Loick and Bruno Peyron training on their DNAs for AC72 campaign



Loick & Bruno Peyron ready to rock (pic by Jean Marie Liot)

Loick, Arno & Bruno at Delivery in Le Pouliguen (La Baule )(pic by Jean Marie Liot)



Boys with new toys, ready to go out (pic by Jean Marie Liot)



Drifting in no wind at zero degrees (pic by Jean Marie Liot)




Loick playing with his DNA (pic by Jean Marie Liot)



Last Friday I delivered two boats to Bruno and Loick Peyron at the CNBPP, one of France's most beautiful located clubs at the Atlantic coast. They are in the process of launching another French America's Cup Challenge.

It is good to see guys which such a long and succesful track record in big multihulls enter both the A-class and the next America's cup.

It is another example how this Cup has a positive effect on the whole sport. We see A-cat sailors who join the AC syndicates, we see AC heroes enter the A-class and we see offshore around the world multihull sailors step on small boats and inshore AC multihulls.

I had very interesting discussions both with Bruno and Loick about developments in the big cats, the ORMA tris and other boats.  So were the curved foils introduced by Loick in the ORMA tris many years before these showed up  in the A-class. What really surprised me that there seems so little difference in their way to seek performance gains compared to what we do in the A-class and that the same lessons were learned despite the scale factor.

The challenges  in terms of amount of rocker, C-foils, volume, etc,  of an A-class designer appear to be not that different from a AC72 hull designer or a ORMA ama designer.

Before my visit to them I was convinced that we could not scale up the DNA to an AC72 as the crew in an AC72 does not weigh 7000 kgs (in A-class crew is usually heavier than the boat of 75kgs). The opposite might be true...

I think that these brothers have the talent and the knowledge to create a team that can develop, build and sail a competitive A72. They will use another design approach than the older teams wich I am convinced will be very succesful as no other team can rival  them in empirical data about big multihulls.

It will be good for the sport and his country if Bruno will find the extra funding he needs for the campaign before the start of the AC45 cycle in March 2011.