PIP HARE ON HOW SHE’S TURBOCHARGED HER IMOCA 60 MEDALLIA AHEAD OF NEXT YEAR’S VENDÉE GLOBE
Ahead of me, the bow of Medallia is pointing at the sky. This is not poetic license; I am actually looking upwards at my bowsprit as it rises up, 50ft in front of me and some 3m higher than I am. In that split second, I can barely compute what is happening.
My brain just starts to grasp the situation when Medallia levels out and shoots forwards. I watch the speed log flick from 26 knots to 27, 28, 29 knots. The acceleration is actually insane. The foils are humming. Occasionally the windward foil grazes the waves and sprays me with a wall of water. Medallia, newly refitted and modified, is just one hour into our first commissioning sail and I have no doubts that we have indeed turbocharged our IMOCA 60.
The IMOCA class is in the midst of a boom. There are now over 50 international teams running these 60ft ocean racing beasts. The Vendée Globe has expanded its entry list to 40 candidates for the next edition in 2024 while The Ocean Race has been reborn as a crewed IMOCA event, with teams smashing the 24-hour monohull record.
Sponsors are flocking to the class and team budgets have never been higher. There are 14 new boats in build and the first two-boat campaign (Thomas Ruyant and Sam Goodchild’s For People and For Planet) was launched earlier this year. It’s an exciting time to be part of this class, but it’s tough for a small team like mine, based outside France, to stay competitive.
When I finished my first Vendée Globe in 2021, I had already started planning for the second race and I knew I wanted a competitive entry. I had the support of Leslie Stretch, CEO of my title sponsor Medallia, but with neither the time nor the funds for a new boat (around €6 million and two years to design and build), I had to look at existing boats. There were no 2020 generation boats for sale, so we settled on the best previous generation boat on offer – the VPLP/Verdier-designed Banque Populaire VIII, in which Armel Le Cl’éac’h won the 2016 Vendée Globe and set the course record. One of the first to be designed and built with foils, it was strong, well proven and successful. But when we bought it in 2021, I had now idea how the class would grow and how much it would advance – or how much we’d have to do to Medallia to keep pace.
A MEETING OF MINDS
Because of changes to the qualification rules for the next Vendée, there is precious little time in the four-year cycle when the boats can be out of action. The only window we had to refit Medallia was early 2023, before the allimportant qualification races started. Joff Brown, our technical director, and I started with a tour of the pontoons at the 2021 Transat Jacques Vabre start, taking photos and making notes of all the trends, features and ideas we could see on other boats.
I kn
