Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup Day 2: Leopard 3 claws her way back
by International Maxi Association 8 Sep 23:07 BST
6-12 September 2026
To avoid a significant soft patch directly off Porto Cervo, the second day of the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup, organised by the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in conjunction with the International Maxi Association, saw all six classes dispatched northwest on coastal courses of varying lengths, around the La Maddalena archipelago, to make the most of the available wind.
The Maxi 1 class for the 80-100ft giants competing for their Rolex IMA World Championship sailed the longest course at 39 miles, which was effectively an elongated anticlockwise lap of the entire La Maddalena archipelago, including its far northwestern extremity, the rugged island of Razzoli. Here in the Strait of Bonifacio the northwesterly wind built to the early teens.
Among the 100ft front runners, Karel Komárek's V led for the duration on the water but with David M Leuschen and Chris Flowers' Galateia and Joost Schuijff's Leopard 3 hanging on to her. An interesting nuance of their course was the choice of leaving the island of Spargi to port or starboard. The lead trio left it to port while those chasing, led by Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones' Magic Carpet e, chose the opposite route. At this point the area to the west of La Maddalena turned into a scene from Cowes Week with Maxi 1 chasing the Maxi Grand Prix fleet around a mark just north of the island of Piana, both then falling into hot pursuit of Maxi 4-5 and the Multihulls, whose leaders were already passing the south side of La Maddalena. As a result Bomb Alley was subsequently packed with heavy maxi yacht traffic from all classes, with the on-the-water leaders in the Maxi Grand Prix and Multihull fleets jockeying to be first to the finish line of the shortened course (off Capo d'Orso) just ahead of the Maxi 5 leader.
Following V's victory yesterday, Leopard 3 clung on well enough to beat her today but only by 46 seconds after almost three hours of racing. Despite approaching her 20th birthday Leopard 3 has been the most successful of the 100ft maxis here recently having won the first Rolex IMA Maxi 1 Worlds in 2024 and finishing runner-up to Galateia last year.
"We had a good day: We were a bit slow at the start, but then we caught up, inch by inch, with our competitors and we were sticking with Galateia and with V and that was, in the end, successful," commented Schuijff. "We can clearly stick with them upwind, and reaching we're slightly faster and we're the same again downwind. For us it's all about the team. We have the same team and they're very well trained."
Tactician Chris Nicholson added: "We didn't have a great start and on the first beat you could have quite easily lost a lot, but we managed to hang in there. V extended nicely and did a really good job. After that we were chipping away: V and Galateia went for jibtops, while we went for a masthead zero around the top and pulled 50-100m out of them on several occasions. We did more manoeuvres than the other guys because we went masthead zero to jibtop and back to GS - it was all happening. The guys up forward reckon that I owe them lots of beers..."
For a second day Peter Dubens' brand new judel-vrolijk designed, Persico-built 76ft footer North Star III dominated the Rolex IMA Maxi Grand Prix World Championship. First to finish across the entire fleet, they arrived 7 minutes 10 seconds ahead of Peter Harrison's Jolt and 3 minutes 48 seconds ahead under IRC corrected time. The extent of North Star III lead on the water is no surprise: her IRC TCC is 1.681 which is closer to the 'slowest' yacht in Maxi 1 (My Song at 1.700) than the next closest below her in her class (Jethou at 1.655).
North Star III's navigator Miles Seddon commented: "We're really happy with it. It's exceeding everything that we thought it would do. It was a lovely course - it was a really smart decision to beat around the top [of La Maddalena] in flat water into building breeze where we saw 14-16 knots. Then it was sneaking in to look for current relief and for the shifts off the headlands, and then back down when it was just rock management and putting the bow down and cutting as many corners as you could. But at 16-19 knots things come up pretty quickly..."
Seddon has masterminded much of electronics innovations on the new boat including the LiDAR real time 3D laser measurement of the sail shapes - the latest tech in sail trimming.
After winning yesterday but then being demoted due to a penalty, Luciano Gandini's Mylius 80 FD Twin Soul B finally secured first place in Maxi 3 today from Marcos Tomas Vivian de La Pedrosa's Wally 94 Astra 1 and Silvia De' Longhi and Franz Wilhelm Baruffaldi Preis's JV62 Manticore.
"I enjoyed it very much - we had very good day," said Gandini, whose crew includes Italian America's Cup helmsman Francesco Bruni. "The weather was perfect for racing today and the wind was okay and we had a very, very good start."
In Maxi classes 4 and 5 it was business as usual. In the latter, for a second day, Riccardo De Michele's Vallicelli 78 H2O won but this time by a phenomenal 11 minutes 42 seconds under IRC corrected time from the 50-year-old Swan 65 Shirlaf of Giuseppe Puttini. Meanwhile in Maxi 4 Yacht Club Gaeta President Vincenzo Addessi's Mylius 18E35 Fra Diavolo won under IRC corrected time from Luigi Sala's Vismara 62 Yoru and former IMA President Benoît de Froidmont's Wally 60 Wallyño.
"It was a nice race today," commented Luigi Sala. "We won line honours and were second overall. I'm happy about the race itself, how we did and the competition with Fra Diavolo, which was tough. Basically, we are able to stay ahead of them for most of the race but we cannot keep the distance that we need to win overall. But, it was really nice."
"Upwind, they are slightly better than us, which makes a difference," added his wife Alessandra. "The leg between La Maddalena and Santa Maria was exciting - very fast reaching and then we turned around La Maddalena and the Maxi 1 and 2 fleet, they were coming from behind us and sailing past. It was a bit tricky, with all these very big kites around."
Finally in the Multihull class, the catamarans came into their own today with Lord Irvine Laidlaw's 80ft Highland Fling XVIII narrowly beating Adrian Keller's 84ft catamaran Allegra by a mere 36 seconds under ORCmh corrected time - the closest result of the day across all of the classes.
"We had a good day," commented Highland Fling XVIII's tactician Ned Collier-Wakefield. "It was a tricky first beat for us. We protected the left, but they actually had more pressure on the right, and we ended up getting stuck. So we spent the rest of the beat working our way back through and got Allegra just at the top. As soon as we get into more pressure and can fly the hull, we're off. So it was a race of two halves: the second half was great, the first half tricky.
"They did a good job finishing it where they did - about 100m after the line the wind disappeared."
Given a dicey forecast for Wednesday, the layday, originally scheduled for Thursday, has been brought forwards by 24 hours. So tomorrow (9 September) the AGM for the International Maxi Association has been rescheduled for 1030, with the IMA Members' Dinner and Prizegiving taking place nearby in the evening at the Surrau Winery.
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