Magic Carpet is bold, new… and fast.
Behind every successful yacht owner stands a great captain. And in the case of Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones’s radical new maxi Magic Carpet E, there’s also a great project manager. Danny Gallichan is the captain who has helped Sir Lindsay steer the previous boats in the franchise to no fewer than seven wins in Porto Cervo. But whereas they were all built with Wally, Magic Carpet E has followed a different path. Together with Ed Bell as project manager (and captain-in-waiting), this triumvirate set the project off in a direction that led to full electrification.
First came a new designer. Guillaume Verdier pulled in features from his work on giant ocean racers, so there is a pronounced reverse sheer to the deck, which arches up amidships, but the foredeck is hollowed out like a giant spoon.
“It is pure engineering,” says Axel de Beaufort, who partnered on the design team. “There’s no styling here. It’s the shape you need to withstand the load, just like a beam. The scoop at the bow helps to manage the airflow at the bottom of the sail.”
Guillaume also came up with a canting swing keel, which moves from side to side and swings back to go from a race-winning draft of 23 feet to a more harbor-friendly 15 feet. The whole 10.6-ton bulb is articulated so that it stays level as it moves. “The operation can be performed in two minutes,” he says.
There’s also a new yard in the form of Persico, whose carbon-fiber layup was so accurate that the boat is 11 tons lighter than her predecessor. Lessons were again taken from the IMOCA world, with solid laminate at the front of the boat and thermoformed Kevlar honeycomb sandwich for the topsides and deck. An automated tape laying machine from the aerospace sector allowed extremely precise shapes to be built up under high pressure.
“We approached this project as we would an America’s Cup yacht or a cutting-edge TP52, bringing years of expertise in lamination, assembly and engineering to create something truly extraordinary,” says CEO Marcello Persico. “The outcome is a state-of-the-art maxi, built to challenge limits and set new benchmarks.”
On the Pace
The efficacy of the design became clear during an early spring sea trial off Saint-Tropez. No sooner were the sails trimmed than the boat palpably accelerated. It foamed off upwind at 12 to 13 knots, the North Sails’ 3Di sails close hauled and making around 45 degrees off the wind. By the end of the afternoon, the wind had risen to 18 knots and it was reaching at 20 knots of boat speed.
Captain Danny stalked the pit with the keel controls buckled at his waist, like those remotes you see crane operators using. He also controlled another key feature of the yacht via a joystick on the starboard pedestal. This is the so-called canard — a short appendage somewhere between a rudder and a keel positioned on the hull’s centerline, whose purpose is to prevent the boat from making leeway when the keel is canted to windward.
This canard is highly mobile. Captain Danny twiddled the joystick and immediately, the bow started to round up. “Set it right and we actually make positive leeway going upwind,” Sir Lindsay explained later. “We can gain three degrees on our heading instead of losing out.”
Rather than using a noisy engine to drive the boat’s hydraulics, Magic Carpet E has two custom-made 220kW electric motors running off a big 101kWh battery bank. It’s by no means silent, with the familiar whine of pumps as the load comes on, but it liberates the crew from the endless throb and vibration of a diesel. A third electric motor propels the boat itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who counts motor sport as one of his life’s passions, Sir Lindsay and his team looked to Formula E when it came to developing this system. Williams Advanced Engineering, now called Fortescue Zero, is keeping the technical details a closely guarded secret, but according to Captain Danny, “there is nothing comparable in the marine sector in terms of power density.”
There’s also some America’s Cup thinking from hydraulics expert Cariboni around the twin rudders. Mounted on huge titanium bearings with a ceramic race, a hydraulic cylinder can raise the windward rudder five feet to clear the water and reduce wetted surface upwind. The marginal extra weight was deemed a worthwhile penalty for coaxing a little extra speed from the boat in light airs.
Racing Prospects
Taken together, these developments break out of the cycle of small iterative improvements and the team hopes that it will yield impressive results on the race course this year, particularly against the old Magic Carpet E. Sir Lindsay didn’t quite like to say it out loud, though: “I’ve been taught to be superstitious by my Italian wife,” he says.
By launching the boat in the autumn, even before the interior was in, they’ve been able to fit in a long winter of race training. It seemed to pay off at the opening PalmaVela regatta in April, where the team took two bullets before a collision with a Botin 65 forced them to retire. They came roaring back at the Giraglia, however, missing out on first place in IRC0 by less than three minutes.
It’s even more impressive when you remember that this was not just a racing boat project. Axel de Beaufort was tasked with creating a beautiful cruising interior with three cabins that added less than 2,000 kilograms of weight. “We told the owner that we should treat the inside as a rocket,” he says. “We removed cladding, replaced square doors with structural openings in the bulkheads. I glued wooden veneer to foam backing for the walls and used acoustic fabric on the ceiling, upholstering on frames instead of the usual panels.”
In the end, the clear hope is that the undoubted innovations behind Magic Carpet E will motivate other maxi owners to follow suit. Requiring just 21 instead of 29 crew to sail, logistics are easier too. And although detail of the build was kept on the down-low by Ed and the rest of the team, he is certain that there are already yachts in stealthy build using the same ideas. “I reckon we’ve got about two years tops,” he says.