France splashes its next-gen AC75 in Lorient

France knows the AC75 well enough by now, but it had never seen one on home water. That changed in Lorient yesterday, where the team now racing as La Roche-Posay – reborn from the Orient Express outfit that carried French hopes in Barcelona – dropped its foiling monohull back in, freshly wrapped in blue and white, for its first time in the water since leaving Spain. Now the third team to relaunch for AC38, today the rig goes on and the boat heads out for a proper sail.

"A launch is always a special moment," says technical director Antoine Carraz. "For months we've been working on plans, parts and systems. The day it goes back in, all of it has to work together."

Of course, the shape is familiar. Cup rules this time force returning teams to build on the hull they already had. Arriving late last cycle – announced just 18 months before racing began – K-Challenge bought a design package off Emirates Team New Zealand and ended up with a boat closely modelled on Taihoro, the Kiwi machine that went on to win the competition. Even so, it was France who exited the Challenger Selection Series before anyone else. Whether that was down to the boat or simply too little runway is what this campaign should reveal.

"Externally, people will recognise the 2024 boat," says Carraz. "But technically this is no refurbishment. We've had to rethink the internal architecture and the way the crew interacts with the boat."

Beneath that familiar skin, almost everything that makes the thing fly and turn has been reworked. The obvious one is the crew. While eight sailed in Barcelona, five will sail in Naples, with at least one woman. "Going from eight to five changes everything," Carraz says. "With fewer people on board, every action has to be simpler and more direct."

Gone too are the cyclors, the four sailors who pedalled to make hydraulic power last time. Batteries do that work now, which meant gutting and rebuilding the electrics and hydraulics. "Before, part of the performance came straight from the sailors' ability to generate power," says Carraz. "Now we store energy, distribute it and use it at the right moment – and, like a racing EV, the real trick is not wasting it."

At the helm this cycle are Quentin Delapierre, back after skippering the last campaign, alongside Diego Botín, the Spanish Olympic and SailGP champion who usually lines up against the French rather than for them.

Not everyone's sold on the look. The blue-and-white ties in with La Roche-Posay's branding, and the campaign doubles as an open-air lab for the brand's sun creams against UV, salt and spray. But as one reader in The Foil's comments has already noted, all that white could end up bouncing glare straight back at the crew. Form over function? Maybe. We'll only find out once the crew are out there squinting into it.

For now the priorities are safety, reliability, and making sure the new systems behave before anyone chases 50 knots. "We won't be aiming for top speed straight away," says Carraz. "Performance can only come once the boat is reliable and fully understood by those who sail it."

K-Challenge boss Stephan Kandler seems happy with where things sit. "Following our excellent start at the first official regatta in Cagliari last May, seeing our AC75 sail for the first time in France is a highlight for the whole team," he said. "This launch marks the culmination of months of work in Lorient."

From here the diary looks pretty jam-packed: training in Lorient from 29 June to 17 July, then again from 1 to 14 August, followed by the move south to Naples from mid-August to the end of September. The Naples Preliminary Regatta, raced in the AC40s, runs 24 to 27 September, before the French team begins sailing their AC75 in the host city in October. Suddenly Naples 2027 doesn’t seem so far away.