I cant get my head around the whole boat design of probably all the boats being too fragile for a round the world race. Surely building a boat that is 500kg heavier would be faster overall if you did not have to back off so much. (They are probably caring 100kg of carbon repair kit anyway)
Totally agree, last Vendee race guys from a very light boat were critical of a heavier design for not been optimized it finished they did not.
There is a balance. Build it too light and stuff breaks. Build it too heavy and stuff breaks because the loads have gone up.
A lot of these teams are using the TOR as evaluation for the important race, the Vendee Globe. With crew, and associated kit/food, they are heavier than they will be at the start of the Vendee. So if they get through this race they know how light/heavy they need to be for the Vendee Globe.
If I remember correctly Malizia's hull isn't built in the usual sandwich lamination with relatively thin carbon layers on the inside and outside of a foam but in solid carbon. Boris says it's much stiffer and he's "absolutely sure" it won't break. I am lacking any more details. Meilhat joked Malizia is built from the double amount of carbon compared to Biotherm.
Possibly marginally slower. The original foildesign enabled foiling at lower speed than with the current replacement foils, which have advantages in rougher seas however.
They also said that that since that cabin volume makes the boat unstable when upside down and more likely to right itself, then they save the same weight on the keel bulb. I like the boat too, and I think it's likely to improve the human performance of the crew, which can make a difference. I'll be curious as to whether the boat has a real advantage in heavy weather soon, or a disadvantage when going more to windward after rounding Cape Horn and heading North. So far it's been neither, I think.
It’s possible there are more areas of solid laminate, but that boat is absolutely cored. You could not make the boat stiff enough with solid laminates everywhere, unless you were cool with it weighing 10x what it should. It’s also possible that he opted for foam in areas where other boats went with nomex. A lot of boats (not just imocas) have had to scrape out delaminated nomex and replace with foam like Guyot Environment over the years. You can engineer honeycomb laminates to be pretty bombproof, but more often than not, when there is core shear failure in a bottom panel it’s a honeycomb laminate. I definitely subscribe to the Boris approach as far as making the structure a bit heavier to avoid having to make structural repairs. It’s interesting to see these repairs be done with crews aboard vs when skippers are on the Vendee. They can push much harder and still affect repairs, in contrast to the complete clusterfuck that occurs when someone is all alone. Not only is it slow on the course, but even with the crewed boats, it’s clearly exhausting to the crews.
Many if not most! Obviously some are going a different route, however I think the manuard concept has proven to be advantageous.
Same test different detail 😂
