11th Hour Racing Team reveals IMOCA 60 build details
11th Hour Racing Team announces the design and build of a brand new IMOCA 60 taking place in Brittany, France11th Hour Racing Team Press Release
Following on from a recent announcement of three new crew members, the 11th Hour Racing Team have released fresh details about their new IMOCA 60 boat build.
Below is from an 11th Hour Racing Team press release
11th Hour Racing Team is one step closer in our ambition to win The Ocean Race 2022-23 with the announcement of the design and build of a brand new IMOCA 60 taking place in Brittany, France.
We have brought together three of the most experienced and successful offshore racing expert organizations to conceptualize, design and build this new boat for the Team.
Our designer, Guillaume Verdier is one of yacht racing’s most prolific naval architects in the sport with America’s Cup winners, Ultime record-breakers and was involved in the design of four of the last five Vendée Globe winners. Verdier brings together the very best minds in the offshore sailing world to work collaboratively across all areas from structural design to routing, and engineering to computational fluid dynamics.
Our strategic partner for the technical and performance aspects of the new boat build is MerConcept, led by offshore racing veteran François Gabart who won the Vendée Globe in 2012. MerConcept, an Entreprise à Mission [purpose-led company] more recently led the build of Apivia – the latest generation foiling IMOCA, which is a front-runner for the upcoming single-handed round the world race. A group of nearly a dozen engineers, designers and analysts are working on the analytics and data for the performance analysis of the new design.
The boat is being built by CDK Technologies, based out of Lorient and Port-la-Forêt, France, who have constructed many of the leading offshore sailing boats in the sport, including the last three winners of the Vendée Globe and the largest racing trimaran ever built, the Maxi Banque Populaire V.
(Skipper) Charlie (Enright) shared what inspired this next step in our team journey, “When we learned that The Ocean Race was going to be open to a development class we jumped at the opportunity. We’ve done two laps of the planet now in the one-design Volvo Ocean 65s and are very excited to take this next step in the Race with a custom design and build process.”
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