How Groupama won the Volvo Ocean Race pt 2

Laurent Pages on the design, Cammas on his future and Groupama NOT terminating their sponsorship of sailing

This article continues from part 1 here

Working out of the old Le Defi AC team base at the end of the impressive line of WW2 nazi-built submarine bases in Lorient, the Groupama team already had a set-up more akin to an America’s Cup campaign than a Volvo Ocean Race team with their own in-house design and technical departments, many of whom worked on Groupama 3. The only team in this Volvo Ocean Race to have a set-up similar to this was Camper with the mighty Emirates Team New Zealand warhorse behind them.

Pages continues: “Franck [Cammas] has always been very much involved on the technical side of his boats - he likes that and is excellent at that, and working with the main designers and some external contractors or consultants, for example [A-Class cat designer] Martin Fischer worked on our daggerboards and rudders and that definitely gave us a bit of an edge over the original Juan K plans. In many aspects we looked into improving the Juan K options, sometimes going a slightly different way. For sure the package from Juan K is excellent and the three Juan K boats during the race were extremely competitive, but all the work done by this in-house design office, going into more detail, probably also made the difference and gave us this little edge of speed we had in some conditions. We worked a lot on centre of gravity fore and aft and on weight in different areas. We ended up with the same weight as the others, but we also ended up with a very strong, solid boat and that helped us to be confident in pushing hard at times.”

With Juan K’s design team in Valencia penning three boats for this race there was an issue of maintaining confidentiality between the teams and so each team had a different person to work with within Juan K's design office – Telefonica got Santi Lange for example, while Groupama worked directly with Laureano Marquinez. “The communication between the Groupama in-house design office and the Juan K office has been permanent,” says Pages. “That was very interesting. Sometimes of course there were disagreements on some technical options, but that is what makes a rich technical discussion. If you disagree it is because there is something to find out and I guess that is also where our design has been very, very clever and where Franck made some very good calls.”

Particular areas of the boat where the Groupama design team made changes to the Juan K design were in the rudders, daggerboards, the keel rake, the mechanics of their keel fin and the deck layout, where Pages says it was a compromise between CoG, weight and usability. “A lot of different aspects, but a little bit everywhere makes you a little bit faster.”

Groupama’s rig is also a step on. Pages was with Telefonica Blue in the last race when they broke new ground opting for a jumper-less four spreader rig. That become the ‘norm’ for this race but Groupama, to reduce windage, moved on again, going three spreader.

So was that the reason for their dismasting? Pages is adamant that is was not. “It is nothing to do with that or the tube or the rig support itself. But we don’t know exactly. There are two options – it was either compression resulting in first spreader failure, or a D1 attachment.”
Pieces of the broken spreader have been sent to Safran for detailed analysis of how the carbon broke.

They are also contemplating that their Carbolink solid carbon fibre standing rigging might have had a similar issue to that of the Future Fibres equivalent on Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing that caused their dismasting on leg one: “The D1 is supposed to break at 18 tonnes and at the moment of the mast break we were sailing upwind with J2 and full main in normal conditions. So there was about 6 tonnes on it at the time, so it couldn’t be that, but the rigid carbon diagonal, being very loose to leeward for many days in the Southern Ocean, maybe it was fatigued, because rigid carbon elements don’t like to be too loose, and the impact of the waves on that were really strong. What is for sure is that we sailed fast around the world with this without a problem when it was more heavily loaded, so the only thing can be fatigue,” says Pages.

Importantly Groupama also overcame its dismasting, along with other technical drama during the race, such as the collision that caused their bow to fill up with water at the end of leg four. In doing this they had an excellent shore team led by Herve le Quillec and Ben Wright, who also did this job for Ericsson in the last race and are two of the most experienced in the business in these roles.

“We have to accept that a yacht race it is a mechanical sport like car racing is,” says Pages. “So the Volvo Ocean Race is also a management race: you have to be the best, but you have also got to be a very good manager overall to make the right calls and manage problems and difficult situations. The Volvo Ocean Race you can win by fixing your problems. And you will have problems – it is such a difficult race, it is so hard on the crew and the boats, everyone is pushing so hard, always to the limit. You will have some surprises and you have to be ready for them.”

Sails

As the team’s Sail Co-ordinator, Pages worked closely with the Groupama’s in-house sail designer Gautier Sargent and says Sargent was on top of the latest technology. With the sail wardrobe much reduced this race along with the numbers of sails that could be introduced during the race, this required some substantial pre-race planning. “I am really happy with the work we have done with the overall strategy on the sails," says Page. "During this race we have been sticking with our plan, which was written ahead of the race and our original plan was right in terms of which sails to use at which moment - that happened as planned and that is a great satisfaction.”

Pages says that North’s 3Di has come of age in this Volvo Ocean Race. “At the very early stage of the campaign there was still a question mark about it as it is quite a new technology. We and Puma were the first boats to build some sails for the VO70 in early 2010 to test the durability of the material.” The intention was to try and put 1500 hours on a 3Di mainsail to see how it performed. He continues: “The results beat all of our general expectations because the durability was absolutely not a problem, but even breakage - with a hole in the sail, it wasn’t splitting in two and you could keep sailing with that and just the shape holding was also fantastic.”

Test run

Groupama, when they originally announced their campaign stated that they would be participating in two editions of the Volvo Ocean Race, so in theory this was supposed to be the French team’s supposed ‘test run’. However the team don’t seem to have seen it this way. “Ha!” says Pages when we put this to him. “We are all competitors and Franck is the most competitive of anyone. So for sure when you are going with the objective of doing two races, you can always say ‘okay, we will do our best and we’ll try to learn the maximum this race and in the second race we have to be in a position to win’, but that doesn’t mean we won’t try and do everything to win this first time.”

As to a second attempt on the Volvo Ocean Race, despite reports earlier in the year that Groupama was following Veolia Environment in suddenly pulling the plug on their sailing sponsorship, including their second participation in the Volvo Ocean Race, this is in fact completely untrue. Franck Cammas confirms: “They finish sponsoring in the football, but that contract ended. They want to continue in sailing, but they want to reduce the cost of the team.”

Cammas

This Volvo Ocean Race has demonstrated that Franck Cammas, so dominant over the last decade in French ORMA 60s and maxi-multihull classes, can not only compete, but win, against the best in the international sailing arena.

So what next for France’s golden boy? Cammas will be getting a taste of the MOD70 circuit sailing on board Steve Ravussin’s Race for Water in the class’ European Tour in September, however he remains in two minds about the one design trimaran circuit. It is a multihull, which he prefers, but he feels it is still too French and being a one design isn’t as attractive as the ORMA 60, where his Groupama 2 excelled.

And all the competitors are too familiar. “For now the skippers come from La Trinite to Port la Foret!” (ie a 100 mile stretch of the Breton coast) he says of the MOD70. “It is a shame for the organisers because the goal for them is to open it up, so it is attractive for everybody, for the Anglo-Saxons as well, but it is not like that now. So we have to wait and see. The crews are very strong but it is the same as six years ago with the ORMAs. What I like here in the Volvo is that you fight against other countries and the best in the world.”

Shorter term there is no rest for Cammas as he is competing in the French Match Racing National Championship and is also seriously contemplating a Nacra 17 campaign for Rio 2016. “I want to try. I am not sure. We will see if it is serious or not,” he says. And, no, he hasn’t found his crew, although one imagines there will be quite a few long legged applicants.

Beyond this he seems more keen stay in the Volvo Ocean Race, even though it is one design and, as we have mentioned, he is very very keen on classes where he can apply his and his team’s technical expertise. A decision is believed to be being made in September.

“It is more attractive from a cost point of view,” Cammas says of the move to the new 65ft one design. “For sure we will save money because the cost of the boat is almost zero – it doesn’t change value, so it is very good. But it is not the best thing we can imagine, because for me offshore racing is also about the design process and it is a part that is very interesting in this race. The first part before the start - I love that. So we lose this part and go into one designs...but if it is mandatory to do the race like that, if there is no choice, there is no choice. I prefer to go sailing with a one design than to stay ashore!”

Laurent Pages says he is also in two minds about the one design. On the one hand his expertise pre-Volvo Ocean Race was in one design classes from the Melges 24 to the Mumm 36 and Mumm 30, but he likes development classes too. “Historically this race has been a fantastic laboratory for offshore sail boats with the development that is allowed, so I am pretty sad if you ask my feeling as a sailor. After that we all understand that the cost killing program is a must in this global economic environment and the one design is a possible answer to that. However we have to make sure first that we are really dropping the cost and the second thing is that it is going to put even more weight on the sailors’ shoulders.

“The big challenge for the Volvo Ocean Race with the one design will be the rules management. They have to be clever with the rule itself, how it is written, how it is set and how it is controlled. I must say it has been a bit loose on this event sometimes in how the rule has been interpreted by the Measurement Group. We arrived at the earliest part of the race with some very strange interpretations on some measurement aspects.” He refers to Camper’s definitely non-adjustable forestay. He adds that the organisers are also going to have their work cut out maintaining the integrity of the one design and the rules associated with it.

So Bravo to Franck Cammas and his team. Cammas hasn’t raced one designs since he won La Solitaire du Figaro, so if Groupama does enter the next Volvo Ocean Race it will be back to the drawing board once again. Our money is on them being back.