Lending Club 2 Cuts Bait

San Pedro, CA (July 15, 2015) – The multihull division of the 2015 Transpac Race had four boats entered. Now, three days before their start on July 18, they are down to three teams. With a difficult weather forecast ahead, the 105-foot VPLP-designed trimaran Lending Club 2 has withdrawn from the race.

Lending Club 2 co-skippers Renaud Laplanche and Ryan Breymaier, who had entered the biennial event in hopes of setting a new race record, will now leave today with their sights on setting a new Los Angeles to Honolulu outright record.

Race record: 05:09:18:26, set in July 1997 by Bruno Peyron (FRA) and crew on the 86-foot catamaran Explorer.
Outright record: 04:19:31:37, set in November 2005 by Olivier de Kersauson (FRA) and crew on the 110-foot trimaran Geronimo.

Laplanche and Breymaier had attempted to set a new race record during the 2013 Transpac, joining John Sangmiester on the modified ORMA 73 trimaran Tritium Racing. However, they were hindered by debris as large as tree trunks and telephone poles thought to be left by the 2011 Japanese tsunami, and arrived in Hawaii just two hours outside the record.

“There were at least six major impacts we had with debris out there,” recalled Breymaier. “In all, I think we probably spent about 10 hours working with the damage on the centerboard.”

Laplanche and Breymaier, along with navigator Boris Herrmann, have concluded the weather window for the race start on Saturday will not offer the right conditions for a fast race. At the same time they noted a low pressure system offering ideal conditions for an extremely fast crossing if the boat were to leave immediately.

Lending Club 2, launched in 2006 as Groupama 3 and later rebranded as Banque Populaire VII, had been chartered by Laplanche for a record-breaking program in 2015. The team has successfully set a new Cowes to Dinard outright record and Newport to Bermuda outright record, and now will seek the Los Angeles to Honolulu outright record.

Following this latest record attempt, the boat will be transferred to Francis Joyon who will seek to set a new outright crewed round the world record (Jules Verne Trophy), which is currently held by Loïck Peyron with a time of 45:13:42:53. Joyon will be receiving the boat in mid-September, and following a re-fit, plans to go on stand-by for the Jules Verne Trophy in early November.

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