Transat Jacques Vabre - IMOCA form guide

We look at the 14 runners and riders and their potential in this Sunday's race to Costa Rica

Thursday November 5th 2009, Author: James Boyd, Location: United Kingdom
Pos
Boat Skipper Nat Co-skipper Nat Type Odds
…to 1
1
Foncia Michel Desjoyeaux FRA Jérémie Beyou FRA Farr 2008
4
2
BT Sébastien Josse FRA Jean François Cuzon FRA Farr 2007
5
3
Veolia Environnement Roland Jourdain FRA Jean Luc Nélias FRA Lombard/Juan K 2004
6
4
Safran Marc Guillemot FRA Charles Caudrelier Benac FRA VPLP/Verdier 2007
6
5
Mike Golding Yacht Racing Mike Golding GBR Javier Sanso SPA Owen Clarke 2007
6
6
Akena Verandas Arnaud Boissières FRA Vincent Riou FRA ex PRB, 2006 Farr
7
8
Brit Air Armel Le Cléac'h FRA Nicolas Troussel FRA Finot 2008
9
7
Groupe Bel Kito de Pavant FRA François Gabart FRA VPLP/Verdier 2007
11
9
Hugo Boss Alex Thomson GBR Ross Daniel UK Finot 2008
12
10
Artemis Ocean Racing Samantha Davies GBR Sidney Gavignet FRA Rogers 2008
12
11
AVIVA Dee Caffari GBR Brian Thompson GBR Owen Clarke 2008
13
12
1876 Yves Parlier FRA Pachi Rivero SPA ex Gitana, 2008 Farr
15
13
W Hotels Alex Pella SPA Pepe Ribes SPA ex Virbac, 2007 Farr
25
14
DCNS Marc Thiercelin FRA Christopher Pratt FRA Finot 2008
50
 
Mon dieu – this is hard! The Transat Jacques Vabre is due to set sail this Sunday from Le Havre, northern France on a course that will take the boats down the Channel, across the north Atlantic dodging the Azores high, then through the Caribbean Sea to the new finish in Costa Rica (as opposed to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil). In the 14-strong IMOCA 60 fleet pretty much all the boats have the possibility of winning, the line-up featuring only one nominally older generation boat – Roland Jourdain’s Veolia Environment and she was virtually renewed prior to the last Vendee Globe, with design work carried out by Juan K.

While all, apart from Veolia, were built for the last Vendee Globe, many had technical issues in that race, which the teams have since been attempting to resolve. Also the experience level or competitiveness of the skippers, which is one gauge for the form guide in the Vendee, is evened out in this race as the boats are sailed doublehanded. The upshot is that this is probably the hardest form guide we’ve ever had to put together for the IMOCA 60 fleet, indicating the level of competitiveness this class has reached.

About the only certainty is that Michel Desjoyeaux and Foncia are favourite. This year Desjoyeaux has won the Vendee Globe for a second time and has also won the IMOCA class’ other long distance event of 2009 – the Istanbul Europa Race. He is sailing the TJV with Jeremie Beyou, who if he never shone when he was skipper of the Delta Dore Open 60 – a Farr design, like Foncia is – is a highly capable sailor and a past winner of the Solitaire du Figaro.



We are also reasonably happy with our choice of BT for second place. Seb Josse is waiting in the wings for his chance to win a major event and has teamed up with Jean François Cuzon for the TJV. Cuzon is considered one of the bright sparks in French yachting - a former 470 World Champion, who was navigator on Areva Challenge in the last America’s Cup. This year he race with Francois Gabart (sailing the TJV on Groupe Bel with Kito de Pavant) and won two legs of the Tour de Bretagne – impressive considering this was his first time in a Figaro. Both have been training hard this year, BT being one of the boats – along with Foncia, Safran, Akena Verandas, Artemis and Veolia - to have been training regularly out of Port la Foret, which we believe counts for a lot (when will we set up such a facility in the UK???)

Beyond this the form guide turns much much harder. Let’s distract ourselves momentarily by looking at the long term weather forecast– which seems pretty heinous over Monday and Tuesday with a depression heading east over Ireland and the UK and the Azores high well east, buffeting up against Europe at the latitude of Gibraltar, with ominous looking 35-40 knots westerly headwinds in between. So think Solidaire du Chocolat Mk2. By Thursday next week the boats will, we hope, be long gone because then a nasty small depression is forecast to be lurking over the Bay of Biscay itself. So maybe upwind specialists Mike Golding and Dee Caffari will come good? However what seems likely, given these brutal start conditions, is that there will be casualties.

So moving on. After having Marc Guillemot in third for a while – Safran is a great boat, which Guillemot is highly racing having completed the Vendee Globe aboard her, and his co-skipper is past Solitaire winner Charles Caudrelier – we have instead opted for Akena Verandas to be third. There may possibly be some small bias involved having sailed the Artemis Challenge on her this year (and not done well admittedly) however this boat is the ex- PRB and her Vendee Globe helm Vincent Riou is Arnaud Boissieres’ co-skipper for this race, as a new PRB (a Verdier design on this occasion) is under construction. However thinking about this some more, PRB as she was, rarely seemed to have had the speed edge of some of the other Farr designs, so we are going to change our opinion again and put Veolia Environnement up there into third.

Despite being the oldest boat in the fleet, Open 60 veteran Roland Jourdain’s red flier still has good legs and she has two of the most experienced skippers in the race aboard her – along with Mike Golding, Jourdain has the longest continuous tenure in the IMOCA class. He is sailing with another old member of the Port la Foret mafia - former Belgacom ORMA 60 skipper and also, briefly, Green Dragon Volvo Ocean Race navigator, Jean-Luc Nelias.



So we now have Safran in fourth place and of course Mike Golding has to be up there too aboard his Owen Clarke design – assuming he can keep the rig up and keel on. The British veteran is fifth in our ranking as he has a good track record in this race, an evil opening stint upwind will be his bread and butter and he has very experienced Spanish sailor Javier Sanso with him. Sanso previously completed the Barcelona World Race aboard Golding’s previous Ecover. During the Vendee Globe the boat showed good pace prior to her dismasting.

In our hiatus over third place Akena Verandas has dropped to six.

The next group is equally impossible to call. We have Kito de Pavant’s Groupe Bel in sixth. She is the sistership to Safran, so the design is fast. De Pavant is a past Solitaire du Figaro winner and with him is the talented Francois Gabart, who was winner of the previous ‘Espair Bretagne’ competition to win a two year Figaro campaign, prior to Anthony Marchand winning it this year. Gabart was 13th overall in this year’s Solitaire. Groupe Bel dismasted early on in the Vendee Globe, but came second in the Istanbul Europa Race this year, following a corporate tour of the Mediterranean, so we don’t have a great deal to go on in terms of her performance relative to the fleet.

Again we’re going to change our mind. In fact we are going to elevate Armel le Cleac’h and BritAir to sixth. In a decimated fleet, Le Cleac’h brought his Finot-Conq design home in second place in the Vendee Globe as he also did in the Artemis Transat. For the TJV he is sailing with Nicolas Troussel, the most talented Figaro sailor of his generation, having twice won the Solitaire. So why is BritAir not in the top three in our ranking? Our view is that the boat is strong, but a little heavy compared to the competition, a boat that will reach the finish line when others fall - as Le Cleac’h has so admirably proved to date. In this race however aside from the first few days after the start, the majority of the race is likely to be light to moderate running or reaching.

With Groupe Bel down to seventh we have Alex Thomson and Hugo Boss in eighth. Again this boat and her skipper have the talent and potential to win the race, but given their patchy track record, it is hard to gauge how competitive they will be in this race, their last in this Finot-Conq design, now that they have bought the mighty Juan K-designed, former Pindar. While the French are taking Olympic class World Championship or Solitaire di Figaro winners, Thomson is taking his shore crew Ross Daniel. Thomson explains his reasons: “I am taking Ross on the Transat Jacques Vabre and then assuming we get on, the plan is that he will do the Barcelona World Race. I see an advantage to it, because in the Vendee Globe we had reliability problems and one of the problems is that the people who are preparing the boat don’t really know what you are going to go through. Ross is a really good sailor and we are good mates and have worked together for eight or ten years now. He is a very strong team member and knows the boat inside out, but also come Vendee time he will really know what has to go on to make the boat right and ready to go.”



Another podium placer could easily be the new riders of the Artemis Ocean Racing IMOCA 60 – Sam Davies and Volvo Ocean Race veteran, Sidney Gavignet. Sam is the unquestionable star of British solo sailing at present and the most capable, having been based in France for the last few years, having been through the Figaro school with the result - first Brit home in the Vendee Globe despite her Roxy, being a two generation old boat. Sidney brings the experience and know-how from the Volvo including two laps on the IMOCA 60’s more grunty, heavy weight big brother, the VO70 – ABN AMRO One and most recently Puma. The reason they are not higher up our league table is that while the boat went through a severe weight loss regime this summer, shedding almost a tonne from her, she remains something of an unknown quantity and her sailors only got on board her three months ago. Over that time they have been flat out training, trying to develop the boat and learn her quirks – in addition to the normal features, twin rudders, twin daggerboards, canting keel, a lot of water ballast, she has an elliptical trailing edge rotating wingmast and an interceptor. Her Hunter’s Child-style bulb maker (or ‘soda stream’ as previous skipper Jonny Malbon used to refer to it), that in theory reduces friction on the hull by introducing air bubbles, has been removed. Sam reckons the boat is a weapon upwind, which could see them do well in the first few days, but thanks to her weight and sizeable hull, she is not the fastest when it is light and off the breeze. If there is a dark horse in this race, it is certainly Artemis.

And guess what? Aviva could be up there too! The boat is from the same moulds as Mike Golding’s and Dee now has the experience of having raced her around the world in the Vendee Globe, as well as round Britain when she set a new record with her all-girl star team including Sam Davies and Miranda Merron. For this race she has teamed up with her former Vendee Globe competitor Brian Thompson, who has previously competed in this race with Mike Golding. Coming from the powerful Pindar Open 60, Aviva must seem like a dinghy to Thompson. They have the capability to do well and Dee has the added incentive as this is her last race with sponsorship from Aviva and she will be keen to put in a top performance.

One of the biggest surprises was the return to the IMOCA fleet – for this race at least – of Open 60 hero Yves Parlier. In the 1990s Parlier has won this race in his 60s, Cacolac d’Aquitaine and Aquitaine Innovations and has a talent and resourcefulness to match MichDes. The problem is that he has had to step in at the last moment, following Guillermo Altadill’s departure from the team. Pachi Rivero, who Parlier is sailing with, competed in the Barcelona World Race with Javier Sanso (sailing with Mike Golding in the TJV) and this year raced the Istanbul World Race on this boat. 1876, is a potential race winner being Loick Peyron’s Artemis Transat winner, Gitana Eighty, that led the Vendee Globe down the Atlantic. If Open 60 racing is like riding a bike for Parlier, then this boat has every chance of being up there.

Another Spanish, entry which is hard to work out the potential of, is W Hotels. This boat is the sistership to 1876, being previously Jean-Pierre Dick’s Virbac Paprec 2, another leader in the last Vendee Globe, until she suffered rudder problems to the south of Australia. So the boat is another potential race winner and she comes with a top notch crew in former Mini sailor Alex Pella who is joined by seasoned Volvo Ocean Race bowman, Pepe Ribes. However we suspect that both will be too new to the boat compared to the well practiced French.

Finally we have DNCS, the last of the 2008 generation Finot-Conq designs after Generali, BritAir and Hugo Boss. The boat has a similar catamaran-style deck layout to Hugo Boss and is being skippered by Open 60 veteran Marc Thiercelin. Part of the deal with this team is that Thiercelin gradually hands over the reigns to an up and coming sailor, following a competition that ran prior to the start of the Vendee Globe. The winner was Figaro sailor Christopher Pratt, who is racing with Thiercelin in the TJV. The reason DNCS is bottom of the pile is that she comes with very little track record other than the Istanbul Europa Race in which she was last.

So following on from the Mini Transat and the Solidaire du Chocolat this is another transatlantic competition that will have us glued to our seats for the next few weeks.

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