The batboat

We take a crawl over Alex Thomson's new Hugo Boss Open 60

I don't know why we're surprised. We had a guided tour of Yann Elies' Generali prior to the Calais Round Britain Race, so when we had the opportunity to have a good crawl around Alex Thomson's new Hugo Boss recently, a Finot-Conq designed sistership to Elies', we were expecting some similarities between the boats. But aside from the overall ethos of the hull shape and that the two boats have fixed rigs, that is where the similarity ends.

Initial impressions of the new Hugo Boss are that she is monstrously wide and - what the ??? - she also has twin cabin tops, not unlike a maxi-cat. In fact lop the rig off, lose the keel and cut a tunnel down the middle of the hull and the new Hugo Boss would make a pretty fair Formula 1 power boat. As it is, with her immaculate black carbon fibre finish and wide beam, she is aptly dubbed 'the batboat' - all she needs are some gulwings.

Compared to the last Hugo Boss, the new boat is 40% more powerful - 40%!!! - and 25% lighter, to give some indication of what a quantum leap there has been over the last two generations of Open 60s (the original Hugo Boss - the former Sill - was 2000 vintage).

Thomson confirms that his new weapon is wider than Generali but won't reveal by how much. He makes no apologies for this - the most powerful boat possible is what he wanted. He describes one of the meetings at Groupe Finot when they were looking at hull shapes: "We came down to two choices, so I said 'what do they reckon?' And they said ‘me, me and me reckon we should go for the less powerful version'. And they said Jean-Marie won’t even discuss it anymore: he thinks 'more powerful'. And I said ‘guess which one I want’. But because our weight was quite low, in the end we all agreed."

Like Generali, the new Hugo Boss has a chine pretty much the length of the hull to artificially fool the water into think the boat is wider than it actually is. Finot point out that under the Open 60 rule where there is an AVS limit of 127.5°, it becomes a case of the wider the boat, the lighter the bulb can be.

The hull itself has maximum beam carried pretty much all the way aft and the bow is pinched in giving it 'that Finot look'. With the boat's engineering carried out by SP Technologies (normally Finot-Conq handle it in-house), the build at Neville Hutton's in Lymington, masterminded by Jason Carrington, is nothing less than you would expect from the man who built the Assa Abloy VO60s and the Ericsson VO70 . Free from the panel weight constraints of the VO70 rule, Carrington has enjoyed being given carte blanche. Like Ericsson, the boat was built from a female mould, but the mould made directly, without a plug. The art is in getting the female tooling just right and like Ericsson, Hugo Boss has no filler and her carbon/Kevlar Nomex sandwich hull is simply clear coated. Carrington says the straight-to-female-tooling works well with an Open 60 because so many of the panels are virtually flat. The mould for the curvy front metre of the boat however was milled.

Like Generali, Hugo Boss has transom-hung rudders that kick up. A cute Formula 1 touch is that the kick-up mechanism is dampened by a gas strut built into the top of the rudder case. Typically designers shun transom hung rudders as they are horribly inefficient and suffer from ventilation, etc compared to rudders suspended under the hull. However in this case a gate is fitted to each rudder, providing a virtual extension to the hull and this system is deemed to be preferable, to the kick-up mechanisms integral to the transom as seen on the Farr boats like PRB- probably due to the weight of such set-ups. Once again the rudders are a masterpiece of engineering and construction, the build on this occasion sub-contracted to Green Marine, while the metal work was made by Roger Scammell. The gudgeons and pintles are all titanium...

Aloft the rig is fixed, with three sets of full-width swept-back spreaders - a development of the final Southern Spars rig set-up Thomson had on his last Hugo Boss, sadly lost in the Southern Ocean last year. However unlike Generali, which has carbon fibre spreaders permanently attached to the mast, she has conventional spreaders. "The power from these boats is not only governed by the width, but the weight and the weight of the rig is a big big part of it, so we went for the lightest option we possibly could," explains Thomson of the general principle behind the rig. "The whole concept of the boat was to produce something as powerful as possible and as light as possible and as uncomplicated as possible. So the last rig I really liked and this is just a development of that, it’s not much taller, a higher modulus of carbon so it’s a bit lighter."

While the last Hugo Boss was fitted with Southern's new C6 carbon fibre standing rigging (read about this here) on the new boat it is all Future Fibres PBO. As Thomson puts it "I thought it was really good [the C6]. The terminations at the spreaders were really small and nice, but I only tested it for half a round the world..." and reliability is the key with, on the one hand, Thomson having earned a reputation for blowing up boats and two non-stop shorthanded round the world races looming over the next two years, on the other.

A neat 'Jason' feature is the chainplates, that are sunk below the deck in a very Wally-like fashion. Even cooler though are the carbon fibre fairings that pass around the bottom of each shroud. According to Thomson this reduces the plumb of water that results from the chainplate/shroud colliding with fast moving water. They have also managed to get rid of the turnbuckles too, saving nearly 6kg in the process.

At the pointy end there is the inevitable maximum length bowsprit allowed under the IMOCA class rule, with the end of PBO strap/martingale embedded in the bow, rather than being mounted externally.

The sail wardrobe has been made by North New Zealand, where they have been designed by Gautier Sargent, who worked on Brasil 1's inventory for the last Volvo Ocean Race.

A feature of Open 60 decks is that they must have enough volume to encourage the boat to right, without their mast, from a 180deg inversion - the aim is to prohibit reverse camber decks as were appearing on the Finot designs of the mid to late 1990s. Thus cabintops have grown generally, however the unique twin cabintop arrangement on Hugo Boss doesn't appear to have anything like the volume to make the boat 'destable' upside down. In fact it does and easily passed the scary test where two crew must be inside the boat when it is rolled upright... To help the process, on Hugo Boss the sizable Fleet 77 dome cover, located forward of the mast, is an integral part of the deck. Cunning . In addition to this - and not immediately obviously - is that the deck also has a chine in it each side, hidden by a red stripe. According to Jason Carrington this is because Kevlar Nomex core isn't happy forming the necessary curve that would have been the alternative.

Forward there are the normal plethora of stays - the only fixed one being the Solent (J2), the sails hoisted and then wound out or in using Karver continuous line furlers and held aloft by Southern Spars locks on the mast. There are two stays inside of the Solent stay and another for the J1 forward by the pulpit with the Code 0 flying off the bowsprit.

As on Generali, the asymmetric daggerboards look tiny, bucking the trend in the Open 60s and Volvo Open 70 fleets of longer and longer boards. According to Thomson, Finot-Conq's theory of the short boards is that the bigger they are, the more they reduce righting moment (ie the action of the board adds to the heeling moment). And, of course, smaller boards are lighter boards. Anyhow if Hugo Boss finds herself getting a kicking upwind against the competition they can always build another longer set.

Obviously there is a canting keel and down below the set-up for this looks impressively simple, with twin rams, one mounted on each side of the head of the foil, the extendable arm of the ram passing through a waterproof sleeve and into the wet box area. The rams themselves are mounted on fore and aft located yokes passing through two giant self-aligning bearings mounted on two full bulkheads. The yokes allow the rams to twist up and down according to the keel position - all standard canting keel fair. However the keel pin is not parallel to the waterline, one end being slightly higher, so for example when the keel is fully canted the CoG moves aft (this was something designer Juan K tried on the first ABN AMRO boat in the Volvo Ocean Race and then controversially outlawed).

Once again Thomson has made the call of going for a carbon fibre keel foil. School is still out on which is the best type of keel foil material (see the cases here). With carbon you end up with a keel that is lighter but has to be built thicker and therefore has increased drag over steel equivalents. Thomson says the reason he went for carbon (as did the two other skippers of new FInot-Conq Open 60s) is because it is 400kg lighter compared to a steel equivalent. "This weight difference largely offsets the drag difference, thanks to the innovative disposition of the appendages," Finot-Conq say. "Its very high strength carbon fibre core and high module torsion box are optimised both in strength and vibratory behaviour. The theoretical values obtained through hundreds of hours of calculations have been confirmed by measurements." So there you have it. The keel fin was built by Multiplast, as were the yokes.

The idea for having the twin cabintops was originally Thomson's and while Carrington agreed that it would be interesting to investigate, Finot took a little convincing. The reason for it is that on the one hand Thomson wanted a much more protected driving position (his previous Hugo Boss had a small enclosed cockpit) but the problem with one large cabintop (in his view) is that the multitude of lines running back from the mast then have to pass back to the cockpit through a tunnel (as is the case on the Farr boats). "All the other boats have got them down the middle, you so you end up with this tunnel and an ungainly coachroof," he explains. "For me I couldn’t see the point of having the tunnel and putting this big thing over the top of it. And it is also a really nice to walk up through because you can’t go anywhere. The big worry was headroom down below and how much water is going to go down there. We haven’t found out about that yet..."

However they do know a reasonable amount. Unlike the VO60 SEB which had twin companionways but alarmingly allowed water into the leeward one when she was laid flat on one occasion, they have already discovered that the leeward hatchway was not even close to the water line when they went through their inversion tests. This is particularly because the freeboard of the boat has increased generally - Thomson says that at the bow it is 0.5m higher than on his previous Marc Lombard-designed 60.

Most impressive about the channel between the cabintops leading aft is just how much rope leads back there. Thomson tells us that his new steed carries around 2.8km of rope and that the organiser it passes through straddling the cabintops is the largest Spinlock have ever built! All this rope passes back to two Harken pit winches mounted on the cabintop and these have secondary drums built into their bases so that lines can also be taken aft to the other winches in the cockpit. There is every possibility of this cockpit turning into a complete cat's cradle... Generally throughout the cockpit all the winch sizes have increased to take into account the enlarged size of the sail plan and for example the primaries are now 880s.

Generally the cockpit is considerably further aft in the boat compared to the Farr designs. The aft deck is only around 2-3ft long before it culminates in the mainsheet track and the transom. The cockpit is also impressively deep, literally coming up to waist height, providing a great feeling of security.

A problem on the old Hugo Boss was the small cockpit filling up with water (read about this here) however on the new boat massive apertures in both aft corners of the cockpit expel water directly out through the transom, so this shouldn't be a problem.

The new boat has twin wheel steering, the helming position protected behind each cabin top which Thomson can peer over and also see the 20/20 displays. On the bulkhead forward of each helm are further electronics controls, including those for the keel canting, made by Olectric, who made the same gear for movistar, Leopard and the other Aussie-built maxis.

Down below on Hugo Boss is cavernous, black and without standing headroom in the middle. This is partly due to the configuration of the deck but also because the entire floor in the middle of the boat is water tank - something we have also seen down below on the new Farr boats. Hugo Boss has giant pairs of tanks in the middle of the boat, forward and aft. Thomson won't specify how much water could be taken on total, but given that of her 18.2m LOA around 12-13m of it is water tank, one suspects that it could increase the overall displacement of the boat but almost 75%. Obviously this would never happen as only the weather tanks will ever be filled and it is even unlikely that they would ever all be filled on one side.

The bay for the engine and generator is located forward and the chart table is somewhat unconventional in hanging off the front of the aft bulkhead, so the navigator faces aft. This offers a weight saving and also is closer to the cockpit. The electrics have been specified by veteran navigator Andrew Cape, who will sail with Thomson later this year in the Barcelona World Race and fitted by Mark Wiley.

The sleeping arrangements comprise a pipecot on each side of the central area, aft and forward of the main bulkhead, as expected is a giant space for the sails, accessible on deck via a maxi-boat sized hatch.

Hugo Boss looks like a boat that will be blisteringly quick and there is a chance we will see if this is the case this coming Sunday when she has her first competitive outing in the Rolex Fastnet Race, joined by her fellow Finot-Conq sisterships Generali and Armel le Cleac'h's new BritAir.

Many more photos on the following pages....