It’s official. The World Sailing Speed Record Council has ratified Loick Peyron’s 131-foot maxi trimaran Banque Populaire V as the outright non-stop around-the-world record holder. That means it is not only the world’s largest multihull ocean racer, but it has completed a circumnavigation faster than any kind of boat — sail or power.
Peyron and his 13 crew finished their sprint earlier this year in 45 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes and 53 seconds, winning the coveted Jules Verne Trophy with a time that’s 2 days, 18 hours, 1 minute and 59 seconds faster than Franck Cammas’ Groupama 3, which won the trophy in 2010.
Click play for a quick ride-along with the record-setting crew.
Banque Populaire reported sailing 29,002 miles at an average speed of 26.51 knots and posting a top speed of 48 knots. The council, which calculates the round-the-world distance as a perfect sphere, reported the distance covered at 24,857 miles at an average speed of 19.75 knots.
In either case, Banque Populaire sailed around the world faster than New Zealander Pete Bethune’s Earthrace, the current powerboat round-the-world record holder. The 90-foot trimaran motored around the world on biofuel in 60 days, 23 hours and 49 minutes in 2008, with stops to refuel.
In 1993, Peyron’s older brother Bruno and three crewmembers sailed around the world on the 85-foot catamaran Commodore Explorer in 79 days, a day shy of what it took Phileas Fogg to circle the world by train and steamboat in Jules Verne’s novel “Around the World in Eighty Days.” The feat won Bruno Peyron and crew the first Jules Verne Trophy for fastest circumnavigation by any kind of yacht propelled by the forces of the wind and crew — in under 80 days.
He reclaimed the trophy in May 2002 aboard the maxi catamaran Orange, sailing around the world in 64 days, 8 hours, 37 minutes and 24 seconds.
Launched in 2008 in Nantes, France, Banque Populaire was designed by the French firm Van Peteghem Lauriot-Prévost and built by the French shipyard CDK Technologies in Lorient. Pascal Bidégorry attempted to wrest the Jules Verne Trophy from Cammas on Banque Populaire in January 2011, but the crew retired after the trimaran struck an object and suffered a damaged daggerboard.
