The Boat

Invicta is one of only five Melges 40s ever built. It is a boat designed and engineered for a single arena — the front of European Grand Prix racing — and its story begins a long way from Moreton Bay.

A Botín design

The Melges 40 grew out of a collaboration between the American Melges yard and Botín Partners, the Spanish design office behind a generation of TP52 and America's Cup yachts. Melges had a fleet of Melges 32 owners looking for a larger, faster platform; Botín had been refining canting-keel technology and wanted a strict one-design to put it into.

Design lead Adolfo Carrau set one principle above all others — simplicity. A Grand Prix boat that needed a full engineering and shore team to keep it running would defeat its own purpose. The Melges 40 had to be fast, powerful and demanding to sail well, yet contained enough that an owner and crew could run it themselves.

The canting keel

At the centre of the design is the feature that still makes the Melges 40 unique: it is the only canting-keel production one-design yacht in the world. The keel — built around hydraulic canting technology proven in IMOCA and Volvo Ocean offshore racing — swings up to 45 degrees to windward, driven by a single ram and worked from a keypad at the tactician's station. It generates far more righting moment than a fixed keel for around half the bulb weight, and that is what lets the boat carry its tall rig and oversized sail plan.

Everything else is built around that idea. The hull is all carbon and epoxy, built by Premier Composite Technologies in Dubai, and the finished boat weighs just 3,250 kilograms — light enough to run at 22 to 23 knots downwind. Twin rudders hold it steady when it is pushed hard, a single centreline canard keeps the deck uncluttered, and the propeller retracts before racing. Nothing about it is compromised.

The Mediterranean Grand Prix

The Melges 40 was built for an idea as much as for a racecourse. The class was conceived as an owner-driver Grand Prix circuit to run alongside the TP52 Super Series — for owners who wanted racing of that calibre, but in a strict one-design, without the development arms race and full-time professional crews a TP52 campaign demands. The rules kept it deliberately lean: a capped sail inventory, limited training days, and a single shipping container per team to move each boat between European venues.

Across 2017 and 2018 it drew a small, well-resourced fleet to the Mediterranean's grandest stages — Porto Cervo's Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and Lanzarote. The owners were a glamorous group, among them Alessandro Rombelli's Stig and Richard Göransson's Inga; the afterguards were stacked with talent — America's Cup names and Olympic medallists, Francesco Bruni and Jordi Calafat among them — racing boats that were, by rule, identical.

It was an ambitious, elite affair, and it was short-lived. The fleet never grew beyond those five boats, and the Grand Prix wound up after two seasons — leaving a handful of exceptional yachts to find new waters.

From Monaco to Moreton Bay

Invicta is one of those yachts. On the Grand Prix circuit it raced as Dynamiq Synergy under the flag of Monaco, taking third at the inaugural Melges 40 Grand Prix at Porto Cervo in 2017 — with America's Cup champion Ed Baird calling tactics — and finishing fourth overall across the 2018 season.

From Europe the boat came to Australia, and to Tasmania, where it was campaigned as 2 Unlimited by the late Greg Prescott — a much-respected Tasmanian sailor, a national one-design champion and a veteran of 29 Sydney Hobart races.

Now the boat begins its next chapter. Owned by Andrew Northcott and racing from the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron, it carries the name Invicta — and brings a genuine Grand Prix pedigree to the Australian east-coast circuit.