Route du Rhum runners and riders: Class40

Forty-nine boats, no defending champion and two favourites who can barely be separated. Here’s how the Class40 fleet shapes up for the Route du Rhum start off Saint-Malo on 1 November.

For the past eight years the Class40 race to Guadeloupe has belonged to one man. Yoann Richomme won in 2018 and again in 2022, but he isn’t on the start line this time – he has moved to the IMOCA class and is building a new Paprec boat for the 2028 Vendée Globe – so the biggest fleet in the race will crown a new champion.

Finding a clear favourite to take his place is harder than it looks. Plenty of the 49 skippers in this fleet are amateurs taking on the Atlantic for the love of it, but the professional end of the class is as deep as it has ever been, and two names have been winning almost everything between them.

“They have excellent boats, they are superb sailors, and lately, they’ve been winning everything,” says Axel Tréhin of Corentin Douguet and Guillaume Pirouelle. Tréhin should know. He was on board with Douguet when the pair lost last year’s Transat Café L’Or to Pirouelle by just 7 minutes and 21 seconds after 19 days of racing.

Corentin Douguet has seen more of the ocean than most of the fleet put together. The 52-year-old has won the Mini Transat in 2005, rounded Cape Horn in the Globe40 this year, crossed the Atlantic 14 times and twice finished third in the Solitaire du Figaro, in 2007 and 2010.

He was a late starter at the Rhum, making his debut only four years ago, and finished third, despite nursing a failing engine from the Azores to Guadeloupe. He was crowned Class40 champion that season too.

Since then he has built a new boat. SNSM, Faites un don !, a Lombard-designed Lift V3 launched in 2025, set the pace from its very first races. Last year he and Tréhin won Spi Ouest-France, the Normandy Channel Race and the Fastnet – three wins from their first three starts – before that agonising near-miss in the Transat Café L’Or.

This season, sailing solo, Douguet was second to Pirouelle in the Trin’40 in April, around an hour behind, then turned the tables to win the Drheam Cup in July, slipping past his rival in a tricky transition after Pirouelle had led for three days. Experience, a boat that wins races and a rivalry with an edge to it: Douguet has everything he needs bar a Rhum victory.

If Douguet is the class's elder statesman, Guillaume Pirouelle is its fastest riser. The 32-year-old won the Tour Voile in 2019 and finished second in the 2022 Solitaire du Figaro as top rookie before turning his attention to Class40 with Cédric Chateau.

The partnership peaked last season. The pair were crowned Class40 champions and capped the year by edging Douguet in that Transat Café L’Or thriller, two years after a collision with another boat at the first mark wrecked their 2023 edition. Pirouelle then spent the winter in very different company, as part of Thomas Coville’s crew that set a new Jules Verne Trophy record on Sodebo Ultim 3.

Back in Class40, he hasn’t missed a beat. He won the first edition of the Trin’40 in April, his first solo race of the season, taking the lead on the opening upwind leg and never giving it up. He then won the Normandy Channel Race with Jules Ducelier in record time: 816 miles in 3 days, 2 hours and 20 minutes, at an average of 11 knots. Without Chateau alongside him, the Rhum is a different test, and the Drheam Cup showed he can be caught – but he heads to Saint-Malo with the best record of the season.

Alexis Loison, 42, arrives for his first Rhum on a brand-new boat launched this year, and it’s already winning. Last year’s Solitaire du Figaro champion only put Groupe Réel, a Lift V3, in the water at the start of July, and kept it in port for a rough Drheam Cup rather than gamble the whole campaign. Its racing debut came at the 40 Malouine in September – and Loison won it, on the very waters where the Rhum starts.

He has 20 years on the Figaro circuit and six transatlantic races behind him – three Transat AG2Rs, two Jacques Vabres and a Québec–Saint-Malo – but has never crossed alone. He's under no illusions about what lies ahead. “It’s going to be quite a battle, and I really like that,” he says. “The standard in this class is very high. In short, there’s both quantity and quality!” A new boat is always a reliability gamble on a transatlantic, and this one has only a single race in its log, but if Groupe Réel holds together, Loison has the speed to split the favourites.

Pep Costa has been the most consistent non-French sailor in the class this year. The Barcelona-born, Lorient-based skipper teamed up with Pablo Santurde del Arco – himself a Transat Jacques Vabre winner in Class40 – to push Pirouelle all the way in the Normandy Channel Race, finishing second just 34 minutes behind, then took Class40 honours in the Round Ireland three weeks later.

The Rhum is a different proposition with nobody to share the load, and doublehanded results don’t always translate to solo pace – Costa was eighth in the solo Trin’40. But VSF Sports has shown real speed this season, and the Spaniard looks the strongest threat from outside France.

Fabien Delahaye has been one of the most dependable names in Class40 for more than a decade. The 42-year-old won the 2013 Transat Jacques Vabre with Sébastien Rogues, was part of Dongfeng Race Team’s Volvo Ocean Race win in 2018, and brought the Normandy Channel Race trophy home to Normandy for the first time in 2024 with Pierre Leboucher. He has also coached some of the class’s biggest names, Richomme and Douguet among them.

Last year he won Les Sables–Horta on the way to second in the Class40 championship, and this season he finished third in the Trin’40 behind Pirouelle and Douguet. It will be his first Rhum, but he already has solo transatlantic form – third in the 2024 Transat CIC – and Legallais is a well-sorted boat. In a race this long, that counts for a lot.

Ian Lipinski brings more transatlantic know-how than most on Crédit Mutuel. The 44-year-old double Mini Transat winner won the 2019 Transat Jacques Vabre in Class40 with Adrien Hardy, the 2024 Transat CIC solo, and in April the Globe40 round-the-world race. He is back for his second Rhum.

Achille Nebout has a boat that's won this before. Amarris is the Lombard design on which Richomme won the last Rhum, and the 36-year-old, third in the 2022 Solitaire du Figaro, started this season by winning Spi Ouest-France. He will be hoping some of that magic rubs off.

Axel Tréhin swaps co-skipper duties on SNSM for a new boat of his own, a Lift V3 launched this year, which he took to fourth in both the Trin’40 and the Normandy Channel Race. Four years ago his first Rhum saw him fit a replacement mast in the Azores, with help from a rival who had retired.

Quentin Le Nabour, on Bleu Blanc Planète Location, was second to Loison in the 40 Malouine and won the Armen Race in May – and, born inside Saint-Malo’s walls, he will have the home crowd behind him. And Luca Rosetti, the 2023 Mini Transat winner, leads a strong Italian contingent on Maccaferri Futura after finishing third in the Normandy Channel Race, with Matteo Sericano, Andrea Fornaro and Marco Guerra also in the mix.

Then there’s a name from another era. Vincent Riou, who won the Vendée Globe in 2004-05 and has four Rhums behind him with PRB, is racing Pierreval – Fondation GoodPlanet in Class40, proof that this class can still tempt the biggest names in the sport.

On form, it’s Douguet or Pirouelle. The last time they went head to head across the Atlantic, 19 days of racing came down to seven minutes. Going solo changes the dynamic, and in this season’s solo races they are one win apiece.

But with Loison, Costa, Delahaye and a handful more in with a shout, Richomme’s successor as Class40 champion won’t necessarily be one of the big two. The favourites can’t afford to spend 3,542 miles watching only each other. Whoever it is will have earned it, and if this season is any guide, the margins at the front will be tight.