Francesca Clapcich & Will Harris’ second place finish in the 2025 Transat Café L’OR is all the more impressive given that it was Clapcich’s first race in charge of the boat she will use in the 2028 Vendée Globe. We checked in with Harris recently to get his take on how the race played out.
When Clapcich was looking around for a co-skipper for her first competitive outing as skipper aboard the 11th Hour Racing IMOCA – previously Boris Herrmann's Malizia Seaexplorer – that she aims to race solo around the world in 2028, Harris was a somewhat obvious choice.
Other than Herrmann, nobody had sailed more miles aboard the German boat or knew it so comprehensively inside and out.
"I've known that boat since the first moment a piece of carbon was laid into the mould," Harris explained. "I've followed the development of the boat and done an awful lot of sailing on it. So it seemed obvious that we could partner up and I could share my knowledge and experience of the boat with Frankie."
The pair got some racing time together during the summer of 2025 after Clapcich joined the Team Malizia crew for the 2,000-nautical mile Course des Caps race around the British Isles, and for the second edition of The Ocean Race Europe.
It didn't take long for Harris to see that the two sailors had very similar personality traits when on board a race boat...
Tom Slingsby's Bonds Flying Roos and Diego Botín's Los Gallos head into the final day of the Apex Group Bermuda Sail Grand Prix locked together at the top of the leaderboard on 32 points apiece, after an excellent day of racing on the Great Sound.
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