme together in 2005."

Aside from these prospects Peyron says that there is still the small possibility of building a new maxi cat using Club Med's moulds. "The most advanced in that is Roman [Paszke - who campaigned the Polish entry Polpharma Warta in The Race], but I don’t think they are going to do it. They still have a month, because we know how to build it in 10 months, but they could join up with another team."

Peyron thinks that there are opportunities for teams to amalgamate in order to take part in The Race and says he will do his utmost to matchmake these deals. With potentially 50% more boats than last time he is reasonably unconcerned that with 14 months to go the financial arrangements of a majority of the campaigns remain decidedly up in the air.

An exciting new prospect are the number of giant monohulls of which at least five are now under construction from Hasso Plattner's giant monohull recently competed at Baltic Yachts to Bob Miller's new Mari Cha still in build at CMN/JMV Industries in Cherbourg. "Those owners have been in contact over a number of year. They have asked if they can participate and the answer is 'yes'," says Peyron, although it seems more likely that they will take part in The Race Tour (see page 2), as requiring a massive crew they are more suited to shorter legs.

"We have been contacted by six of them, but there are more than six being built. But the interesting thing is that they are starting to talk together now." Significantly he adds: "no one has taken care of them ever and we are proposing some ambitious races for their ambitious racing boats. They are fantastic. And the global principle is that innovation and high technology doesn't belong just to multihulls. So it will be fun to see the 10 fastest multihulls and the 10 fastest monohulls on a line in China in a few years."

At present an overall race sponsor has yet to be secured and Peyron is talking to various 'partners' but he is feeling less pressure to prove himself this time around. "Our duty is to be in a position where we are going to have the means to protect what was good last time and try to improve what was not so good last time," he says. "We have just announced the main partner - that is Marseilles. Then we will continue to work on the marketing and commercial side during all this year"

He is confident that The Race 2004 will go ahead. "I’m not saying that we are going to reach 100% for sure the ideal level. Many people are talking about the economic situation in the world today but on the other hand we have product that is perfect in this kind of period because big companies still need to communicate about their products. Obviously they still need to make some cuts, some of them are obliged to think more about other projects with better return on investment and we are among those projects. So that is why we are building this long term programme to ever increase the value on the return, to make this commercial process even easier. So now I am a lot less worried than I was before the first one."

On the following pages read the latest about The Race Tour, Peyron's proposal for a league table of records and of a new one design maxi-multihull

Below: Bruno Peyron and lawyer Thomas Scichili at Friday's conference