Everything’s abuzz at CDK Technologies in Lorient, France: Sheltered in the hangars, the Gitana Team, together with naval architect Guillaume Verdier and members of the CDK Technologies shipyard, are hard at work. The platform assembly phase is underway with the aim of getting out of the shipyard at the end of September. Gitana 18, as the project is known, will be the 28th vessel in the legendary line of boats dating back to 1876 and owned by the Ariane de Rothschild family (see bellow). While the characteristics of this giant of the seas have been kept secret for a long time, those involved are now revealing the broad outlines of their ambitious project.
Building on the experience gained with Gitana 17, which has an impressive track record of fifteen podium finishes and ten victories in 16 races, the designers of the new Maxi Edmond de Rothschild have been able to draw on billions of pieces of data collected with the aim of taking offshore foiling even further and, naturally, improving the overall design!
“Gitana 18 is in some ways the culmination of a lot of things we already knew and could have done before but perhaps didn't dare to do. Having the chance to relaunch such a project also allows us, after seven years of operating Gitana 17, to put all our ideas into practice on a new project, starting from a blank canvas,” says Sébastien Sainson, head of the Gitana design office and one of the key figures in the construction of the future 105-foot Ultim.
To bring this project to fruition, Gitana Team is relying on an in-house design office with eight full-time staff, all young and highly talented individuals with backgrounds in naval architecture or engineering and highly specialized areas of expertise such as structural analysis. Designing Gitana 18 will have required nearly 50,000 hours of design, compared to 35,000 hours for Gitana 17 - already a very significant figure in the field.
One question that’s on everyone's lips: What will the new Maxi Edmond de Rothschild bring in terms of performance compared to her predecessor? “Today, I'm not afraid to say that there is more of a gap between Gitana 17 and Gitana 18 than there was between Gitana 17 and the previous generation of boats,” Sébastien assures us, “Everything has been 100% optimized for flight. For this boat, we didn't ask ourselves the question, we simply said she had to fly 100% of the time, so we did everything we could to make her go as fast as possible when she’s foiling.”
“We challenged ourselves not to make a boat that was just a small step forward,” emphasizes Guillaume Verdier. “And I think we've really made a technological breakthrough with this boat, in the same way that we did with G17, redoing so much work looking to the future with this vessel.”
Gitana : A Family Maritime Saga Spanning Almost 140 Years!
© Rothschild/GITANA SA
On September 21, 1876, Baroness Julie de Rothschild inaugurated her steamer Gitana, the first of her name, on Lake Geneva. The elegant steam-propelled boat exceeded 20 knots on her maiden voyage, smashing the speed record for the lake. Next came the sleek monohulls of Edmond de Rothschild, before Benjamin and Ariane de Rothschild, who created the Gitana Team in 2000, shifted the focus to multihull ocean racing and, today, foiling trimarans.
