uim newsletter april 2016

UIM Newsletter

UIM NEWS

UIM - 1, avenue des Castalans - Stade Louis II - MC 98000 Monaco - Tèl : +377 92 05 25 22 - www.uimpowerboating.com

NEW

SLETTER

UIM RACING

• 2016 F1 World Championship opening round, in Dubai

• Aquabike Offshore World Championship - Karujet 19th edition

• XCAT Fujairah GP, opening round

• XCAT Dubai GP

GREEN PAGES

• The boat of tomorow seen by the Hydros Foundation

• 7th edition of the UIM Environ mental Award & Special Mentions

• Out & About

APRIL 2016

F1 World Championship opening round: Philippe Chiappe wins in Dubai

French driver and two-time World Champion Philippe Chiappe rocketed off from the start and led every one of the 48 laps to win the inaugural Grand Prix of Dubai at the opening round of the 2016 UIM F1H2O World Championship held along the inner city lagoon in front of thousands of spectators in downtown new Dubai.The CTIC F1 China Team driver made a clean start and was being pushed hard from start-to-finish by Team Abu Dhabi driver Alex Carella. The three-time champion, tried every which way to find an avenue to slide into a strong position to challenge through traffic, but, it never happened with Chiappe holding point and winning for the sixth time in his career. “It was a great way to start the season and a great day for my team, as my young teammate “Leo” Xiong finished fifth for the best run in his career,” said the driver from Rouen.“The restart was no problem as we had clear wa-ter, but the final few laps and a lot of traffic on this small 1.96 kilometer race circuit forced me to make every

move a smart one in the final mo-ments with Alex hovering right behind. “It worked out in the end and it’s nice to go home with 20 points in the bank heading to my home race in Evian, France in mid-July.” Second place dri-ver Carella was like a shadow to Chia-ppe, but couldn’t get close enough to challenge the leader at the end. “I tried everything I could to find a way to get close to him but couldn’t quite do it,” said Alex. “I’m hoping we can find that little bit extra in France and this time take the victory.”Team Abu Dhabi’s other driver Thani Al Qamzi who had qualified sixth dropped out early on lap seven and wasn’t a factor.Home standing Victory Team driver Shaun Torrente of Miami had to claw and scratch his way to the podium with a third place finish after starting fifth.The American finally passed fourth placed Jonas Andersson of Team Swe-den on a nifty move on the restart at the two-thirds mark of the race ear-ning him 12 valuable points for the organization that is based in Dubai.With the top four drivers finishing on the

UIM NEWS APRIL 2016


same lap, Chinese driver Xiong, a lap down, had his best finish of his career with a fif-th place after qualifying in seventh yesterday.Duarte Benavente of Portugal and the F1 Atlan-tic Team took seventh in his French built Moore boat, while veteran Italian driver Francesco Can-tando was eighth in his Blaze Performance Team hull making his 36th career start in the Emirates dating back to 1996. Young Filip Roms of Finland flew the flag for his BABA Racing team coming home in ninth with two points despite taking out one of two turn one buoys and being forced to make a slow drive through. His veteran team-mate and two-time World Champion Sami Selio had heartbreak at the start failing to get around even one lap with engine problems ending a less than spectacular start to his 2016 campaign. Bartek Marszalek of Poland was the final driver to earn a point, finishing in tenth place for the Blaze Performance Team. Jesper Forss of Team Sweden had a spectacular end to his drive on the 27th lap when he blew the boat over end over end one and one-half times before barrel rolling to a stop thankfully coming out with no injuries and forcing a yellow flag and a re-start to the race.Marit Stromoy of Norway was up in the top ten when she stopped suddenly down on the east side of the circuit on the seventh lap as she was hoping to finish on the podium for the second straight race. It was not to be for the EMIC Team driver.Thirteen of the 18 starters finished the event as the series now takes a spring recess before heading to Evian in France for the second round of the UIM F1H2O World Championship on the 15-17 July.


UIM NEWS

Pons wins Karujet title number two

Teddy Pons held his nerve on the final day of the 19th edition of the Karujet to win the GP1 tit-le for a second time, with Cyrille Lemoine adding to French ce-lebrations with victory in GP3.Pons headed into the final day with a solid six minute plus ad-vantage over Yann Ponama but still had to negotiate the final two stages which he did with a measured drive, finishing four-th in both stages to take ove-rall victory by 5:58s from Po-nama with Pascal Gounouman winning stage 6 to move him up into third overall. Despite the di-sappointment of not being in

a position to fight for the tit-le after their early challenge evaporated on stage 5 Alex Barret and Francois Me-dori ended the event fi-nishing first and second in the final stage, Barret taking 13th and Medori 10th in the final standings.Lemoine made no mistakes in his quest for the GP3 Karu-jet title extending his overall lead and securing an impres-sive victory winning stages 6 and 7 to win by 4:28.191s from Vincent Thomas, with Didier Merles Des Iles third.

Teddy PONS

MEDORI François

Alex BARRET

Yann PONAMA

APRIL 2016


UIM NEWS

The Victory Team lived up to their name and reputation by taking the first title of the 2016 UIM XCAT World Powerboating Series with a win at the Fujairah GP on Friday April 8th.The defending Series champions, Arif Al Zaf-fain and Nadir Bin Hendi, stormed to the front in typical fashion and led from start to finish to top the podium and the Series after round 1.It was not a race without drama, however, as Team Australia (Brett Luhrmann and Paul Vi-rik Nilsen) and Abu Dhabi Team 5 (Rashed Al Tayer and Faleh Al Mansoori) collided at the first turn and the Australians flipped their boat.With both drivers safely back on land, the race was restarted with Victory Team once again storming to the front on the first lap.“It was dream race, yes, but the challenge was very tough,” said Bin Hendi. Speaking about ha-ving to start the race a second time, he added: “We were leading already so mentally it upsets you – a bit up and down because you have to do the start again. You don’t know what’s going to happen and you predict a lot of things but luckily it went in our favour and as you saw, Vic-tory boats are always very good at the start.”That they certainly were and once at the front the duo executed their race plan to perfection.Meanwhile, further back Gold Coast. Australia were steadily making their way up the field. After a dismal start in eighth position, Tom Barry-Cot-ter and Ross Willaton made the decision to take their long laps early and the strategy paid off.The pair had worked their way up to fourth spot when the Fujairah Team (Serafino Barle-si and Alessandro Barone) experienced pro-blems and lost speed, meaning the Australians moved up into the podium places. Swecat Racing (Mikael Bentsson and Erik Stark) who were then in second still had one more long

lap to complete however – and when they tackled that, the Gold Coast boast made their move up into second, where they stayed until the finish.“We had a really bad qua-lifying session so we were starting from eighth on the grid,” explained Gold Coast’s Barry-Cotter. “We had a lot of technical issues but we knew all weekend that the boat had a lot of pace. It was just the technical issues holding us back.“We got a really bad start so from there we were literally one of the last boats to come around the second corner so we made the call to take both the long laps straight away and we managed to have clear water. We honest-ly didn’t know until right at the end that we were still on for a podium, just because so many of the boats waited so long to take their long laps. So it was a lot of suspense for us. We were really aggressive. It’s a really great re-sult for the team. They worked so hard to get the boat ready and I can’t thank them enough.”

APRIL 2016

2016 UIM XCAT World series : first title for Victory Team

Speaking about the new Mer-cury XCAT ROS 400 engines that have been introduced to the Series for the first time in this race, Barry-Cotter added: “Early, they had some gremlins but Mercury have been real-ly good and the WPPA have been fantastic in tuning the engines to all the teams’ needs and they performed flawlessly this race and the boat is performing really well.”Swecat eventually finished third with the Dubai combina-tion of Salem Al Adidi and Eisa Al Ali grateful they weren’t the ones flipping their boat again – and finishing in fourth place.“We didn’t know if we had the gap we needed to take the long lap but it was so close. I real-ly enjoyed it. This is what ra-cing should be like,” enthused Swecat’s Stark afterwards.“These are really strong new engines so when you’re jumping they’re real-ly pushing you. I really en-joyed it. For sure this is the future of XCAT,” he added.


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Arif Al Zaffain and Nadir bin Hendi put the finishing touches to a perfect weekend’s racing with victory in the Dubai Duty Free Speed Cat Run in Dubai.Competing in the second round of the 2016 UIM XCAT World Power-boating Series, the Victory Team duo had already claimed top ho-nours in the race for Emaar Pole Po-sition and then also in the Dubai GP.So the Speed Cat Run victory com-pleted their clean sweep of the weekend’s events and saw them extending their lead at the top of the overall Series standings after victory at the Fujairah GP. Al Zaffain and Bin Hendi now have a 31-point lead over the Swecat Racing team of Erik Stark and Mi-kael Bengtsson who are second while the Dubai 33 pair of Salem Al Adidi and Eisa Al Ali are third overall, another four points back.It was Dubai 33 who took on the Victory Team in the final of the DDF Speed Cat Run and came the closest t o beating them. Had the race been

about 10m longer, it could in fac-thave been a very different result.But it was not to be and Al Adi-di and Al Ali were, in the end, content with their podium place after finishing fourth and missing out on the podium in Dubai GP.The Victory Team started off the Speed Cat heroics with a win over Abu Dhabi Team 5 (Rashed Al Tayer and Faleh Al Mansoori) in the first round before getting the better of the Fujairah Team (Serafino Barlesi and Alessandro Barone) in the second. T hey then came up against and beat a fired-up T-Bone Station team (Gio-vanni Carpitella and Luca Fendi) in the semi-final to book their showdown against their teammates, Dubai 33.Dubai 33 got the better of Spirit of France (Francois Pinelli and Saul Bu-bacco) in their first round run before defeating Six (Tomaso Polli and Mat-teo Nicolini) in the second round and then Team Australia (Brett Luhrmann and Pal Virik Nilsen) in the semi-final.T-Bone Station, meanwhile, de-feated Team Australia in the race-off for third spot to repeat their po-dium performance of last weekend.

Speaking after the weekend’s racing had come to an end, Bin Hendi said: “We had the same set-up as the Fujairah race and we were very happy with the ac-celeration. We knew that we got a very good start and the wind was with us so it was great and it was a good fight with our teammates.“We are very happy with the weekend’s results because there are still a lot of races to come and every championship point counts.”Dubai 33’s Al Ali added: “When we got to the final, we were very happy to go against Arif and Nadir – the champions. I pushed very, very hard for thewin but they did a great job and won – and my team won.”As for T-Bone Station, who are still running the old Mercury 2.5 EFI engines while the majority of others in the field have switched to the newly introduced XCAT Mer-cury ROS 400, Carpitella explained that things could potentially have ended differently. “There was a lot of wind and our boat is light so it really affected us. We tried three different lines from the start. The first one, we had to make too much correction. “The second one was completely wrong – which was the one with Victory Team and the third one was perfect so we got good speed and accelera-tion and it was fantastic. So, if we had done this line against the Vic-tory Team I don’t think they could catch us. But that’s how it is.”With the curtain coming down on two sensational weekends of racing, the spotlight now shifts to Europe where the third round of the XCAT World Series will take place in Lugano from 4-5 June.

APRIL 2016

Victory Team do it again at Dubai GP


UIM NEWS


APRIL 2016

Awarded both with the 2015 Environ-mental Award and the 2015 Special Mention for environmental Benefit at this year UIM Awards Giving Gala in Monaco, Jérémie Lagarrigue, Founding Member of Hydros Foundation and CEO of Hydros Innovation tells us more about the Organization’s vision and activities aiming at fostering maritime efficiency.

1- What inspired you to create the Hydros Foundation?Plenty of events inspired me to create Hydros Foundation. I grew up watching the “Shell Eco-marathon”, and I would have loved to participate in that event. With my sailing background, I thought that a challenge on the water might be more appropriated. I also worked in the motorcycle and car industry, and it made me wonder why we don’t do more to reduce the consumption of energy. I was convinced that we could do more on energy efficiency in the maritime and nautical sector. I had the chance to pitch this idea to Thierry Lombard, who has the same thoughts on this sub-ject. The idea was to create a platform to share ideas on the boats of tomor-row. This concept is perfectly reflected in our banner event, the HydroContest.

“With revolutionary projects like the HY-41 and the new se-cret project HY-Air, we have the keys of the Maritime’s future.”

THE BOATS OF TOMORROW seen by the Hydros Foundation

we are proud to promote and organise this competition. Our ambassador catamaran, the Hydros.ch, is current-ly a multiple record-brea-ker, and we are planning to improve it to be able to face new challenges. 2017 will be a big year for this boat, that is the only thing I can tell you for now...We are also in close colla-boration with our engineers from Hydros Innovation, who help us in creating the boats of tomorrow. With re-volutionary projects like the HY-41 and the new secret project HY-Air, we have the keys of the Maritime’s future.

3- What do you perceive to be the single biggest challenge facing the boa-ting industry in terms of energy efficiency?I think one of the main challenge is to raise awar-eness to this cause. In fact, the maritime transporta-tion is “only” the fifth glo-bal pollution on earth, but people forget that maritime trade represents around 90% of the global trade in the world. Thinking that we can carry on at this rate is not acceptable, and our position is to foster inno-vation to tackle this issue.Our events, like the Hy-droContest, are set up to generate a large flow of ideas and concepts that could then be applied by the different

2- Could you tell us about Hydros Foun-dation’s missions and activities?Hydros Foundation’s mission is to encou-rage technological innovation in order to face the energy and environmental challenges in the nautical and maritime in-dustry and to raise the awareness of these issues among professionals, students, opinion leaders and the general public.One of our main event is HydroContest, first international competition devoted to nautical and maritime energy efficiency. This contest, which invites participants to design and build boat prototypes that are as efficient as possible, calls for thinking in terms of industrial ap-plications and encourages innovation in imagining the boats of the future. We are also the orga-nisers of the Little Cup, C Class World Cham-pionship. This competi-tion, which is both spor-ting and technological, is often seen as the ideal testing ground for prepa ring for the Ame-rica’s Cup. Since innova-tion is part of our DNA,


UIM NEWS

industries of this sector. The best example is our collaboration with ABB, which gave an industrial challenge and the opportunity to a participant of the Hydro-contest to work on the optimization of one of their major maritime products.

4- What is the Hydros Foundation’s five year plan?Our first goal is to grow our events in order to give more impact to our cause. For the Hydrocontest, I see for the future a competition having regionalquali-fier, and then a final in the house of Hydros, Lausanne. We also plan to grow the LittleCup, making it bigger and more connected to the America’s Cup, to act as a mandatory event before to test team’s innovations for the big cup.We have other big projects in the pipeline. Our project HY-X, yacht equipped with foils, will now be industrialised, and we will see the first clients will be delivered around summer 2017. Another big project we have is the HY-Air, I cannot tell you a lot about this because we are at the very early stages, but you will be amazed by this new way of moving through the water and the air.

They also won an award for their green initiative

2015 UIM Special Mention for Greening the sport : Jet Ski Kid Eletric

2015 UIM Special Mention for Innovation : V-24 The World’s cleanest race boat

APRIL 2016

THE 7th EDITION OF THE UIM ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD AND SPECIAL MENTIONS

If you want to be part of the UIM «Green» adventure, do not miss the 2016 edition of the UIM Environmental Award & Special Mentions which will be launched by June 2016.

Fore more info please contact the UIM Tel: +377 92 05 25 22 Email: [email protected] www.uimpowerboating.com


UIM NEWS


OUT &ABOUT APRIL 2016

Rashed Al Qamzi

UIM Mid term meeting

Joint Cominsport-Comintech

Arif al Zaffain & Nadir Bin Hendi

UIM Mid term meetings - MONACO

French driver Teddy Pons cele-brating his victory in Guadeloupe

XCAT Dubai GP Podium

F4 WG Meeting - MONACO

2015 UIM Environmental Award and Special Men-tion winners attending the UIM Press Conference in Monaco.

Pal Virik Nilsen & Brett Lumrman of TEAM AUSTRALIA

uim newsletter april 2016

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