Checking in with Francesca Clapcich about her 2028-2029 Vendee Globe campaign
by David Schmidt 13 May 16:00 BST
May 13, 2025
Francesca Clapcich onboard 11th Hour Racing in The Ocean Race 2023 © Amory Ross / 11th Hour Racing
If you follow high-end sailing, you're likely familiar with Francesca "Frankie" Clapcich. The Italian-American sailor is a double Olympian (2012 and 2016), and she's raced around the world twice, first aboard skipper Dee Caffari's Turn the Tide on Plastic in the 2017-2018 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, and more recently aboard skipper Charlie Enright and 11th Hour Racing Team's winning campaign in the 2023 edition of The Ocean Race (née The Volvo Ocean Race). Additionally, she raced aboard the New York Yacht Club's American Magic Women's AC40 in the 2024 Puig Women's America's Cup.
(N.B., Clapcich also won the 2015 49er FX World Championships with teammate Giulia Conti, and she was also skipper of the Ocean Fifty trimaran Upwind by MerConcept on the 2024 racing circuit.)
While racing in the Ocean Race, the Olympics, and the Woman's America's Cup, is downright impressive, this trifecta is "missing" a key event, namely the singlehanded Vendée Globe.
In late March, Clapcich announced her Team Francesca Clapcich Powered by 11th Hour Racing will campaign for the 2028-2029 edition of this famed circumnavigation race.
Clapcich and 11th Hour Racing acquired the IMOCA 60 Malizia-Seaexplorer from skipper Boris Herrmann and his Team Malizia, who are serving as her Technical Partner for her campaign.
Clapcich will take possession of Malizia-Seaexplorer later this year and will begin logging miles and optimizing the boat. Her first planned event is the Transat Cafe L'Or (October 26, 2025), which will take the competing fleet from Le Havre, France, to the Caribbean island of Martinique.
While Clapcich has a lot of miles to go before she can ensure her spot on the starting line of the 2028-2029 Vendée Globe, if she's successful—and we at Sail-World have every reason to believe that she will be—she will become the world's first sailor (male or female) to have competed in the sport's four biggest events.
I recently caught up with Clapcich, via email, to learn more about her campaign.
Can you please give us an overview of the racing that you plan to do on your new IMOCA 60 ahead of the Vendée Globe? Also, what are the (ballpark) timeframes for these events?
In 2025 we will debut with the Transat Cafe L'Or (formerly the Transat Jacques Vabre), it will be our first race as the all-new Team Francesca Clapcich Powered by 11th Hour Racing, and of course it's really exciting for me to get ready for it! I'll announce my co-skipper in the coming months. Then from 2026 we will take part in most of the IMOCA calendar.
Typically, in even years, the calendar is focused on singlehanded racing and on odd years doublehanded. All this racing will give points and by July 2028 the first 37 skippers will automatically qualify for the Vendée Globe, and the remaining 3 spots will be given to wild-cards teams.
Your sailing C.V. is the stuff of legend. Can you please give us some insight about how much of your sailing has been fully crewed (or shorthanded), and how much has been singlehanded?
Actually, I've done a lot of crewed sailing compared to singlehanded! I've been racing ILCA 6 (former Laser Radial) for a couple of quads preparing for the Olympics in London 2012, and most of my sailing afterwards has been in a crew configuration.
In 2021, I dug more into singlehanded and raced the full Figaro 3 season finishing the year with the Solitaire du Figaro. I think that season really gave me the confidence to think about a possible Vendée Globe campaign in my future. I'm a social person, but I do love sailing solo and the challenges of doing it.
You've already sailed around the world on a foiling IMOCA 60 in The Ocean Race. Can you please tell me a few lessons that you learned about sailing these boats in fully crewed mode that you plan to apply to your singlehanded circumnavigation?
Life onboard is hard!! That was a big lesson learned! The boat has a lot of technology, and you need to know the systems really well to make sure you don't get in trouble when you're solo.
With more teammates it's easier to share the load but alone you need to make sure to be able to handle anything.
Of course, performance-wise I learned a lot, from loads, trimming, and crossovers, but the boats—even if they are in the same 'class'—they are quite different. The former 11th Hour Racing Team boat (now Seb Simon's boat) is really different than Malizia-Seaexplorer, and I will need to re-learn the way to sail it.
From a design perspective, how different is Malizia-Seaexplorer than 11th Hour Racing Team's Malama? And how do you see these differences affecting how you might sail the boat?
The boats are really different! Malama is a Verdier design with quite an extreme waterline, and was designed and built to be pushed in crewed mode for The Ocean Race. It's incredible what Seb Simon did in the last Vendée. It's a hard boat to sail in crewed mode, and I can't even imagine being sailed solo! He smashed the solo 24 hours record and that shows the level of performance that the boat can do!
Malizia is a VPLP project built and designed with the Vendée Globe in mind, in particular for Boris [Herrmann] to be able to push hard in the Southern Ocean and keep high [daily mileage] averages. It has a completely different design, the freeboard is higher, the cockpit is big, and the overall weight is slightly higher. It makes it a reliable and fast boat in tough conditions, but it does suffer in the 10-14 knots of wind range and upwind. It's been mostly my choice to go with a design that can make it a little 'easier' to sail as it's my first race around the world solo.
I realize that we're still 3.5 years out from the start of the 2028 Vendée Globe, but—as of right now—what do you see as your biggest strengths going into the race?
I hope the reliability of the boat will be a strength and the time we will have to optimize it. We have a lot of time, and we need to be wise on how to use it, making the right decisions for sails, foils, etc.
The boat is fast, and in my opinion [it] still has potential to improve, and we can find the extra edge.
As a follow-up to that last question, what do you see as your current biggest weaknesses? And how do you plan to address these in the next 3.5 years?
Definitely my lack of experience racing solo. I need to learn how to manage myself, the boat, the racing...it's a lot, and I'm motivated to do a good job but it will take time! I also need to improve from a technical point of view and spend time with the technical team, learning the boat and the systems.
How much involvement do you think that Boris Herrmann and his team will have in your Vendée campaign as your technical partner? Also, do you see this involvement happening mostly in the first year or so that you will be sailing the IMOCA, or do you expect that their involvement will continue through the run up to the Vendée Globe itself?
Team Malizia is our technical partner for the campaign. They have a lot of experience in running a team and they know the boat inside-out, we are already collaborating a lot, making performance decisions on potential new sails, scheduling the racing calendar, and more.
They are not just 'involved' in our campaign, they are part of our campaign and Boris is a really interesting person and sailor to be around, and always open to share what he learned in past campaigns.
Is there anything else about your Vendée Globe campaign that you'd like to add for the record?
The campaign has a strong side not only on the water but off the water too. We launched our purpose campaign called Believe, Belong, Achieve, which is based on three strong pillars of education, advocacy, and collective action. We want to use our campaign as a platform to raise awareness on social issues especially in the maritime industry and make tangible change promoting a strong sense of belonging in teams, working spaces, federations, clubs and more.
We started with an academic study about the sense of belonging and performance, we've run our first workshop, and we are getting national governing bodies and more entities involved to be allies and advocates.
It's a really busy program, but one that I'm incredibly proud to be developing in partnership with 11th Hour Racing.