From Mini to Class 40 to Vendee Globe

Tanguy De Lamotte tells us of his latest campaign

While stealing the limelight in this winter’s Vendee Globe will be the high profile campaigns, another contingent is approaching the singlehanded non-stop round the world race from the opposite end of the budgetry spectrum, their skippers setting out into the unknown on their first lap of the planet.

Among those making their Vendee Globe debut will be Tanguy De Lamotte, who competed in the 2005 Mini Transat finishing 7th aboard a boat he designed himself, but who has since been one of the most successful skippers in the Class 40 - winner of the 2008 World Championship and the Solidaire du Chocolat transatlantic race in 2010.

For De Lamotte the Vendee Globe will be personally poignant in many ways. His first proper exposure to the French shorthanded offshore racing world was while he was still at university in Southampton, working on the shore team of Ellen MacArthur’s high successful Kingfisher campaign prior to the 2000 Vendee Globe.

De Lamotte admits that competing in the Vendee Globe had always been in the back of his mind, but it is a very considerable leap up to it actually happening. Last year he had been planning to build a new Class40, but at the Salon Nautique in December his sponsor had other ideas. “He heard there were only 14 boats in the Vendee and said ‘why don’t we try and do a Vendee Globe campaign?’ Throughout December I was preparing three different projects to propose to my sponsor, but he kept talking to me about the Vendee and I understood the others weren’t of as much interest to him...”

At the beginning of January he started looking at secondhand boats, but at this point he still hadn’t convinced himself that taking part in solo offshore racing’s ultimate event was a possibility. The eureka moment came when he was out running on 9 January. “It seemed very obvious to me that I had to run fast to go back to the office and find the boat and do the Vendee. I remember that day very clearly...”

This was helped considerably by finding the right boat in Le Pingouin, the boat Brad van Liew sailed to victory all legs of the last Velux 5 Oceans. “That was probably the turning point of the project, because it made the budget that we were thinking of realist,” says De Lamotte.

This Marc Lombard design was built by MAG France in Cherbourg originally for Catherine Chabaud to compete in the 2000 Vendee Globe sponsored by French white goods manufacturer Whirlpool. She was a sistership to Roland Jourdain’s successful Sill Plein Fruit, the top 60 in the early 2000s, only Jourdain’s red boat was fitted with a wingmast and deck spreaders whereas Whirlpool had a conventional three spreader rig. In fact she shares the same deck as the 2000 and 2004 winning boat, PRB.

According to De Lamotte the boat was the first 60 required to comply with the IMOCA class’ new stability rules introduced after the disastrous 1996 Vendee Globe which features numerous capsizes and the terrible loss of French Canadian skipper Jerry Roufs in the Pacific. The new tests (that remain today) include the requirement that a skipper can demonstrate he righted his boat from a full inversion without its rig.

Whirlpool was sold to Italian Simone Bianchetti who campaign her as Tiscali in the Around Alone race (predecessor of the Velux 5 Oceans) in 2002-3. She was then acquired by Marc Thiercelin who painted her black and raced her in the 2004/5 Vendee Globe, retiring into New Zealand. Then it was bought by van Liew and taken on its fourth lap of the planet winning the last Velux 5 Oceans.

Significant for De Lamotte is that the boat is one of the few 60s he has any offshore miles in - he was part of Simone Bianchetti’s crew in the Regate Rubicon in 2002. However he admits he previously had a soft spot for the boat: “To start with I thought we didn’t have enough time, money or experience to do the Vendee Globe, but when I found this boat, it made everything possible. It fitted in our budget and in my experience and my knowledge of the Open 60s and because I sailed on this boat and I always liked her from day one when it was launched for Catherine, from the time I worked on the Kingfisher team - it was the boat I liked the most in the whole fleet, it just looked good and I like Marc Lombard’s designs.”

According to De Lamotte a perennial problem with the boat was its rig – Chabaud originally broke the top of the mast off in the Transat Jacques Vabre, Bianchetti then lost it during the Regatta de Rubicon and again in Around Alone. However these problems were partially solved by Marc Thiercelin who replaced the rig (although he too retired from the Vendee Globe with rig issues...)

“It was one of the first new sail plans with a furling genoa and a three spreader rig with the spreaders on rotating pins,” says De Lamotte of the changes Thiercelin made. “Before that the spreaders were fixed. It was also the beginning of the whole composite standing rigging – that was a bit of a mission to tune and get right.”

Since then the boat has been brought to France for a refit and repaint and they have had several pieces of good news. When buying the boat there was a question mark over whether they would have to replace the steel foil for the canting keel, but since carrying out Non-Destructive Testing on it, the keel has been given a clean bill of health and it will be going around the world again. “The keel is pretty strong,” says De Lamotte. “It is steel fabricated and not on the limit of engineering calculations. It is a bit heavier and thicker than what we can do now, but for my project that isn’t a big problem - we want to be simple and reliable.”

They also have several sails they can reuse, including the main. “Brad [van Liew] was given a warranty mainsail in Uruguay, so the sail was supposed to do the round the world, plus two transatlantic deliveries and in the end it only did Uruguay to Charleston and then Charleston to La Rochelle. So I am going to take that sail around the world, which is another 45,000 Euros saving - not negligible in our budget.”

The whole keel mechanism and the hydraulic ram have been serviced and the keel pins replaced.

Sponsorship and $$$$

For this year’s Vendee Globe, the boat is will be called initiatives-coeur.fr. Initiatives is De Lamotte’s long term sponsor - the Le Mans-based company markets fund raising solutions for schools, associations, etc. Their skipper explains: “For example they will sell to a school a lottery with the tickets and the gifts for say £1000 and then the school kids will go and sell the tickets and they make a profit out of it and they can go on skiing holidays or whatever. It is soft fundraising.”

Initiatives also owns a chocolate manufacturing company called Alex Olivier - hence De Lamotte’s Class 40 was called Initiatives Alex Olivier, as the company was originally enticed into backing De Lamotte for the Solidaire du Chocolat.

In the Vendee Globe Initiatives’ primary concern is to promote Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque, the charity that operates on children with heart disease De Lamotte has supported for the last eight years. In another one of ‘those’ connections, the boat’s original owner Catherine Chabaud is also an ambassador for this charity.

An interesting aspect of De Lamotte’s campaign is how little a Vendee Globe campaign can be done for if the goal is to get safely around the world in one piece to gain experience, rather than attempt to win line honours. If a new IMOCA 60 costs in the order of 2.5 million Euros to build with running costs of 1.5 million per annum, then De Lamotte’s campaign costs around one tenth of a new build and four year campaign. This makes his the smallest budgets in the race, with only Italian Alessandro di Benedetto, who is competing in the equally ancient Sodebo/VMI/Akena Verandas 60, managing it for less.

In addition to buying the boat, the team has employed a PR officer and two shore crew in Ronan Deshayes, the former boat captain of Actual (who by coincide also bought De Lamotte’s Mini) and Lucas Montagne, former President of Classe Mini.

The boat’s arrival in France coincided with De Lamotte heading off to sea for a month competing in the Solidaire du Chocolat. So the shore team had to crack on without him, assisted by Michel Desjoyeaux’s company Mer Agitée in Port la Fôret.

According to De Lamotte they spent the refit replacing things on board, rather than changing them. A new engine had to be installed to comply with the IMOCA class rules and the hull, keel and rig were fully surveyed. They fitted the spare rudder van Liew had carried as a spare in the Velux 5 Oceans and changed the stanchion mounts so that they are now through deck.

www.initiatives-coeur was relaunched two weeks ago and has since been through its stability tests required by the class before being delivered down to Lorient where she is now moored at the famous submarine base where the Virbac-Paprec, Maitre Coq, Banque Populaire and Jean le Cam’s new SynerCiel (the former Gitana 80) teams are also based.

Emotionally De Lamotte is still up and down about taking part in the Vendee. “The other day we were out sailing and it was a great day and the boat was going fast, reacting very well and it was nice to steer, and it was like ‘let’s go.’ But other times I have a lot of big question marks and I am more nervous and there is a lot of work to do still. For me, the excitement comes from the unknown. I know in my head that I want to do a round the world race one day and this is the toughest one, that is why I am so excited about it. I have no pressure for a result. I have to go out there and have fun and do a nice race and come back.”

He says that this mindset is very different from what he is used to in the Class 40 where he is solely out to win and this is what has taken him a while to come around to. “I am not going on a cruise, but I am going out there to get experience and get the boat back in the best shape possible. This approach attracts me hugely compared to trying to win this race, because this race to me from the outset has always been a game of who finishes. I don’t feel easy with the idea of putting four years of effort into something that can come to an end in an instant. It is still a mechanical sport: Last time there were 18 new boats and only five finished, so a ratio of less than 30%. Of the 10 secondhand boats, I think eight finished - more than 75%. So the outcome is likely to be more positive especially with the amount of money invested and the experience I will gain.”

With the Europa Warm-Up race completed, so there are now no more events De Lamotte can compete in before the start of the Vendee Globe. However the next big issue will be completing his three week long qualifying trip which he will undertake at the beginning of July. “Unfortunately the start of the Vendee might be my first race...”

In theory, De Lamotte’s skill set should be ideal for the Vendee – he’s a trained naval architect, so therefore has a full technical understanding of his boat as well as 10 years worth of experience gained in the Mini and Class 40. “I am quite confident that I will get to learn the boat quite quickly,” he believes. “The size is a step-up from a Class 40 but it is not a huge problem. It is more the experience of being in the big seas and the cold that I don’t have and no one can have before they do a round the world. I need to learn a little bit about hydraulics, the rest is just a bigger Class 40. Then there’s the sails – if you try to put your weight into it you can’t move them so you need to get organised differently. My biggest worry is to be alone for such a long time and to be so far away for such a long time...”