The black and white boat

We talk to Alex Thomson about his imminent Vendee campaign on Hugo Boss

While the likes of Mike Golding, Roland Jourdain and Jean le Cam might be top favourites list for winning this year's Vendee Globe singlehanded non-stop around the world race, we estimate that there are around ten boats in total in with a chance of a podium position.

Among this group is the promising form of Gosport's finest, Alex Thomson who's claims to fame are being the youngest person to win a round the world race (admittedly, the Clipper Round the World Race when he was 25) and holding the present singlehanded monohull 24 hour record of 466 miles, set during last year's Defi Atlantique race.

After a shakey period at the beginning of this year, a period which saw one major sponsor slip through his fingers, this summer Thomson was able to persuade German fashion house Hugo Boss to sign on the dotted line securing him backing for a campaign that includes the singlehanded non-stop round the world race and a program of events next year.

Since the moment Hugo Boss came on board, Thomson's boat has been undergoing a massive refit at JMV Industries in Cherbourg managed by former Vendee competitor and Thomson's solo sailing mentor, Josh Hall. Hugo Boss, is Roland Jourdain's old Sill, a Marc Lombard design complete with canting keel and rotating wingmast with deck spreaders, that finished third in the last Vendee and subsequently won a majority of events in Jourdain's hands in the intervening years. Until the new generation of boats were launched last year, Sill was considered the fastest in the Open 60 fleet.



"The main thing was to not to change too much but to replace absolutely everything with new stuff," describes Thomson cryptically of the refit. "We've chucked everything off it and just used the structure. So a massive very very comprehensive refit. Saying that everything is almost identical to what we had. It all worked brilliantly before, the way Bilou [Roland Jourdain] had set it up - all the deck gear and the systems - so there was no need to change it and from a reliability point of view it would have been silly to go mad on it."

However aside from the most striking change from her original brilliant red paintjob to the stealth-like monotone colours of Hugo Boss, improvements have been made. From two shrouds they have now gone to three and the trinquette (staysail) has been moved up on the mast. As a result the new sail wardrobe from North France features larger jibs, but perhaps the most significant change to the rig has been removing some of the rake from the mast.

Previously Sill's rig carried 4.5deg of rake. "It used to be a nightmare climbing the mast: if you let go of it, you’d never get back to it..." half-jokes Thomson. More significant was that before putting too much leach tension on the main even under full main and Solent created massive weather helm, a situation made all the worse the more reefed down the boat was.

Now the rake is back to 2.5 degrees and it has been a great improvement. "She is a lot better balanced than she was before," continues Thomson. "Before we had problems with the trinquette and one reef and with the ORC and two reefs. Now she feels really really good."

A significant development in the new generation Open 60s, in particular Mike Golding's Ecover, is their improved upwind ability - no longer are Open 60s merely reaching machines. Hence another change to Thomson's boat has been a substantial elongation of the twin asymmetric daggerboards necessary with her canting keel to prevent leeway. Specified by the boat's designer, these have now grown from 3m to 4.2m. Thomson says the new boards are bigger than those on Lombard's latest boats, Sill Veolia and Bonduelle.

This year there was concern over the keels on the new Lombard boats suffering from a problem well known in the aviation world, called 'flutter' - a severe cavitation with potentially catastrophic consequences. These have now been cured on Sill and Bondulle and Thomson has opted to stick with his boat's existing fabricated steel keel foil rather than spending the 100,000 Euros on a carbon one that would have allowed more lead to be put in the bulb. Thomson explains: "Rather than build a new keel, the amount of sailing time we would have had [with the new keel] wouldn’t have been enough for us to consider it safe to take in the Vendee Globe. So the existing keel was taken off, stripped back completely, dye tested and X -Rayed and there was no fault with it at all."

Like most of the modern boats, in addition to her canting keel Hugo Boss has water forward ballast tanks to alter her displacement and her fore and aft trim and part of the refit work has seen the capacity of these tanks, used principally for weighing the boat down to help her punch upwind in breeze, grow by 0.5 tonnes.

Aside from this they have made a profound attempt to lighten the boat. "We’ve taken all the interior out of the boat. All you see when you go downstairs now is an engine box in front of the nav station," says Thomson. Pride of place is the new seat at the nav station an all-carbon bucket seat running on Harken tracks. The boat has been completely rewired and two independent sets of new NKE instruments and pilots have been fitted, coming complete with cute wireless remotes for the pilots.

On deck all the hardware has been renewed and the new winches are a size larger than before. Her twin rudders have been removed and resleeved on their stocks and a new emergency rudder system fitted. A spare blade is carried and the emergency system is similar to Ecover's in that it's fitting involves punching out a part of the transom so that the new rudder can connect directly to the pilots.

The million dollar question is - following the refit will Hugo Boss be competitive against the new boats? "Upwind I would be very surprised if she isn't," says Thomson in his precise, but matter-of-fact sounding way. " Sill and Bonduelle carry the same rig as me, with very similar rig tension and I’ll have slightly bigger boards than them. My upwind performance should be on a par as soon as I’m powered up. And off the wind nobody can fault the boat for speed. She is slightly heavier and will be a little bit slower in the lighter stuff, but we’ve worked quite hard with Bruno [ Dubois - of North Sails] to solve that issue, by putting some more power in. I’ll probably be carrying more Code sails on the race than anyone else. There is no reason why the boat isn’t going to be competitive. Look at Dominique Wavre on the Transat."

Thomson believes eight boats are capable of winning the Vendee Globe - the four new boats ( Ecover, Sill, Bonduelle and Virbac), plus Nick Moloney on Skandia, the previous winner PRB with new skipper Vincent Riou, Vendee veteran Marc Thiercelin on a heavily refitted sistership to Hugo Boss, as well as his own boat. "I think it is going to be a very very close race."

While Josh Hall has taken on the full responsibility to get this massive refit completed in record time at JMV - to get all the work done in time 25 people were working on the boat from 6am until 10pm - Thomson has been getting his own house in order.

"I'm trying hard to do this as right as possible," he says. "It is a massive opportunity so I've been doing things like a French course and media training, I’ve spent a few days with Chris Tibbs on the weather, and with a sports psychologist and a nutritionalist."

Already he has started his sleep program. "It is going to be 20 minutes sleep and 4 hours aware, to teach my body to get to the right part of sleep straight away."

A concern express by several race pundits over Thomson's prospects in the Vendee - largely based on his unexpectedly breaking the 24 hour record last year in his first solo Open 60 race - is that he might push the boat too hard, break it and not finish. Thomson retorts: "Yes, but you have to sail the boat as hard as you can. What I did in the Defi last year on the same boat, I felt comfortable doing what I was doing. It wasn’t the most comfortable for the boat, but there was far less pressure on it than there would be going upwind in 35 knots of wind. Anyway, you are not going to have those conditions for 90 days. I would say that my strong point is that I haven’t got enough experience which means I drive the boat too fast."

The continuation of the sponsorship with Hugo Boss is working well. "For me they are a dream sponsor, in terms on how they treat us and look after us. Their thoughts on PR and publicity are refreshing. They are brilliant," says Thomson of his sponsor. "When they did the Fastnet last year, that was their first dip. And it was fairly expense for them to do it. And they sat down afterwards and evaluated it and came back and said it was one of the best returns on a sports sponsorship they had ever done. I think initially it was difficult to justify the kind of money we were talking about, which is why they didn’t do it originally. Having just done the Fastnet they wanting to make sure that what they were doing was the right thing. So they looked at Volvo and the America’s Cup and they came back thinking that what we had to offer was fantastic value for money, and they would get complete control over the project for a great budget and they’d worked with me before and knew what was on offer."

Hugo Boss will be christened in Les Sables d'Olonne the week prior to the start and F1 driver and fellow Hugo Boss sponsoree David Coulthard as well as UK TV star Davina McCall should be attending.

Following the Vendee Globe, the deal with Hugo Boss extends until the end of 2005 with a program that will take the boat throughout Europe and Scandinavia. After the Vendee the boat will be refitted and will go to Palma for the boat show, Cannes for the Film Festival, Monaco for the Grand Prix, Kiel for Kiel Week, followed by Gotland Rund, Cowes Week and the Fastnet. Then it will be down to Sardinia for the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup and on to the Voiles de St Tropez. The present sponsorship is set to conclude with the Transat Jacques Vabre at the end of next year.

"It will be a great program for me as a lot of those events I haven’t done," says Thomson. "And it will be fantastic for them. The impact of the boat branding-wise will be unbelievable. And we've worked out that it will satisfy 75% of their global market. After the Transat Jacques Vabre, there is the possibility of shipping the boat to Sydney for the Hobart. That will take us to the end of 2005."

Hugo Boss arrived in Les Sables d'Olonne on Friday after Thomson delivered her down from Cherbourg with a small crew including a journalist from GQ men's magazine. "We set it up with all the reefs before we got to the Alderney Race and then two hours later we were into 50 knots." The miserable delivery pounding upwind into 50 knots after rounding Ushant included a massive wind shift that caused the boat to wipe out, lying over on its ear.

Fortunately this was exactly the kind of shake down the boat needed prior to the Vendee. En route they met up with a helicopter bearing photographer Jon Nash and a film crew and shooing the crew below, Alex bore off and the photographs accompanying this article, of Hugo Boss submarining along at speeds approaching 30 knots, were the result.

If someone were looking for an outside bet on the Vendee, then Alex Thomson and Hugo Boss would be it.

More photos on the following pages...