11th Hour Racing IMOCA
The first to be designed for fully-crewed racing
The arrival of any new IMOCA is a moment the class looks forward to as the design game takes its next step in the era of foiling monohulls, but the new 11th Hour Racing IMOCA is of particular interest.
That’s because the Guillaume Verdier-designed flying machine that will be skippered by Charlie Enright and Pascal Bidégorry in the Transat Jacques Vabre, is the first IMOCA to have been built with fully-crewed racing in mind.
The 11th Hour Racing Team has its sights firmly set on The Ocean Race in 2022 and the brief for the design team, led by Verdier and Hervé Penfornis, was to produce a boat that could be pushed hard 24/7 by a crew of four or five and one that will be suited to the stop-start nature of The Ocean Race format.
Enright can’t wait to get going on sailing trials in the multi-coloured new IMOCA which rolled out of the shed at CDK Technologies in Port-la-Fôret for the first time at the weekend. The American veteran of two Ocean Races quipped that his new boat looks like the Batmobile from the Batman movie franchise and you can see what he means.
Indeed the first impression is of a hull with a super-slick aero treatment that follows on from the old VPLP-Verdier HUGO BOSS (now named 11th Hour Racing), with a scow-type profile to its bow (in a similar vein to the first Sam Manuard IMOCA, the former L’Occitane en Provence), a pronounced chine, and with a large and almost completely enclosed cockpit with minimal side decks.
The first photos do not show how the cockpit is laid out, what the foils will look like or what the boat looks like down below, where many of the significant design advances have been made to accommodate a full crew.
