The Ocean Race Atlantic puts a radical Verdier and an iterative Koch on the same start line for the first time. The result will shape every campaign through to the 2028 Vendée Globe.
Two New IMOCAs, One Atlantic
Two new IMOCA designs will leave New York on September 1 carrying more than crew and sailcloth. Boris Herrmann’s Malizia 4 and Kojiro Shiraishi’s DMG MORI Global One represent philosophies so divergent that Herrmann himself put it bluntly: “If you put them next to each other, you would think they were two different classes.” The inaugural Ocean Race Atlantic — roughly 3,000 miles to Lorient — will be the first time either boat has raced. It will also be the first time anyone outside a VPP model finds out which idea is right.
IMOCA itself has adopted the framing explicitly: revolution versus evolution. That is not marketing hyperbole. It is, for once, an accurate description of two genuinely irreconcilable visions of what a 60-foot ocean monohull should be.
The Bustle and the Blade
Start with DMG MORI Global One, designed by Guillaume Verdier and built by Multiplast. Its centrepiece is a pronounced longitudinal bustle that runs the length of the hull’s centreline — a feature never before seen on an IMOCA. Verdier, who helped create the AC75, has imported foiling-multihull thinking into the solo-offshore world. Where most IMOCAs heel to reduce wetted surface, this one is designed to stay almost upright, riding on the bustle at around eight or nine degrees of heel. Verdier claims a wetted-area saving of roughly 20 square metres. Team manager Jacques Caraës called it “a new page in IMOCA design-thinking.”
By contrast, Malizia 4 is an Antoine Koch and Finot-Conq design — a declared evolution of the hull that Thomas Ruyant raced around the world in the last Vendée Globe. That boat, then called For People, is now Allagrande MAPEI. Malizia 4 shares a hull mould with Ruyant’s new boat and with Loïs Berrehar’s forthcoming Banque Populaire, due in early 2027. Three sisterships from three separate campaigns: an unprecedented cost-sharing collaboration that is itself a statement about where the class’s centre of gravity lies.
If one radical gamble proves fast, every campaign that bet on iteration will spend the next two years wondering whether their budget was wasted.
Malizia 4 is narrower, flatter, and has less rocker than its predecessor. It carries the pronounced double-chine bow that Koch’s boats used to punch through Southern Ocean waves, combined with foils designed to split the difference between downwind power and light-air acceleration. Co-skipper Will Harris described the ambition plainly: “We are trying to keep that downwind speed and power… but then also we’ve got more power in the boat, which is going to help us upwind in the medium and the light conditions.” It is, in other words, a very good design made measurably better. Not a clean sheet.
The Ghost in the Design Office
Both boats were conceived in the shadow of Charlie Dalin’s extraordinary 2024–25 Vendée Globe. Dalin shattered the record by more than nine days, finishing in 64 days 19 hours aboard MACIF — a Verdier design that proved the potential of the architecture. He did so while battling the cancer that would kill him on June 11, aged 42. Sam Goodchild inherited MACIF and the task of writing the boat’s next chapter. Every new IMOCA now being designed is, in some sense, an answer to the question Dalin’s record posed: how do you go faster still?
Verdier’s answer with DMG MORI Global One is to rethink the hull entirely. Koch’s answer with Malizia 4 is to refine what already worked. Both are legitimate responses, but they carry very different risk profiles — and very different consequences if they fail.
Beccaria’s Inconvenient Proof
Before either new boat touched salt water, the Vendée Arctique delivered a pointed reminder that the IMOCA class does not always reward the biggest budget or the newest hull. Ambrogio Beccaria won the race on June 16 aboard Allagrande MAPEI — the very Koch design from which Malizia 4 evolved. He beat Goodchild on MACIF, a boat widely regarded as the fastest in the fleet, overcoming a 200-mile deficit in the closing stages when a windless zone reshuffled the standings off Les Sables d’Olonne.
Beccaria’s victory was his first solo IMOCA win. It was also the first qualifying race for the 2028 Vendée Globe, which starts on November 12 that year. The result does not prove that older hulls are superior. MACIF remains formidable. However, it does demonstrate that a well-prepared skipper on a known, understood platform can extract performance that a newer design cannot guarantee. That is precisely the argument Koch’s evolutionary camp makes, and Beccaria provided 3,190 nautical miles of supporting evidence.
What a Transatlantic Can and Cannot Prove
Here is where honest assessment must temper the excitement. The Ocean Race Atlantic is a crewed transatlantic, sailed by mixed teams of two women and two men. It is not a solo race. The conditions — a fast North Atlantic crossing in early September — will favour certain design traits over others. Neither Malizia 4 nor DMG MORI Global One will have had more than a few weeks of sailing before the start. Harris was candid about the challenge: “Launching one of these new boats is really hard. To make sure every system is working reliably enough to go and send it across the Atlantic… that’s a big thing.”
A single race, sailed on green boats by crews still learning their systems, cannot deliver a definitive verdict on which philosophy owns the future. Yet it can reveal early tendencies. If the Verdier hull’s low angle of heel and reduced wetted surface translate into measurable straight-line gains, the revolution thesis gains credibility — and budget pressure on every rival campaign intensifies overnight. If Malizia 4’s iterative approach proves equally quick while needing less commissioning time and offering more all-round versatility, Koch’s sistership model becomes the template for the 2028 cycle.
Six teams will start. Among them, Conrad Colman on MSIG Europe will represent a different kind of ambition entirely. However, the race within the race — Koch against Verdier, evolution against revolution — is the storyline that will echo through every design office in Lorient for the next two years.
The Wider Current
The new IMOCA designs are not arriving in isolation. Justine Mettraux, the fastest woman ever around the world, has commissioned a new Verdier design under the technical direction of Simone Gaeta, with a spring 2027 launch aimed at the Vendée Globe. She will crew aboard Malizia 4 for this transatlantic — gathering intelligence on the Koch approach before committing to a rival architecture. Meanwhile, Ruyant’s sistership to Malizia 4 launched in June, and Berrehar’s will follow. The Koch camp is building critical mass. The Verdier camp is betting on disruption.
Registration for the 2028 Vendée Globe opened in February, and the qualification window is now live. Every skipper needs at least one Grade 2 solo result and a top-37 finish in the IMOCA Globe Series. The clock is running. Design decisions being made this summer will determine which boats are competitive in November 2028 and which are expensive also-rans.
The Atlantic Decides Nothing — and Everything
The Ocean Race Atlantic will not settle the revolution-versus-evolution argument. No single race can. However, it will establish the first data point that matters — not simulation output, not tank testing, not confident assertions at launch parties, but actual performance over 3,000 miles of open ocean. In a class where the previous generation’s best design won the Vendée Globe by nine days and its direct descendant just won the Vendée Arctique in the hands of a rookie, the question of how much innovation is enough has never been more urgent.
Somewhere in Lorient, two very different hulls are being prepared for their Atlantic delivery to New York. One looks like nothing the class has seen before. The other looks like everything the class has learned. Next week, the ocean gets the deciding vote.
