Boat Review: An old looking bow

Paulo Pernão of Interesting Sailboats frequently reviews new boats and does not always like what he sees:

The Grand Soleil yachts have been visually handicapped by a designer that has insisted in shaping transoms and bows the way he has been doing for more than 12 years, ignoring all evolution of the past decade which has been huge.

Now Grand Soleil changed designer for their new 44 Performance and chose Matteo Polli. I thought they were on the right way since Polli has been designing yachts that are winners at the ORC Championship like the M37 or the racers from Italia Yacht, and while certainly this new hull looks nice, and the transom looks effective and modern, but the bow… see below.

Come on, Mr Polli, giving just a tad more buoyancy to that bow, making it slightly inverted, will just result in adding a little bit more LWL to the boat. It is not going to undermine its performance and it even may help a little in getting the bow out of the water under gennaker at planing speeds and certainly will make the boat look much, much better.

Paulo envisioned something more like this below: