Alex Thomson looks like a kid who has just wandered into a sweet shop and been told he can have all the gobstoppers he wants. “This is like the world’s best toy,” he shouts above the din of electric drills and saws as he clambers aboard his 60ft black carbon yacht with fluorescent pink accents and motions for me to join him – “£5.5 million. I mean, who gets to spend that kind of money on a toy? It’s insane.”
Thomson, one of Britain’s foremost yachtsmen, is optimistic that this is the boat that will finally carry him to Vendee Globe glory.
He is getting closer each time. Having been forced to abandon his first two attempts in 2004-05 and 2008-09 due to boat damage, Thomson finished third in 2012-13 and then second last time out in 2016-17, when he would have won but for a broken foil which handicapped him for most of the race.
The 45-year-old has high hopes that the next edition will be the one that sees him break his duck and become the first Briton to win the non-stop, solo round-the-world race known as the Everest of sailing.
He would certainly appear to stand an excellent chance. His new boat, which like all his previous ones is called Hugo Boss after the team’s principal partner, went in the water for the first time yesterday and looks absolutely stunning. Built in an unassuming boatyard near to the team’s base in Gosport, it has taken a team of designers, boatbuilders and architects 26 months, 50,000 man hours and the small matter of the aforementioned £5.5 million to get to this point (although as Thomson notes: “£5.5 million and it still doesn’t have a toilet!”).
Only eight of the 30-odd boats competing in the Vendee Globe will have been built from new
Only eight of the 30-odd boats competing in the Vendee Globe will have been built brand new CREDIT: LLOYD IMAGES
It is how it compares to the other next-generation Vendee boats that matters, however. Of the 30-odd boats which will compete in the next edition of the race, only eight will have been newly built.
The race will effectively be between these eight foiling monohulls. And while there are some parameters – a length limit, a width limit, a draft limit and so on – which everyone must stay within, there is plenty of scope to play around with the design.
“The big thing is that if something is not specifically disallowed then it’s allowed,” Thomson says, as we move about the boat, stopping every now and then so that he can point out some gizmo or gadget.
“We have a chief measurer, Rene Boulaire, who is basically God.” Boulaire is one of the few who knows all the secrets. While yesterday’s launch was an opportunity to show Hugo Boss and its new pink trim off to the public, the team were careful not to show too much.
Thomson will be competing in the Vendee Globe for a fifth time
Thomson will be competing in the Vendee Globe for a fifth time CREDIT: AFP
They were happy for their rivals to see the 60 black, grippy solar panels across the deck and coach roof, for instance (Thomson is aiming to complete the Vendee Globe without the use of fossil fuels and, in doing so, prove that being more sustainable can actually have performance advantages). Or even to the cockpit, which intriguingly has been moved further forward and appears to be, to some degree, enclosed, with multiple exit points or hatches. But they were coy about showing too much of their new foils, which they believe represent a significant development from the previous generation. The foils (short for hydrofoils) are basically arms which extend out of the side of the boat and lift its hull out of the water as it moves along, reducing drag.
With new rules allowing the foils to move on two axes rather than on one axis, as was the case last time, the challenge for everyone has been to come up with a solution that allows sailors to change the boat’s “angle of attack” as efficiently as possible. This is what keeps the boat “flying” out of the water at the fastest speed.
Thomson says the idea for his foils was fleshed out while sitting in a car with Pete Hobson, his design manager at Alex Thomson Racing, and Andy Claughton, who used to design for the America’s Cup. “We were waiting for the ferry, and I’m trying to explain to Andy what I mean and he’s drawing the foil in the condensation of the car windscreen,” Thomson recalls. “We then went home, Pete drew it up and we sent it over to [French architects] VPLP.”
The stakes are high. If they have got it right, it could be the key to the team’s success. Conversely, if they have got it wrong he admits “it’s going to be hard to recover at this stage”.
Thomson says he hopes his solution will be different, at any rate. Like New Zealand in the last America’s Cup, who arrived late in Bermuda and caught everyone out with their “cyclors” – which had the crew pedalling on static bikes rather than using traditional grinding pedestals – he hopes the fact that he is based in the UK, away from everyone else, can be an advantage. “There will be 30 teams in the next Vendee and 22 of them come from one place in France,” he says. “You can’t hide anything. They all drink in the same bars.”
Thomson will spend the next few weeks testing the boat, gradually increasing the loads and seeing what happens, before racing her for the first time in the two-handed Transat Jacques Vabres this autumn.
He says he is hoping to hang on to his secrets, at least until it is too late for any of his rivals to copy what he has done.
For better or worse, this is what the Vendee Globe is all about. “I think people see it as man versus the elements,” Thomson says. “And it is. But like F1, it is mainly a design race. If I hadn’t broken my foil on the last Vendee I would have won it. And I would have won it because of a technical advantage.”
After four attempts, Thomson is hoping experience and a bold design pays off this time.
