To the uninitiated, it looks like the blandest recipe for relaxation: sun, sea and a little sailing for overstressed chief executives in search of freedom from the cares of office. Dressed for the Mediterranean spring in casual shirts, shorts and trainers, the superyacht owners like to look the part at their regattas.
The reality of luxury yacht racing, however, is a little more complicated. “For some sailors,” I overheard a race official say in the Italian resort of Portofino earlier this month on the way to a evening party overlooking the bay, “the word ‘fun’ is spelt W-I-N.”
Far from escaping the tensions of corporate competition, men such as Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones, the Welshman who used to head the French cosmetics group L’Oréal, deliberately, perhaps perversely, replicate the intense rivalry of their working lives as they race around the buoys in their high-tech Wally yachts.
“It’s just like being a CEO,” is the satisfied refrain of owners who have usually overseen the design and construction of a 100ft carbon composite cruising and racing machine, crewed it with Olympic medallists and other sailing professionals and now want this complex combination of hardware and manpower to be first across the finish line.
Superyacht racing is no sport for pennypinchers. But the will and the skill to win are at least as important as the money invested in the equipment and the crew.
“When I was younger I used to play a lot of tennis, including tournaments,” says Claus-Peter Offen, the German shipping magnate and owner of Y3K, the latest of a series of Wally yachts he has commissioned. A knee injury put an end to competitive tennis and he cast around for an equally intense pastime, choosing yacht racing over golf, which “I think is more for elderly people”.
Like many yacht owners, Offen enjoys cruising with his family but he does not disguise his delight at grappling with the cerebral management challenges involved in procuring and refining the best technology and then co-ordinating 25 people to win a sailing race.
Is he a perfectionist? “You always try to optimise boats. That’s part of the fun. It’s a constant process in any boat that’s racing,” he replies. “Racing is a very complex sport. It’s the hardware of the boat, it’s the sails, it’s the crew. It is a little bit like running a company – a lot of planning, a lot of organisation. You have to have good people, good bow-men and good mast-men. And, like in the office, you need financing.”
Andrea Recordati, the 39-year-old Italian owner of Indio – his nickname, he says, because he looks “a bit South American” – is one of the younger sailing superyacht proprietors and a latecomer to competitive racing. But in the light breezes of Portofino he still beat Offen and Owen-Jones to win this year’s Nespresso Cup (the latest event in the FT Wally Grand Prix, a series of summer regattas that are the result of a partnership between yachtmaker Wally and this newspaper).
As a senior executive of the eponymous family pharmaceuticals group, the victorious Recordati agrees with his rivals on the surprising parallels between sailing and work. “Boats are like little companies, to keep running them and to keep them in top form,” he says, relaxing with his crew on the terrace of a Portofino café. “The only difference is that it doesn’t make any profit – except the buzz of winning, and lovely holidays with your family.”
Recordati is as enthusiastic as Offen or Owen-Jones not only about the racing but about the whole process of designing, building and tuning the machine he will race. He says he and his representative spent months refining the design of the bulb, the shaped weight at the bottom of the keel that counteracts the force of the wind on the giant sails, and poring over “velocity prediction programmes” on computers. “I was always attracted to sailing. My father used to charter boats when I was younger. You are closer to nature, and closer to the water,” Recordati says. But he adds: “I’ve always been into technology, design, performance ... The building phase, from a fascination point of view, is the biggest thing. These sailing boats are extremely high-tech pieces of equipment.”
As with aircraft, designers and builders spend a lot of time trying to reduce wind resistance and weight in the hunt for higher speeds. Owen-Jones says the lightweight carbon structure has more in common with that of the modern racing car, and he should know: like several competitive superyacht helmsmen, he used to be a racing driver.
After he finished fifth in the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1996, he and his wife Cristina and L’Oréal’s shareholders, decided that it was time for him to take up a rather less dangerous sport. “But I’m a competitive person,” he says, so he took up a sport that was equally technical and tactical. “You’re racing with and through a machine ... It’s very much a thinking person’s sport.” The following year, work began on Magic Carpet – so called because one of the first Wally yachts sold had been named Genie of the Lamp.
Although he has extracted a decade of racing and cruising enjoyment from his current boat, Magic Carpet², as a racing addict Owen-Jones is poised to upgrade to an even faster yacht.
He has agreed with Charles Dunstone, co-founder of the UK’s Carphone Warehouse, that they will be the first customers for the new-generation Wally Cento designs, fast, lightweight boats expected to plane downwind at up to 25 knots, compared with about 15 knots for the current versions. “Neither of us wanted to have a lovely boat but then to end up all alone at the head of the fleet,” he says.
Like his yacht-racing rivals and friends, Owen-Jones sees no merit in loafing around on a sun lounger when he could be plotting victory at sea.
“I was a very driven CEO and at the same time doing this for fun at weekends,” he explains. “I never found it possible to just cool off and relax and go zen at weekends. If I tried, I just went on thinking about the business. I couldn’t sit on a beach or listen to music.” It was better, he found, “to do something that required so much concentration that I couldn’t think about the business”.
That meant flying a helicopter – or racing a yacht.
Victor Mallet is the FT’s Madrid bureau chief and sailing correspondent
