Route du Rhum runners and riders: Ultim

Eight 32-metre flying trimarans and a record of 6 days 19 hours to beat. Here’s how the Ultim class shapes up for the Route du Rhum start off Saint-Malo on 1 November.

If you want to be first to Guadeloupe, you need an Ultim. And if you want to win in an Ultim, history suggests you need a boat that has been sailed hard, broken, fixed and sailed hard again.

That’s the puzzle facing this year’s eight-strong fleet. Every team has spent the summer bolting on something new – foils for SVR-Lazartigue and Sodebo Ultim 3, a daggerboard for Maxi Banque Populaire XI, a whole new mast for Actual Ultim 4. And then there’s Gitana 18, the most talked-about boat on the dock in Saint-Malo, which hasn’t raced at all.

Four years ago Charles Caudrelier set the benchmark at 6 days, 19 hours, 47 minutes and 25 seconds. The boat that did it is back too, just with a different skipper. Here’s who to watch.

Tom Laperche arrives at his first Route du Rhum in an Ultim on a roll. Last month the 28-year-old won the 24H Ultim off Lorient for the second year running, covering 503 miles at an average of 27.3 knots and finishing 10 minutes 29 seconds clear of Armel Le Cléac’h.

That followed a breakthrough 2025, when Laperche teamed up with Franck Cammas to win the Fastnet, the 24H Ultim and then the Transat Café L’Or – his first major multihull title after twice finishing runner-up in the same race as François Gabart’s co-skipper.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. A collision in training in mid-September damaged the starboard appendages and forced the team to refit the previous starboard foil. Laperche is relaxed about it. “I’d rather have this bit of bad luck before the Route du Rhum,” he says, insisting it has “no impact on performance”. Winning the 24H Ultim days later rather proved his point.

The gap on the CV is a big solo result. Laperche led much of the 2024 Arkéa Ultim Challenge before an unidentified floating object ended his round-the-world race 1,300 miles from Cape Town. Four years after Gabart took this same boat to second, just over three hours behind Caudrelier, Laperche has the chance to go one better.

Caudrelier has nothing left to prove as a sailor. The defending champion and record holder went on to win the Arkéa Ultim Challenge solo round the world in 2024. What he does have to prove is his boat.

Gitana 18, racing as the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild, was launched in Lorient on 14 February after more than two years of design and build conducted almost entirely behind closed doors. Designed by Guillaume Verdier, it’s built to fly all three hulls clear of the water all of the time, with Y-shaped foils that owe more than a little to America’s Cup thinking, U-shaped rudders and a pivoting central daggerboard. At the launch, Caudrelier talked of averages bordering on 40 knots: “With Gitana 18, we’re entering another dimension.”

The catch is that nobody knows how fast it is against the opposition, because it hasn’t raced them. Caudrelier completed his 1,200-mile solo qualifier north of Ireland in early September, then skipped the 24H Ultim so the team could put the boat back in the shed and refinish its foils. The team admits it won’t be at 100 per cent of its potential on the start line.

Caudrelier knows the score. “It’s still a gamble and a major challenge,” he says, “as no one has ever managed to develop a boat like this in such a short time.” Four years ago he called himself the possible weak link on a proven boat. Now it’s the reverse: “I have the experience, but the boat still lacks miles at sea.”

WATCH: What it's like to fly at 42 knots on Gitana 18

The Route du Rhum has not been kind to Armel Le Cléac’h. The 2016–17 Vendée Globe winner lines up for his fifth Rhum still waiting for the result his talent deserves.

In 2018 his first flying Ultim, Banque Populaire IX, capsized north-east of the Azores on day two after a float failure, and Le Cléac’h was plucked off by a fishing boat. Four years later he broke the daggerboard of Maxi Banque Populaire XI on day two, limped back to Lorient, restarted a day and a half later and finished seventh.

This time the signs are better. A new daggerboard went in during June, a year after a new set of foils, and Le Cléac’h reckons the boat has finally “reached full power”. Second in the 24H Ultim backs that up, as does third place in the Arkéa Ultim Challenge despite two pit stops. After so much bad luck, few would begrudge him a Rhum win at last.

Few skippers know this race better than Thomas Coville. This will be his eighth consecutive start, stretching back to 1998 when he won the monohull class on Aquitaine Innovations. His team counts four podiums in the giant multihulls since, including third place four years ago.

Coville comes in with serious momentum. In January he and his crew took the Jules Verne Trophy round-the-world record on Sodebo Ultim 3, and the boat then went into the yard until the end of June for new foils, new rudders and a ‘ray-wing’ daggerboard designed to get it flying earlier in lighter breeze.

Fourth in the 24H Ultim suggests the new package still has more to give, and the team was still tweaking the foils in early October. But motivation is never Coville’s problem. He calls this one “la course de ma vie” – the race of his life. For the first time, Sodebo will have two boats on the line, with Léonard Legrand racing in Ocean Fifty.

The boat that set the Rhum record now belongs to Team Actual, which bought Gitana 17 in January 2025. Anthony Marchand, 41, takes it to the start of his first Route du Rhum.

Rather than leave a winning formula alone, the team commissioned a new mast – the tallest the class rules allow. Hydraulic rams bend it forward to flatten the mainsail, an idea borrowed from the America’s Cup, while LIDAR scanners read the sail shape at several heights. The goal is to get flying earlier and reef later.

Marchand finished third in the 24H Ultim and has already proved he can get one of these machines round the planet. He brought Actual Ultim 3 home fourth in the 2024 Arkéa Ultim Challenge despite foil damage that forced stops in Cape Town and Dunedin.

Louis Burton has swapped monohulls for multihulls on Armand Thiery, the former Actual Ultim 3. It’s his fifth Rhum but his first in an Ultim, and the man who was second across the line in the 2020–21 Vendée Globe will be keen to banish memories of retiring in the 2018 Rhum and dismasting in 2022.

Guirec Soudée knows Liamm, the 2014-built former Sodebo Ultim, better than most skippers know their boats, having sailed it solo around the world the ‘wrong way’, east to west.

And Alexia Barrier makes history as the first woman to race an Ultim in the Route du Rhum. She does it on IDEC Sport, the former Groupama 3. In January, Barrier took The Famous Project CIC around the world on it in just under 58 days, the first all-female crew to circumnavigate the globe non-stop. It’s also a boat with three Rhum victories to its name, for Franck Cammas in 2010, Loïck Peyron in 2014 and Francis Joyon in 2018.

Joyon himself is back too, but not in this class. The 2018 winner has traded his Ultim for a 60ft ORMA trimaran in the new Vintage Multi division – more on that in a later instalment.

So who gets to Pointe-à-Pitre first? On form it’s hard to look past Laperche. On raw potential, Gitana 18 could make the rest look ordinary if it holds together. Le Cléac’h and Coville have the most developed boats and the most to prove, while Marchand has the fastest Rhum boat in history.

But the Rhum has a habit of punishing whoever pushes hardest across the Bay of Biscay in November. The fastest boat on paper doesn’t always win. The one still in one piece off Guadeloupe usually does.