Sailing: pounds 10m plan for maxis' championship

BRITAIN IS at the heart of a pounds 10m initiative to establish a new world championship of maxi yacht racing.

Plans outlined in Marseilles yesterday revealed that four of the eight events which make up the series will be based in the United Kingdom, including the opening North Sea Race from Harwich and the Fastnet Race finale to Plymouth, which follows Cowes Week.

The fleet of eight, 80ft maxis, designed by Bruce Farr, has had a chequered career, starting life as the Grand Mistral fleet meant to rival the Whitbread, now Volvo, Round The World Race.

When that, and the building programme, faltered, its founder, the Whitbread veteran Pierre Fehlmann, linked up with a fellow Swiss businessman, the immensely wealthy pharmaceuticals executive Ernesto Bertarelli, to complete the final three boats and produce a revamped regatta programme.

Fehlmann's carrots include a relatively low-entry cost to a sponsor, just pounds 140,000 for the world championship series, a first prize of pounds 250,000, and ploughing nearly all of the income from a series sponsor he hopes to announce next month into boosting television coverage.

He also plans to transmit on-board television direct from the race course to giant screens on shore in order to improve spectator accessibility to the racing, which will be staged as close to the shore as possible for yachts which need a minimum depth of 16 feet in which to work.

The plan is to have a different national sponsor for each of the boats, but there is sure to be some flexibility if the need arises. Fehlmann says he is close to deals with French, Swiss, Swedish and Italian companies. One of his skippers, Ludde Ingvall, who in 1997 set a record for crossing the Atlantic in one of the same boats, said, in his capacity as one of Fehlmann's vice-presidents, that talks were also advanced with a British group.

His co-vice-president is Lawrie Smith, though the British Whitbread skipper is now in Australia to reacquaint himself with sailing a Soling with his 1992 Olympic bronze medal crew, before the world championship series in Melbourne next month.

That leaves his America's Cup syndicate boss, Professor Andrew Graves, to conduct negotiations - a further meeting is scheduled for tomorrow - to find the pounds 5m needed to start building the British boats next month.

It looks to others to run the racing - it will piggy-back existing events, including the four in the UK, which include the Channel race, plus a North Sea regatta in the Netherlands, Germany's Kiel Week and the Round Gotland Race in Sweden.

For the moment, there is no challenge to the Volvo Ocean Race in 2001 but, said Ingvall: "All doors are open."