The future of the G-Class

We speak to uber-designer builder Gilles Ollier and designer Franck Martin

Gilles Ollier and his build company Chantier Multiplast in Vannes on France's Brittany coast have been creating large catamarans since the early 1980s. It was they who in the late 1980s came up with the state of the art all conquering catamaran Jet Services V, the long term holder of the outright transatlantic record in the 1990s. It could be argued that they have been as instrumental as Bruno Peyron in the development of the newer larger G-Class maxi-multihulls. It was Ollier and his team who designed and built the three first generation G-Class sisterships Club Med (now Doha 2006), Innovation Explorer (subsequently Orange I and now Kingfisher II) and Cam Lewis' Team Adventure for The Race in 2001. They also built Geronimo for Olivier de Kersauson and are currently midway through the construction of Franck Cammas' Groupama III maxi-trimaran.

Since the 1980s Multiplast have been building one-off boats from female moulds to save weight in fairing (most custom boats, multi or mono, are built over a male plug) and at present they have almost finished all the moulds for the new Groupama and are two weeks into laminating the main hull.

However soon to follow this will be the new Team Qatar catamaran. The new boat is believed to be around 130ft long, 10ft longer than Ollier's last creation - Orange II, that few would dispute is currently the fastest offshore boat in the world and is of course skippered by the founder of the G-Class, Bruno Peyron, with whom Tracy Edwards has been having legal skirmishings since her move into race organisation.

Ollier and his team are understandably proud of Orange II and her outstanding Jules Verne Trophy record. While Ollier acknowledges that to set such a record it takes range of factors to come good from the weather to the crew work, the success of Peyron and his team can also be attributed to lessons they learned from the first generation G-Class maxi-cats and development work they put in in the intervening years.

Bearing in mind Will Oxley's observations about the limited range of 'sweet spots' in Doha 2006's performance envelope, Ollier says that Orange II's performance is much more 'polyvalent' - a useful single word the French have, meaning better all-round sailing performance. Aside from the boat being longer and more powerful, they have achieved good upwind performance by making Orange II's hulls narrower, increasing the size of the daggerboards but particularly by making the structure, and especially the crossbeams, a lot stiffer. "The boat was designed to be stiffer so there is less sag in the forestay. That is something which needed to be improved, compared to the first generation," admits Franck Martin one of Ollier's design team. "Upwind Doha 2006 can sail in flat water at 18 knots. In the same conditions Orange II will sail at 20-21 knots."

Orange II is also a very different animal being more of a fast powerful truck (ie it is longer, has more freeboard, and is heavier) compared to the first generation boats such as Doha 2006 which are more Ferrari-like in their performance - showing moments of great flair.

"The hulls designed at the time [for Doha 2006/Club Med and her two sisterships] were optimised for fast conditions downwind and for top speeds," continues Martin. "With Orange II the goal was to do something more polyvalent, but that was at the expense of top speed, because the top speed of Orange is not bigger than the top speed of Doha 2006. Doha 2006 has done 44 knots, the fastest Orange II has done is 41. But Orange's average has increased by more than 10% overall. You win with average speed."

But as we have mentioned in previous articles the most significant development with Orange II - that we can also expect to see on the new Team Qatar catamaran - is her increased freeboard. This alone has caused the most dramatic performance leap, enabling Orange II's crew to push the boat hard and to realise their boat's performance potential more fully. On the Doha 2006 generation boats the moment that the forward crossbeam started to bury itself into waves was the time the crew had to back off. In comparison on her recent Jules Verne Trophy record Orange II never once buried her forward crossbeam. Ollier accurately compares Orange II to a 4x4 in that "it will go over the bumps..."

With Team Qatar Ollier says that there a number of further developments that they have in mind. Yet while we are as keen as anyone to see the progress of 'speed under sail' continue to improve, one wonders what the building of a 130ft catamaran will prove other than that, yes, surprise surprise, it is faster than Orange II and suddenly another generation of boats, possibly even including Franck Cammas' new Groupama III maxi trimaran that is yet to be launched, is obsolete. While this is good for the technical development of our sport and for the owner of the newest, fastest boat, it cannot be good for the commercial mechanics of the sport if boats this large and this expensive have such a short competitive life span.

On this basis, and because we would like to see better competition between the G-Class maxi-multihulls, one wonders if the time hasn't come to somehow cap these extra-ordinary boats? If one takes the ORMA 60 multihulls for example there is a class that is the best in the world at providing high speed, action-packed racing offshore that is close by virtue of the fact that the boats are nearly identical in their dimensions. Perhaps it is time that the G-Class multihulls moved the same way...

So what are the alternatives? A maximum length limit of 125ft so that Cheyenne fits in? This would rapidly lead to trimarans dominating the class with increasingly large sail area as they have in the ORMA class and previously in Formula 40. Some sort of ORMA-style box rule would have the same effect.

Veteran multihull designer Dick Newick once made the somewhat philosophical suggestion that what should be limited is cost, but this presumably would result in G-Class build facilities opening up in Eastern Europe and the Far East or where ever there is the latest source of slave labour. A more practical alternative is that perhaps sail area and mast height alone should limited and that the platform be left open? Now that would be interesting.

Then there is the prospect of a one-design as Bruno Peyron was mooting back in the spring of 2003. Peyron's suggestion was for an 80ft catamaran and this would have the advantage of allowing the G-Class to go forth and innovate while bringing new blood into the class with a dedicated offshore boat that is truly fast, competitive and almost certainly cheaper than an ORMA 60. Perhaps the Qatari money would be better spent on a fleet of 80ft catamarans providing the opportunity for some Tornado hot-shots to graduate up. However Tracy Edwards says she has no enthusiasm for a one-design.

In fact there is a convincing argument against capping the G-Class. Bruno Peyron for example has argued in the past that the class is self limiting. Firstly the size of the boat is ultimately dictated by available technology. Gilles Ollier agrees. "There is a certain point [the larger you go] when the boat becomes too heavy if you want it to hold together with the materials that are available today," he says.

Also, as powered winches are banned there is a limit to the size of sail plan that can be managed by a crew. While this makes sense, it has yet to come true as just four to five years on and the sail plan on Orange II has grown substantially over the first generation Ollier G-Class catamarans such as Doha 2006.

"The biggest improvement since The Race has been with the sails," says Ollier. " Club Med [now Doha 2006] had Spectra, now you have Cuben fibre and 3DL. The weight of the mainsail on Orange II is the same as the weight of Club Med’s, but the area is not the same at all. Orange II has 20% more..."

The fact is that even between one designs, from dinghies upwards, there are speed differences whether due to minutae such as the surface finish of the hull and appendages or the quality of the sails, to the way the rig is set up, the trim of the boat or at a most basic level the skill of the crew. Because of the lengthy duration of a round the world course even the smallest potential speed differential should become greatly magnified, yet strangely this often isn't the case as Mother Nature intervenes throwing the weather dice and re-levelling the playing field. Witness the close finishes between the first three very different boats sailed singlehanded in the Vendee Globe, one even without a keel!

There is another good reason for Sheik Hassan to go ahead with his new boat in that at present there hasn't been a boat purpose-built for sailing around the world from the Middle East. Ollier points out that the present generation of G-Class multihulls are all designed predominantly for reaching, which, apart from a small section coming back up the Atlantic, is the predominant wind direction for the Jules Verne Trophy course.

Gilles Ollier not surprisingly is still adamant that a catamaran is the correct tool for winning even on the Indian Ocean course. "During the Indian Ocean and from the start until Geronimo broke the conditions were supposed to be favourable to Geronimo but he was behind when he broke. Plus Doha is older than Geronimo. We are sure that if Orange II were on the start line, none of the other boats would have had a chance. In fact the debate is not really between catamarans and trimarans. It is debate is that there are some good boats and there are some bad boats."

However traditionally trimarans have regularly proved themselves to be superior to similar length catamaran upwind, due to the possibility of achieving better forestay tension, and in light air because of their reduced wetted surface area. For the Quest Qatar in 2007 the demand of a boat optimised for these conditions will be even greater with the boats having to make stops, sailing in closer proximity to land.

The 24 hour record

Another source of great debate in the G-Class world is exactly where the limit of the 24 hour record lies. From 1984 until 1998 the 24 hour record increased from 508 miles to just 540 miles. Within days of the launch of the first G-Class maxi-multihull (Steve Fossett's PlayStation - now Cheyenne) the 24 hour run soared to 580 miles and in just seven years has continuously been improved to the present record, held by Orange II, of 706.2 miles.

"25 years ago when it started we would never have thought 700 was achievable," says Gilles Ollier. "We can probably can go up to 800 miles maybe - it is difficult to say. These days the difficulty is not so much the speed of the boats as finding a playing field big enough." Bruno Peyron also believes Orange II to be capable of sailing 800 miles in a day and one suspects that part of his schuedule this year will be to see how high he can raise this particular bar.

"At the moment it is still going up," continues Ollier. "For sure we haven’t reached the plateau as they probably have in the [ORMA] 60 footers. We are still on a steep slope."

The principle factor that will ultimately limit the 24 hour record for the G-Class maxi-multihulls is technology. Even with multihulls that don't neatly conform to the laws of hull speed as non-planing monohulls do, speed is ultimately dictated by overall length and at present there seem to be no wonder products coming on to the market to replace carbon fibre. And without this there is a length to weight curve that turns unfavourable for maxi-catamarans somewhere around the 130ft mark.

While speed is obviously of paramount interest with this, the fastest sail boats in the world, Ollier concludes with a truism that is easily forgotten. "In general people focus on the relative performance of each feature eg catamaran, trimaran, but in fact the main criteria when we design these boats is reliability first of all. Speed is a secondary factor. In order to get reliability you need a lot of work and experience is also essential there, which is why we go step by step and don’t make one big leap like some other projects. It is easy to make a fast boat, but if it is not reliable then there’s no point. And with reliability not a lot of people know how to do it, so that’s why at Multiplast we have a quality control process and we have all this experience with the previous boats and so on.

"Reliability is going to be the essential factor more and more, because the boats will be pushed harder and harder. In fact there are not a lot of yards and engineers in the world who have experience of these boats and who can say they’ll make something reliable, nor a lot of people who’ve worked with those loads. On Orange II there is more than 100 tonnes of compression at the bottom of the mast..."

If a smaller one design is not attractive, then the best thing that could happen for the Quest Qatar is that then more than one Team Qatar is built. Then there will be a yacht race.