ORMA 60
Class of 60-foot ocean racing trimarans administered by ORMA from 1996 under ISAF. A box rule limited length and beam to 60 feet and the mast to 100 feet. Active from 1996 to 2007, it was succeeded by the one-design MOD70.
The ORMA 60 class was born in 1996, when the International Sailing Federation (ISAF), together with the French sailing federation, recognised the 60-foot ocean racing trimarans and handed their management to the Ocean Racing Multihull Association (ORMA). From then on the association ran a yearly championship combining major offshore races with Grand Prix events sailed on coastal and windward-leeward courses.
The calendar was built around benchmark transatlantic races: the crewed Transat Québec-Saint-Malo, the double-handed Transat Jacques Vabre, the English Transat and above all the single-handed Route du Rhum, seen by the skippers as the biggest prize in the sport. Loïck Peyron, Laurent Bourgnon, Pascal Bidégorry and, most often, Franck Cammas, who collected a string of titles in the early 2000s, are among the champions of the circuit.
Thanks to a very open box rule, the ORMA 60s became some of the fastest ocean-going sailing boats ever built: platforms almost as wide as they were long, canting wing masts, curved foils in the floats and lifting rudders with trim tabs. That race for power came at a cost: capsizes and breakages piled up, and only 3 of the 18 trimarans that started the 2002 Route du Rhum reached the finish.
Rising budgets, sponsors walking away and a near-total lack of foreign entries weakened a class that remained mostly French. In 2007 the championship shrank to a few events in Brittany, with the Transat Jacques Vabre as its flagship, while ORMA worked on a 70-foot one-design drawn by VPLP. The class faded out after 2007; its legacy passed to the one-design MOD70 and, in a cheaper format, to the Multi50. Several former ORMA 60s still race under handicap, such as Mighty Merloe, which set the Transpac record in 2017.
The ORMA 60 was a box rule, not a one-design: only a few maximum dimensions were set, with length overall capped at 60 feet (18.28 m) and rig height at 100 feet (about 30 m). Sources differ on whether beam was also limited to 60 feet or left free; in practice the platforms came close to their length (Banque Populaire was 17.6 m wide).
Everything else was open: design, materials, rotating and canting wing masts, curved lifting foils in the floats, daggerboards and rudders with trim tabs, hydraulic forestays. That freedom fuelled an expensive and fragile technical arms race that led to many capsizes. The crew format depended on the championship event: single-handed in the Route du Rhum, double-handed in the Transat Jacques Vabre, fully crewed in the Transat Québec-Saint-Malo and the Grand Prix.
14 sources · updated 29 Oct 2026
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External identifier
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Source: Ocean Racing Multihull Association (opens in a new tab)
External identifier
Source: Ocean Racing Multihull Association (opens in a new tab)
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