11th Hour Racing Wins Ocean Race Atlantic Sustainability Trophy

Eight minutes and 56 seconds. That is what separated Francesca Clapcich’s crew from winning the inaugural Ocean Race Atlantic, after roughly 3,000 nautical miles from New York and just under eight days at sea. Paul Meilhat’s United by the Ocean stopped the clock at 7d 23h 39m 11s off Ile de Groix on 10 September, with Clapcich’s Team Francesca Clapcich powered by 11th Hour Racing next across. DMG MORI Global One and Team Malizia followed, the whole top four covered by 28 minutes.

Then, at the awards night in Lorient, the crew that lost by under nine minutes won something the finishing order does not record. The Racing for the Ocean Teams Challenge — the race’s second scoreboard — went to 11th Hour Racing.

Two scoreboards, two completely different rulebooks

If you have never followed IMOCA, think of it as endurance racing with a weather map instead of a track map: six 60-foot foiling monohulls, four-person mixed-gender crews with an equal number of men and women, and the same attrition arithmetic that governs the long-distance disciplines car people already know. Team Malizia sailed much of the crossing with foil damage. Embrace the Challenge lost mainsail area to a failure during a reef. Nobody got a red flag to fix any of it.

The Challenge was built by The Ocean Race Atlantic with the IMOCA class, and it scores all six entries against 30 sustainability criteria spanning operations, science, education, sustainable boat building, climate impact and advocacy, plus diversity and inclusion work and each team’s own impact projects. The prize is a trophy molded from recycled plastic and 1,000 euros routed to the winner’s impact partner project.

Note what it is not. There is no fuel-flow limit here, no homologation window, nothing a scrutineer measures at the dock. It is an audit of how an operation behaves for the weeks around a race, which is an unusual thing for a sanctioning body to hang silverware on. Motorsport writes engine rules down to the millimeter and then mostly leaves the freight alone. IndyCar’s renewable-fuel program is the template most series follow: change what goes in the tank, leave the supply chain untouched.

The winning move was pooling with the boats you are trying to beat

Louise Kergomard, 11th Hour Racing’s head of logistics, put freight at the center of the team’s effort, which is the correct answer. She described sharing RIBs and the shipping container used to get equipment to the United States with Team Malizia, and sharing catering in New York with DMG MORI Global One and Team Malizia.

That is harder than it reads. In a development class, a shared container is a shared schedule: your haul-out, your load date, your customs paperwork and your last chance to change a part before it crosses an ocean all become somebody else’s dates too. It also puts a rival’s shore crew within arm’s reach of your foils and rudder stocks. Teams everywhere share freight when a series organizes it centrally. Volunteering to pool with a direct competitor, and eating the scheduling penalty to do it, is a different animal — and it is precisely the behavior a 30-criteria scorecard exists to pay for.

The rest of the list is unglamorous in a way any team manager will recognize: booking accommodation close enough to the race village that crew can walk or cycle instead of defaulting to a car, reusable lunch containers instead of single-use packaging, waste separation at every site the team works from. None of it is technology. All of it is process, and process is the part of a campaign nobody puts in the highlight reel.

“Overall winner” and “lowest carbon” are not the same trophy

Worth spelling out, because they went to different boats. United by the Ocean won the lowest carbon footprint award on top of winning the race. The overall Challenge is a program score, not a carbon ranking, so a team can post the leanest emissions number and still finish behind a rival that scored better across science, education, access and advocacy. The remaining categories split the same way: best individual effort to Vittoria Ripa Di Meana of United by the Ocean, support for access and equity to 11th Hour Racing, most effective ocean science communication to MSIG.

That split is the right design. A single-number carbon ranking would hand the trophy to whichever campaign is smallest and travels least, which is not the same as rewarding the most useful behavior — and would actively punish a team for running a bigger science or education program.

The question the organizers should get ahead of

Here is the part worth saying out loud. 11th Hour Racing is the impact partner of The Ocean Race Atlantic itself, and it also backs the team that won the race’s impact competition. Nothing about that is improper on its face: the criteria were published before the start, and three of the four category awards went to other teams. But a scored competition is only ever as credible as its scoring, and this one now has an obvious reason to publish team-by-team scorecards rather than just a winner’s name. Any series that has run a weighted or subjective award has eventually learned that lesson, usually later than it should have.

Why the class should care

The Challenge is only two events old — the first ran at The Ocean Race Europe in 2025 and went to Holcim-PRB — but the direction is easy to read. Scored criteria become budgeted criteria. If the scorecard keeps widening, teams will start hiring against it, the same way endurance operations built dedicated strategy desks once weather calls started deciding multi-hour races. A logistics manager who can save a container is already worth points. Soon she may be worth a result.

What to watch next

Clapcich leaves Lorient leading the IMOCA championship on 356 points, clear of Sam Goodchild on 230 and Violette Dorange on 205, with Meilhat tied on 200 in spite of winning the Atlantic — a reminder that the class rewards a season, not a crossing. Keep the damage reports in mind too when the next entry list lands: Malizia’s fourth place came with a compromised foil, and Embrace the Challenge was down mainsail area. Ranking these boats on eight days of results would be a mistake.

A trophy made of recycled plastic will not decide a championship. But this is the first time offshore racing has put silverware on the parts of a campaign that actually move the footprint — the container, the van ride, the hotel booking — and made rivals cooperate to win it. That is a stranger and more useful idea than most of what the sport files under sustainability.