Last week I made a ‘trains, planes, and automobiles’ round trip to attend an update presentation on Giovanni Soldini’s Ferrari Hypersail project at the spectacular all-new North Sails loft in Genoa, Italy.
For the ‘Engine Above the Deck’ – aka, the mast, sails, and rigging – on this radical project Ferrari have smartly partnered with North through the umbrella North Technology Group (NTG), also giving them access to the smart thinkers and manufacturing resources at group companies like Southern Spars and Future Fibres.
It is easy to see why picking NTG was such a no-brainer for the team at Ferrari, which is led by the highly enigmatic Marco Guglielmo Ribigini – a mechanical engineer with a more than 20-year career at the company – along with the project’s CTO, fellow long-termer Matteo Lanzavecchia, who also leads Ferrari’s sports car engineering division.
Both have been working on the Hypersail project since 2022 which was reportedly born out of a breakfast/lunch/dinner conversation between Soldini, legendary high-performance yacht Guillaume Verdier, and Ferrari executive chairman John Elkann, about the possibility of creating a truly visionary design for an offshore foiling monohull capable of generating its own power and setting open ocean passage records.
I check-in with Tudor Team Alinghi’s director for technical and sailing, New Zealand America’s Cup veteran Dave Endean – the man in charge of making sure that in AC38 the Swiss syndicate improves on its somewhat lacklustre performance in the last Cup in Barcelona.
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