Extraordinary boats The new Ultime Banque Populaire XI
Banque Populaire Xl is the latest 32m Ultime trimaran for Vendée Globe winning skipper Armel Le Cléac’h
Banque Populaire is one of the world’s most experienced and successful sailing teams, and was the force behind Armel Le Cléac’h’s 2016 record-breaking Vendée Globe victory. Yet a year after her launch, the previous giant trimaran Banque Populaire lx crashed out of the 2018 Route du Rhum in spectacular fashion, having already capsized once before, and was declared an insurance write off after being towed in broken chunks back to shore.
Much has been learned from the experience with that boat and the new vessel incorporates radical improvements that put it a big leap ahead of her predecessor in terms of both performance and, more importantly, safety and reliability. Like Banque Populaire lx, this boat was conceived with a single objective in mind – for one person to sail round the world faster than anyone else. The record to beat is 42 days, 16 hours set by François Gabart in 2017.
Structural failure of a cross beam failing after a collision with an unidentified floating object (UFO) was the cause of the loss of Banque Populaire lx. Her successor benefits from an entirely new concept for structural engineering of the cross beams, plus considerable work on both the foils and the sail plan to make foiling more stable over sustained periods.
“We have worked a lot on the foils, daggerboard and rudders, as well as with the sails, to go fast and be stable,” Clément Duraffourg, the team’s head of data acquisition and analytics, revealed As a result the new boat’s foils are almost twice the size of those of the previous boat.
A further important plank in the project is a state of the art simulator bought from Emirates Team New Zealand. While the boat was in build this enabled the team to spend more than a year trialling numerous different parameters. As a result, Duraffourg says, even before the boat hit the water they had good base settings for the
Banque Populaire Xl is the result of a colossal 150,000 hours of design and construction work
Over the past 32 years Banque Populaire has sponsored boats that have broken 17 world records
foil adjustment across a wide range of conditions. Given the interplay between the main foils, plus the T-foils on the centreboard and each of the three rudders, this task is extremely complex, yet absolutely critical to success.
“The bigger foils, including the rudder T-foils, make the boat more stable when flying and add righting moment, which means increased safety,” skipper Armel Le Cléac’h told me as the boat emerged from the shed at CDK Technologies in Lorient.
This makes it easier to achieve high average speeds, by staying up on the foils for longer, without potentially dangerous and slow splashdowns. “The foils will continue to function up to around 45 knots of boat speed, and the simulator tells us the boat should be able to make 50 knots,” le Cléac’h added. “But then you start having problems with cavitation.”
AIMING FOR CONSISTENCY
However, achieving these kinds of high top speeds was never a priority. Instead, the aim is to achieve a consistent average speed without significant peaks or troughs. “For me a good 24-hour run would be staying close to an average speed of 35 knots,” Le Cléac’h says. “That would be a super day.”
A key reason that top-end speed potential is academic with these boats is that the upper end is determined by sea state, including swells that may be generated hundreds of miles away, and not by theoretical performance in flat water.
The importance of this was brought home for me during a sail on Giovanni Soldini’s foiling MOD70 Maserati off Lanzarote in 18-22 knots of true wind.
We occasionally hit speeds of 38 knots, but never sustained that pace for long before ploughing into the back of the wave ahead and crashing down off the foils, slowing markedly and fire hosing the whole boat with torrents of water.
It was quickly obvious that the first key to faster and safer passages is to minimise these splash down events, rather than chase everhigher peak speeds.