Racing multihulls, trimaran’s unstoppable rise
The number may make us smile today, but the very first victory by a multihull in a solo ocean race was achieved at an average speed of less than 6 knots. This was the Pen Duick IV with Alain Colas, who won the Transat 1972 just four years after having to abandon this race due to a problem with this same boat, skippered at the time by Éric Tabarly. After 20 days and 13 hours of racing, the 20m trimaran, built out of a light alloy by the Lorient-based yard La Perrière, finished less than a day ahead of Vendredi 13, Jean-Yves Terlain’s imposing monohull (39m long). At the same time, it cut more than five days off this event’s record, held since the previous race by the 18m monohull Sir Thomas Lipton.
As indicated by this relatively modest speed, which was therefore still accessible for all sorts of “classic” sailing boats, there seemed to be very little separating monohulls and multihulls at the time. The following Transat event was expected to confirm this on two levels: out of the 125 boats starting the race in 1976, the fleet included just 18 multihulls, with very few really competitive units. In the end, the victory, following a lot of suspense, went to the boat that seemed the least suited to the race, Éric Tabarly’s Pen Duick VI. The wave of emotion triggered by this boat’s second success eclipsed the no-doubt most important technical lesson to be taken from this race: the second place achieved by a 9.50m trimaran, weighing barely 1 ton – Mike Birch’s The Third Turtle – which, despite conditions that were in theory unfavorable for this type of boat, with strong headwinds, managed to finish very close to a 22m monohull.
The next episode went down in history, with Mike Birch winning the 1978 Route du Rhum at the finish on board his 11m trimaran Olympus Photo, crossing the line in Guadeloupe just two minutes ahead of Kriter V, the 21m monohull skippered by Michel Malinovsky. Sadly, Alain Colas, the first sailor to have skippered a multihull to victory six years earlier, disappeared during the race on board the legendary Manureva, previously the Pen Duick IV.
Transat 1980 a turning point
For many observers and racers, despite the success of Birch’s small trimaran – designed like the previous model by the American Dick Newick – the debate is far from over. As before, the average speeds are still relatively low (6.3 knots for the first two finishers in the 1978 Route du Rhum), which could suggest that more optimized monohulls could still have their say in the upcoming events. This is notably the view of Michel Malinovsky, who quickly commissions a Kriter VIII in the same spirit as the V, also designed by André Mauric, but even bigger (23m). But the Transat 1980 event puts an end to all of this speculation: five trimarans with reasonable dimensions – between 10.60m and 16m – stand out by taking the first five places. Moxie, the winning boat, skippered by the American Phild Weld, who is in his 60s, beats the event’s previous record by nearly three days.
Several factors are behind this shift. First of all, there is the growing interest in multihulls, inspiring architects and builders to focus on them more. Derek Kelsall, from the UK, was one of the first to conceive the modern racing trimaran, designing Toria in 1966, which won the Round Britain and Ireland Race in the same year. After sailing on board Toria, Éric Tabarly, impressed by its performances, understood that multihulls were the future and decided to call on André Allègre, the French trimaran pioneer, to design the future Pen Duick IV. Alongside the English school’s increasingly high-performance projects, represented by Kelsall, a minimalist current developed on the other side of the Atlantic, led by Dick Newick, very influenced by Oceanian dugouts, looking to create boats that are as simple and light as possible. This trend gained the advantage in 1980 with Moxie, built by Walter Greene’s famous yard in Maine.
Another significant factor was the decision by the English organizers of the Transat race, shocked by the participation four years earlier of the vast Club Méditerranée, to limit boat lengths to 56 feet (17m), further reducing the appeal of the monohull option, which offers slower performances for an equivalent size. We must also consider the fact that the majority of the monohulls competing in this Transat event – and more generally in the solo or two-handed ocean races at the time – are marked by a certain conservatism and not really representative of the best practices in this field. This point had already been proven the previous year during the two-handed Transatlantic race from Lorient to Bermuda and back again, which was won at the finish by the trimaran VSD (Kelsall design) ahead of the foiler Paul Ricard.
A record and a new era
Unfortunately, in the Lorient-Bermuda-Lorient event, Paul Ricard is then disqualified from the Transat Anglaise after Éric Tabarly withdrew due to injury (the boat still completes the same route, with Marc Pajot replacing Tabarly at the last minute, but the heads of the organizing club, the Royal Western Yacht Club, refuse to include it). In the middle of summer 1980, he is back in the spotlight again after comfortably beating the record for crossing the North Atlantic, held since 1905 by Atlantic, a 56m schooner with a crew of around 50. Accompanied by Éric Bourhis, Georges Calvé and Dominique Pipat, Éric Tabarly takes 10 days and 5 hours to sail from the Ambrose Lighthouse – off the coast of New York – to Lizard Point, two days less than the Atlantic, with an average speed of over 12 knots! This is a historic event on more than one level, marking a spectacular leap forward in terms of speed, while also validating Tabarly’s innovative ideas concerning lifting foils, a forerunner of the modern foils that will follow several decades later.
The world of racing multihulls then enters a phase of all-out research on two or three hulls.
Catamarans seem to move ahead in 1982, thanks to the victory – with a lead of over three days – of the Charente Maritime in the La Rochelle – New Orleans race. This 20m cat, designed by Michel Joubert and Bernard Nivelt, will go on to win the Transat en Double event, then the La Baule – Dakar race, and seems to herald a long period of domination by twin hulls. An impression that is reinforced by the victory of the classic Elf Aquitaine cat, designed by Sylvestre Langevin and skippered by Marc Pajot, in the second Route du Rhum race. A Route du Rhum that extinguishes the final hopes of monohull supporters: despite all the efforts by Michel Malinovsky, the large Kriter VIII, cannot do any better than a 10th place finish, behind three catamarans and six trimarans.
Barely two years after the achievements of the Charente Maritime, the trend is reversed again. Thanks to the contributions of talented new British architects, trimarans will now monopolize the podiums. John Shuttleworth designs the Fleury Michon VI, the first to cross the finish line in the Transat 1984 with Philippe Poupon, while victory in this event goes to the Umupro Jardin V – designed by Phil Morrison – skippered by Yvon Fauconnier, after it was awarded a 16-hour bonus to make up for time spent rescuing a competitor. Nigel Irens and Rob Humphreys will also design several iconic boats. The former’s designs include the Fleury Michon VIII and IX with Philippe Poupon, which respectively won the Route du Rhum 1986 and Transat 1988, followed later by the renowned Fujicolor II, which had an impressive track record with Loïck Peyron (including his victories in the 1992 and 1996 Transat events). The second created the outstanding trimaran Paragon, which was acquired and renamed Groupe Pierre 1er by Florence Arthaud in 1988.
Revival of the French school
In addition to designing the Umupro Jardin V, Phil Morrison needs to be credited with a discreet, but decisive role in the development of the French multihull sector. While they have just teamed up to create their firm VPLP, Marc Van Peteghem and Vincent Lauriot-Prevost have an opportunity to work with him on a joint project. Marked by Phil’s vision – particularly in terms of the long, voluminous floats – the young architects will draw inspiration from this for their own trimarans, which will win almost everything over the following decades, starting off with the 1990 Route du Rhum with Florence Arthaud.
Alongside the various major events, some new races are launched during this decade: The Québec-Saint-Malo and the Route de la Découverte in 1984, and the Course de l’Europe in 1985. At the same time, racers and sponsors become interested in record attempts covering all sorts of routes, with the most closely followed still the North Atlantic, from West to East. This is the only sector where large catamarans – less tolerant for solo racing, but offering major potential with a crew on board – will continue to provisionally keep involved. In 1990, Jet Services V (22.80m cat, designed by Gilles Ollier) crosses the Atlantic in six and a half days, with an average speed of 19 knots. A record that causes a sensation at the time and will then be regularly improved on (down to 3 days and 15 hours by Banque Populaire V in 2009, with an average of nearly 33 knots). For solo events as well, there is a clear acceleration, even though the figures remain less spectacular: to win the 1988 Transat Anglaise, Philippe Poupon’s trimaran averaged more than 11 knots, a speed never reached before over such a distance.
The media success of these events delights the sponsors, and therefore the racers, with the best having access to budgets that will enable them to build increasingly high-performance multihulls thanks to the know-how developed in specialist yards, such as Multiplast or Jeanneau Techniques Avancées. These strong levels of interest will help create a sort of “French exception”, with our racers gradually moving away from the classic English and American events to devote themselves entirely to French-inspired competitions. The downside: these competitions will primarily remain very French-centric, with very few foreign crews getting involved.
