Route du Rhum : The Vintage Class brings legendary boats back to life

118 solo sailors will set sail from Saint-Malo on November 1 for the 2026 edition of the Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe. Among them, 27 will compete in the Vintage Multi and Vintage Mono categories. Created with the aim of reducing the event’s carbon footprint, these categories encourage sailors to bring boats built before 2011 back into competition. Two examples are Armor-lux-Le Finistère Assurance and French Touch-Oceania Hotels, skippered by Kieran Le Borgne and Éric Péron respectively. 

The Vintage Class

The concept behind the Vintage Multi and Vintage Mono categories is summed up by Stéphane Bourrut Lacouture, CSR Manager at OC Sport, the organiser of the Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe: “It started with the realisation that boatbuilding accounts for a significant share of the event’s carbon footprint. Since we couldn’t alter the Ultim, IMOCA, Ocean Fifty and Class40 classes, which are governed by their own rules, we decided to create these two categories, which are not classes, with eligibility criteria designed to ensure that the boats are as sustainable as possible.”

The main criterion was to give priority to boats launched before 2011. “For those built between 2011 and 2024, we introduced a number of rules aimed at rewarding those who had already seriously considered how to build a more sustainable boat. And for those who still wanted to build a brand-new boat, we added further criteria.”

Of the 27 Vintage entries (14 Multi and 13 Mono), 24 were built before 2011, which is naturally a source of satisfaction for the organiser’s CSR Manager: “The result is positive on two levels: first, because many of the Vintage boats have played a part in the history of the race, so it’s great to see them back on the starting line. And secondly, because this category has brought boats that were rotting away in harbours or fields back into the game.”

A year of work on the former PRB

This is particularly true of Armor-lux-Le Finistère Assurance, the former IMOCA PRB, twice winner of the Vendée Globe (with Michel Desjoyeaux in 2000 and Vincent Riou in 2004), which will be skippered in the Rhum by Kieran Le Borgne. The Breton sailor explains how the project came about: “I’m from Brest and, since I was 10 years old, I had been seeing this boat abandoned in the port of Brest, and it really broke my heart. Three years ago, after competing in my second Transat Jacques-Vabre in Class40, I wanted to do something different and decided to try to acquire the boat.”

After difficult negotiations with its owner — “a Polish farming company that was supposed to compete in the Barcelona World Race (2010-2011)” — he eventually succeeded. The company’s directors finally agreed to sell the boat “for around €15,000, ten times less than what they had initially been asking,” explains Kieran Le Borgne.

The hardest part was still to come: rebuilding the boat. The project received a major boost when the Vintage Mono category was announced for the Rhum. “It immediately made sense for the project because we not only wanted to bring this legendary boat back to life, but also to do so with performance in mind,” the skipper explains.

He then describes the work carried out on a boatyard site in Plougastel: “When we got the boat, she was really nothing more than a wreck. There were holes in all the hull panels, two tonnes of mussels and oysters on the hull, the keel was beyond repair, the electronics had been completely stripped, as had the deck hardware… We stripped the boat right down before re-laminating the entire hull. We reinstalled the deck hardware, using 80% second-hand equipment, refurbished the mast, bought a second-hand keel from Michel Desjoyeaux, made a few new sails, and had to use new equipment for all the electrical and electronic systems.”

The project required a full year of intensive work and a budget of around €300,000, financed through a bank loan and private investors. The recent arrival of partners Armor-lux and Le Finistère Assurance has enabled the Brest sailor to line up for the Route du Rhum, “with a certain amount of pride in having managed to bring this project to completion, because it really wasn’t straightforward at the beginning.”

4 former Orma trimarans on the starting line !

Another challenging project for another sailor from Finistère, Éric Péron, who has entered the Vintage Multi category aboard the former ORMA trimaran Sopra Group, launched in 2002 for Philippe Monnet and discovered in the United States.

“For me, it was unthinkable not to be at the start of the Rhum,” he explains. “So when the category was launched, I started looking at which boats were available and in sailing condition. The former Sopra was, and the price was attractive. The only problem was that she was in Chicago!”

Together with his team, Péron brought the trimaran — which had not sailed for three years but was still functional — back into working order, replacing the shrouds on site. Last spring, they organised a major repatriation operation, first navigating through “the exceptional scenery of the Great Lakes canals”, before crossing the Atlantic to Brest.

French Touch-Oceania Hotels then entered the boatyard at the end of July, on a site in Lanvéoc, for “a fairly substantial refit”. This included replacing numerous standing and running rigging components, extensive work to restore watertightness, building a small coachroof and reinforcing the foil wells, which were showing signs of fatigue. “It allowed us to find the second bullet,” Éric Péron jokes, referring to the fact that the trimaran had apparently been shot at while in Chicago!

The sail inventory, on the other hand, was in good condition. The team simply added a small gennaker and a second-hand J2. And the total cost of the operation? “Including the delivery logistics, around €220,000,” answers the skipper.

Péron will also have a genuine match within the match during the 2026 Route du Rhum, as three other former ORMA trimarans will be on the starting line: Groupe GCA (Elf Aquitaine III, launched in 1988), skippered by Gilles Lamiré, Arkéa-Handicap International (Fujicolor II, launched in 1990), led by Damien Seguin, and Francis Joyon’s Océans (Banque Populaire, launched in 1994).