The Figaro Beneteau 3 adventure

The Figaro Beneteau 3 adventure © Mirna Cieniewicz

With its black hull and orange foils that cut though the water on floats, the high-performance racing yacht completed its first official sail in Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie on September 16, 2018.

The Figaro Beneteau 3 combines an attractive design, with its refined, elegant lines, and outstanding competition performance. Created for the French offshore racing championship, this new one-design yacht represents the culmination of a long-term team effort. Thought up by the members of the Figaro Beneteau Class, the plans for the new boat first took shape with drawings by French architects VPLP, before being built in Nantes by the Groupe Beneteau Racing Division. The carbon foils have been developed in Vannes by the racing yard Multiplast.

The Groupe Beneteau Racing Division has been hard at work since the start of the year. After the historic Jeanneau Techniques Avancées site, which had been unused for 10 years, was completely renovated and relaunched, its teams have been working there to carefully craft the 50 boats for the Figaro Beneteau Class competitors. The yard has received frequent visits from the skippers and their partners and 43 boats have been ordered so far. Rigorously identical (each part is weighed before being assembled to guarantee a weight differential of less than 2%), the one-design units will be chosen in a random draw and allocated to the skippers during the Paris Boat Show in December 2018. They will start to be shipped out from January 2019 and the skippers will be able to start training in their new boats right away.

The Figaro Beneteau 3 has already enjoyed its first success: the prototype (not authorized to compete on the French circuit) completed the 2018 Pacific Cup, from San Francisco to Hawaii, in the quickest time, with a two-man American crew. If you missed its arrival at the Solitaire event, you will be able to admire the first Figaro Beneteau 3 fleet's chistera foils and 9.75m during the Sardinha Cup, sailing from Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie to Lisbon, and back, from March 23 to April 14, 2019.

Once considered a potential candidate for the Olympics if offshore racing became an official event, the Figaro Beneteau 3 will be looking to attract more international sailors to offshore racing.

Following in the wake of its illustrious predecessors

Over the past 15 years, the Figaro Beneteau 2 has a prestigious track record of performance and reliability. It has seen the emergence of talented and now renowned skippers such as Michel Desjoyeaux, Yann Eliès, Charles Caudrelier and Franck Cammas to mention just a few. Thanks to the alliance between the skippers and their boats, they have always brought one another safely back to port and not a single boat has ever been lost at sea. The Figaro Beneteau circuit and its flagship event La Solitaire URGO Le Figaro have over the years become a French benchmark in the sailing world, setting the standard for human, sports and technical performance.

To learn more about the Figaro Beneteau 3 click here.