Why the Vendée Globe fleet is right to reject a full foiling rule

Sometimes you don’t need to adopt every technological advance to stay at the front, as the IMOCA class is proving. Matt Sheahan reports

That tens of thousands of Vendée Globe fans were prepared to get up in the early hours of the morning and camp out on a sea wall in the middle of winter to see a group of boats pass by is truly remarkable. I can’t think of another event in sailing that has this kind of pulling power on this scale.

There is no doubt the Vendée Globe is an extraordinary phenomenon. Forty years old, now in its 10th edition and with a record entry of 40 boats there’s nothing else like it in sport. The fact 39 boats made it down to the South Atlantic having crossed the Bay of Biscay was also a record.

But the success of this event has been no accident. Neither has the fact that the class is stronger than ever. That the Vendée Globe was oversubscribed this time around is evidence of that.

Yet success hasn’t been without its stresses, especially when it has come to deciding how to allow teams and their designers to continue to evolve and develop their machines at the leading edge of the sport. The recent development of the foiling IMOCAs has been fascinating to watch with speeds that are simply incredible.

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But to fly the boat using a pair of asymmetric hydrofoils and then balance it fore and aft by dragging the stern around is not the way you’d set out to create a leading edge offshore machine if you started with a blank sheet of paper. Designing an aircraft with asymmetric wings, a lump of lead on one side and no tailplane isn’t a popular approach either.

Lifting the stern out of the water with a T-foil rudder would make life easier, quicker and some say safer. But the class voted it out back in November 2023 as it considered what the rules would be, not for this Vendée Globe but the next one in 2028.

It had been a big topic of conversation with plenty of advocates for making an IMOCA 60 fly properly. But the class is as sensitive to costs as it is to preventing a technical arms race that would fragment the fleet. The class achieves this by acting as a democracy: it’s the sailors and owners themselves who decide the rules. And when it came to defining what an IMOCA would look like for the next Vendée Globe they focussed on a different approach.

T-foils were voted out, largely based on cost, not just of the foils and control systems but also as a result of the amount it would cost to re-think the next generation of 60-footers. Even for those looking to re-configure their boats rather than build new, (which currently is around €7million), it was said that the cost could be as much as €2-3 million for a full facelift.

To some this may have looked like the class had frozen in the headlights as it struggled to figure out how to handle a key technical upgrade. Yet, looking back at its history there are several areas where the class has looked at what would make the racing better, safer, more popular and more reliable instead of going for outright speed. The move to a one-design keel fin is a good example.

Producing a robust design for everyone meant that the horror of broken keel fins has – touch wood – stopped.

So this time around, instead of going for T-foils, the class decided to approve a new one-design mast. This has been much needed for a boat that has developed significantly more power since the foils that created greater righting moment. Keeping the rig in the boat is a tricky, and at times stressful, part of sailing these beasts where alarms are pinging constantly with load monitors in the red zone.

But apart from performance and reliability, the IMOCA class also feels a responsibility to encourage more sustainability throughout the build and campaigning of the boats. From reducing the number of sails that a team can have, to crediting points to teams that, say, share moulds, there are several incentives that have been introduced to reduce the class’s carbon footprint.

During the recent Yacht Racing Forum in Amsterdam we heard of ways in which designers and builders are using panels produced using flax fibres and a green resin for some of the non-structural parts of the boat

But the really clever thing is that this is happening without seriously compromising the performance of the boat and without disgruntled teams and owners drawing stumps and heading to a different class. To maintain this for over 30 years, while still pushing at the leading edge, is remarkable and an example to many other areas of our sport.

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