Cammas ready for another mountain to climb

Having won the Volvo Ocean Race last year and made mincemeat of the C-Class competition last week (at the ‘Little America’s Cup), Franck Cammas (FRA) now has his sights firmly set on the ‘big America’s Cup’. There was a small sigh of relief among multihull fans when Oracle Team USA successfully won the 34th America’s Cup, as the Cup now seems more likely to remain on two hulls for the 35th. Cammas was among them. “That is good for the show and for the public.”

However, he says he would be equally at home in a monohull. “The America’s Cup is my goal now, even if it is in monohulls. I would prefer multihulls, because it is more fun to race this kind of boats and there is more to do in the concept. But a monohull is not so bad either.” The big issue for Cammas is now hunting down the money.

France has probably the biggest culture of sponsored sailing of any country in the world. There is Banque Populaire, who is believed to have spent in excess of 10 million Euros building their 40m long trimaran (now Spindrift 2). Cammas’ own sponsor Groupama put 17 million Euros/year into successfully winning the Volvo Ocean Race, coming after their success with the Groupama 3 maxi-trimaran in which Cammas and his crew not only set a new Jules Verne Trophy record, but which Cammas then sailed to victory singlehanded in the 2010 Route du Rhum.

However the economic downturn has given sailing sponsorship in France a hammering, with some big, long term players like Foncia and Veolia Environnement suddenly pulling the plug on their campaigns and even Groupama has dramatically scaled back its sailing sponsorship spend. Cammas maintains the way to get France onto the start line of the 35th America’s Cup, is to form a consortium with some other big players in France. – The Daily Sail, read on