You spend hundreds of thousands of euros to optimize your 70-foot supertrimaran, you pay professional sailors handsomely (including skipper Brian Thompson, 4 round-the-world races behind you, including Volvos, Vendée and various records, ), you have a textbook regatta, and then you make a rookie mistake. Who knows how Lloyd Thornburg, owner of the very fast MOD 70 Phaedo, must have felt at the Rolex Middle Sea Race, when he realized he had turned around the island of Linosa and not the island of Lampedusa (a really gross mistake: Linosa is much smaller and is 21 miles northeast!), as per the regatta instructions.
SOLDINI THANKS AND WINS MIDDLE SEA RACE
Having to go back and “say goodbye” to Giovanni Soldini’s Maserati, with whom you fought with a knife between your teeth throughout the race and whom you were beating. Even the best make mistakes: “We are running a fantastic race with Maserati Multi70. Last night we scored an own goal,” Thompson admitted. Even the best make mistakes. But we would never want to be in the navigator’s shoes.
So it was all easy for Giovanni Soldini’s crew in the soup of the Multi70 Maserati, which arrived triumphant in Malta by winning the race in real time and finishing the race in 2 days 1 hour 25 minutes and 1 second, beating the multihull course record, which, ironically, belonged to Phaedo3 itself (2 days, 11 hours,, 29 minutes and 41 seconds).
SUPER HONORED
Meanwhile, behind, among the monohulls, George David’s Rambler has passed Pantelleria and seems to be unopposed. Truly superlative performance by Mascalzone Latino, Vincenzo Onorato’s Cookson 50, currently the number one suspect for victory in IRC and ORC, in sixth place overall actual, between Favignana and Pantelleria.
