Land Yacht

Here is a project that I built with a couple of friends (Stéphane Level, Rémy Héquet, Cyril Lesourd, Olivier Hourquet) while stuying at Southampton Institute in 1993.
The plan was to create a machine that could go on water, land and ice. We built the machine during summer 1996 and we went to Weymouth speed week. (Main sponsor: MER CALME, Seagull landyacht, JPK Composite, FIN'S, High Modulus Europe)
As expected, the machine was finished very late and the real first test were done during the Speed Week. The machine recorded an official 1.9 knots on the wrong tack (Well done guys, all this fart for such a tinny speed!!) but one evening, the machine reached about 22-25knots in choppy water. (That was encouraging)
We found a couple of problems in the steering and plans were made to improove the machine but we never did due to a lack of funding.

Instead, we changed the machine to a land yacht and we reached about 100Km/h on the beach during the second test. That was very scarry for me to watch a friend going that fast with an untested machine.


The soft rig prooved to be very unstable so we decided to build a solid wing but the TEAM members found jobs all arround the planet and the wing was never tested. (sponsors: PRIMAGAZ and SICOMIN)


The machine is stored in a friend's garage in Cherbourg.