“We really don’t know.” Welcome to the fastest experiment on the Atlantic

The Atlantic is about to expose the new IMOCA hierarchy: New York to Lorient gives two new boats their first serious offshore benchmark against proven machinery.

There is a useful amount of uncertainty hanging over The Ocean Race Atlantic. Six IMOCAs are preparing to leave New York for Lorient. Two are brand new. One is a proven transatlantic weapon now under Francesca Clapcich. Boris Herrmann is racing a new-generation Malizia he admits he barely knows. Paul Meilhat wants everyone in the same weather system so he can finally get some meaningful numbers. Conrad Colman arrives with the oldest boat and least experienced crew.

Somewhere in the forecast is the possibility of several days of proper North Atlantic pace. Forget the launch renders and VPP predictions - this is where the fleet finds out what these boats actually do offshore.

"We don't know if they're fast, or if they are really fast, or if they're really, really fast." - Paul Meilhat

That's Paul Meilhat's summary of the problem facing the whole fleet. Everyone wants to know where the two new boats sit. Nobody has enough information yet.

Meilhat won The Ocean Race Europe on his existing boat, but waves off the comparison that was lighter, more coastal, a different crew. IMOCA isn't one-design, and "the boats are all different and they go at different speeds." Which changes the tactics: there's only so much covering you can do when one boat may have a fundamentally different optimum mode from another.

What he actually wants is simpler than a hierarchy. Same weather system, same stretch of ocean, then compare. Because even after Lorient there'll be caveats, was the new boat at 80 per cent, ninety, did it have a technical problem, was the crew still learning when to change modes. "There is also a game of bluff," he says. "They're not going to tell us everything." The tracker tells you where the boats are. It doesn't tell you why.

"We really don't know. It will be a great question mark." - Boris Herrmann

Herrmann isn't sandbagging. Team Malizia genuinely has almost no hard offshore data on the new boat. It's two months old. He wasn't aboard for the delivery to New York, and the delivery itself never gave the boat the conditions to show what it's got: "They didn't have any strong condition and they had some technical issues. They needed to slow down."

Foil settings, sail crossovers, autopilot behaviour, trim, the point at which the crew can safely keep its foot down, none of that arrives pre-loaded on a new IMOCA. It gets learned on the water, and this fleet has another new benchmark sitting right next to it in DMG MORI. For Malizia, New York to Lorient isn't the race. It's several thousand miles of commissioning at race pace.

Herrmann's read on the record talk is more cautious than Meilhat's. He should know, Malizia holds the 24-hour benchmark everyone's chasing, and his memory of that day isn't "lots of wind." It was the opposite: a clean combination of manageable strength, the right angle, a sea state that let the boat keep moving instead of slamming. The wind shifted favourably through the period too. "The sea state must not be too strong," he says now, which sounds like caution until you clock what he's actually saying — more pressure doesn't automatically mean more miles. Once the sea state turns destructive, the limiting factor stops being boat speed and becomes how hard the crew can drive without wrecking the boat, or themselves.

"From when we start till we finish, we want to push the boat." - Francesca Clapcich

Clapcich isn't interested in that arithmetic. She's not trying to discover whether her IMOCA works, it already does, with serious transatlantic miles behind it, and that changes the equation entirely against two boats still finding their limits. "We feel that we can definitely push it all the time really hard," she says. "From when we start till we finish, we want to push the boat." One gear, full ahead. There are worse boats to have when the forecast says send it.

She's also carrying the fleet's sharpest personal subplot. Will Harris has spent seven years alongside Herrmann rather than against him, first time racing him in his life. Herrmann isn't pretending otherwise: "He's one of the best sailors nowadays out there." Harris now gets to help set the reference against which his old boss's new boat gets judged. Nobody needs to manufacture that rivalry.

"This race is a very big challenge for us to test her and test ourselves." - Kojiro Shiraishi

Kojiro Shiraishi has spent two years getting DMG MORI to a start line, and he's unusually candid about what the crossing actually tests. Not just the boat. "This race is a very big challenge for us to test her and test ourselves." He's got Sam Davies and Nicolas Lunven around him for exactly this reason, while Arisa Moriya gets an offshore apprenticeship you can't replicate anywhere else. For a new boat, arriving in Lorient knowing where it was quick and why matters as much as the finishing position.

 "I have a lot fewer opportunities to sort of check in with an experienced sailor and ask for a second opinion."

Colman's version of this problem looks nothing like Shiraishi's. Oldest boat in the fleet, by his own account the least experienced crew, three of them made their first Atlantic crossing on the delivery to New York, and then Aaron Hume-Merry dislocated his shoulder on that same crossing and couldn't recover in time. His replacement is a Belgian shore-team hand whose only qualifications are months of New Zealand slang and an aversion to shoes. Colman is laughing about that part. He's not laughing about 3am: "I have a lot fewer opportunities to sort of check in with an experienced sailor and ask for a second opinion." Experienced crews don't just move faster through manoeuvres, they carry decision load, spot changing conditions earlier, push back on a skipper's call when it needs pushing back on. More of that sits with Colman alone now. But his programme was never really about this race. It's building the sailors who'll crew the next round-the-world boat, and this Atlantic is the first rough draft.

 "It's definitely time to go sailing." - Oliver Heer

Oliver Heer's take is the shortest and possibly the most honest: the American stopover was good, the forecast has 40 knots in it, and "now it's definitely time to go sailing."

By Lorient there'll be data, and there'll be excuses too, technical problems, weather splits, claims that the result doesn't tell the whole story. In IMOCA, that combination usually just means the development race has properly begun.