Charles Caudrelier will defend his Route du Rhum title this November aboard a boat that achieved in half an hour what took Gitana 17 nearly two years.
Gitana 18, the 32-metre flying trimaran launched in Lorient on 14 February 2026, found stable foiling settings on her first flight on 25 May. The team had expected a long development period. Instead, in 10 to 13 knots off Belle-Île, the boat was airborne and configured within 30 minutes.
"With Gitana 17, this process took almost two years," said team director Cyril Dardashti. "Here, we managed to find the right mode and make the initial settings for a stable flight in less than 30 minutes."
The breakthrough matters because Gitana 18 is built to sustain full flight across far more conditions than its predecessor. Caudrelier targets an average speed approaching 40 knots, with simulator work suggesting a 10 to 15 percent performance gain over the record-holding Gitana 17.
Yet the new boat remains unproven in competition. Her first sail in March was a technical shakedown. The starboard foil was not fitted until May, the port foil within a fortnight. Through winter the team has mixed day sails with longer offshore passages to work through rig, sails and a newly developed autopilot. The Route du Rhum will be Gitana 18's first major transatlantic crossing.
Caudrelier completed his mandatory qualification run on 1 September 2026, sailing solo for the first time on the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild. The boat is the twenty-eighth in a Gitana lineage now marking 150 years.
The complication for Caudrelier is that his old boat has not retired. Gitana 17, sold to Actual Group in 2025 and renamed Actual Ultim 4, returns to the start line under Anthony Marchand. The exact hull that holds the current record — 6 days, 19 hours, 47 minutes and 25 seconds, set in 2022 — will race against the skipper who set it.
The Ultim fleet has depth. Armel Le Cléac'h, Thomas Coville and Tom Laperche return with years of miles behind them. Louis Burton steps up after 14 years in IMOCA. Alexia Barrier becomes the first woman to race the class. None carry a boat this new.
The Route du Rhum starts from Saint-Malo at 1:02pm on Sunday 1 November, with 3,542 nautical miles to Pointe-à-Pitre.
