VOLVO OCEAN RACE FUTURE

 THE FUTURE IS ALREADY A REALITY

'The Futur' presided over the event held today at the Volvo Museum in Goteborg, the world's best-kept secrets in the last months of the Volvo Ocean Race - Monotype for a six-year cycle from the 2020-2021 or 2019-2020 edition if a biannual cycle is accepted instead of the current three-year cycle.

VO60 monohulls (units of 60 feet or 18.29 meters in length), equipped with 'foils' (side wings that allow it to rise above the surface of the water) will be the new boats of the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR).

State-of-the-art units, presented by the French naval architect Guillaume Verdier, who has worked on the creation of the new monotype, advanced variation of which design for the Vendée Globe 2016-2017.

Its length, already mentioned is of 18,28 meters, its sleeve of 5.50 meters and its draft of 5 meters. It moves eight tons and its keel and bulb are reinforced stainless steel (anti-pollution). It mounts a mast of 28 meters of height and its sail surface in tight (against the wind) is of 320 square meters with 400 meters in slope (in favor of the wind).

The number of crew members will be between five and seven, maintaining the incentives for mixed crews of men and women and young sailors. The organization will build eight new VO60 vessels at the Persian shipyards of Bergamo (Italy) that will deliver them from January 2019. They will be available to be rented by the teams.

This will reduce the launch costs of the campaign, and the sponsors involved in the current edition of 2017-18 will have priority to have one of the boats.

This is one of the initiatives with which the organization of the VOR, with its general manager Mark Turner to the front, intends to turn the test into the most technologically challenging and tough challenge of the high competition professional sail and that will reinforce even more The presence of professional sailors, ship owners, sponsors, partners, host cities and amateurs.

Five months after the start of the 2007-2008 edition, scheduled in the port of Alicante on October 22, with five teams already registered - among them the Spanish Mapfre - in which will be completed the cycle of two editions of use of The monocoque VO65 (19.85 meters in length), which compete both in In Port (coastal) regattas, prior to the departures of each stage, and throughout the route.

From the 2020-2021 edition, these coastal regattas will be disputed with the so-called 'flying' catamarans, also equipped with 'foils' (in this case, L or V flaps under each hull of the catamaran). Today the process has been opened for designers to present their projects. Its length will be between 30 and 50 feet (9.50-15 meters).

"We had a lot of debate about monocoque versus multihulls, and in fact, the solution we have taken at the end is to do both, so in the next editions there will be a monocoque assisted by 'foils' and a flying catamaran," said Mark Turner.

In this future project also reuses the seven monocoque VO65 that are owned by the organization of the VOR and competed in the last edition and will do so in the next. Another novelty can be the current cycle change of three years in each edition, happening to two years from 2019; A topic that is under debate and which seems to be viable.

It will be the grand advance of the Volvo Ocean Race monohulls to match the IMOCA class monohulls competing in the Barcelona World Race or the mythical Vendée Globe: a challenge taken by Mark Turner and Guillaume Verdier, designer of the two IMOCA Open 60 with foils Banque Populaire VIII and Hugo Bossvencedor and second classified of the last edition of Vendée Globe - Around the World in Solitaire.