A perfect FIT | Baltic Yachts

Baltic Yachts’ Café Racer concept is proving to be a compelling prospect for owners of racing superyachts when they decide to downsize. In this exclusive interview with the Baltic Log, the owner of Open Season explains why it suits his style of sailing

Racing is just a small part of the sailing programme for the second Baltic 68 Café Racer, Open Season, according to her owner Thomas Bscher. She is however very strongly focused on performance, unsurprisingly perhaps for a boat that belongs to a former Le Mans racing driver and president of Bugatti who used to commute to work at 300km/h in a McLaren F1. In her first competitive outings last autumn, the new Open Season won a day’s racing, overall and on handicap, at each of two major Mediterranean regattas, the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup and Les Voiles de St-Tropez.

It’s fair to say that this is a man who takes racing seriously and has been quite successful, first in GT motor sport and then in sailing, driven by a lifelong sporting friendship, as he describes it, with Magic Carpet owner Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones. The previous Open Season, well known to everyone on the superyacht regatta scene and now racing under her new name Spirit of Malouen X, is a former Wallycento that Thomas famously cut in half and extended to 107ft (32m), transforming a notoriously underperforming boat into a winner.

So why has he downsized? ‘I have a newborn baby,’ he explains. ‘The old Open Season was a great sailing boat but very unsafe for a child. The loads are so high that it’s not even possible to have a baby anywhere on board. When I told my current captain and the one I had before for 10 years, they both said: “Congratulations, the boat has to go.”’

It is rarely straightforward to sell a specialist, high-maintenance racing superyacht – ‘it’s almost like an aeroplane,’ Thomas says, ‘even if you don’t use it you have to do all the servicing’ – but in this case a buyer was found almost immediately. He wanted his next boat to be a Baltic and one of the triggers for buying a 68 Café Racer, he explains, is that opting for a platform build was an opportunity to only miss one season of sailing, as opposed to waiting several years for a full custom boat to be designed, built and delivered.

Some other deciding factors were that he really liked the look and style of the Café Racer and the concept was an ideal fit for the way he wanted to sail. ‘We have a house in the mountains of Mallorca just 10 minutes from Port de Soller,’ Thomas explains. ‘We use it mainly as a family boat and for that we love that it has no backstays because it makes holiday sailing much easier. Obviously we use running backstays for racing. We wanted to have a good sailing boat, use it a little bit as a regatta boat and see how far we go. You need different sails for cruising so we decided this year to have new racing sails and recut the existing mainsail for cruising.’