Who Are Botín Partners? The Designers Behind the Melges 40

Botín Partners is the Spanish naval architecture firm — based in Santander on Spain's Cantabrian coast — that designed the Melges 40, the all-carbon one-design Grand Prix yacht that Invicta races on the Australian east coast. The same studio is the most successful design office in the history of the TP52 class, holds a substantial America's Cup record, and has drawn fast offshore yachts for some of the world's most demanding programmes. Understanding the firm behind the drawings explains a great deal about why Invicta behaves the way it does on the water.

Who they are

Botín Partners is a compact, elite naval architecture practice that designs high-performance racing and performance-cruising yachts. The firm is led by founder Marcelino Botín, who is responsible for the naval architecture and the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic design of the boats the studio produces. Alongside him, partner Adolfo Carrau is a principal point of contact with clients and leads the velocity-prediction and rating-optimisation work that turns a hull shape into a winning boat.

It is a small team by the standards of the projects it takes on, supported by a handful of production and systems designers, several of whom came through earlier America's Cup campaigns. That concentration of experience is part of the appeal — the people drawing a one-design keelboat like the Melges 40 are the same minds working at the frontier of grand prix yacht racing.

History and founding

The practice traces back to 1995, when Marcelino Botín established a design venture in Santander. Botín had studied naval architecture in Southampton, England, and it was there that he met the South African designer Shaun Carkeek. The two formed Botín & Carkeek Yacht Design, with the aim of designing racing boats across the rating rules of the day.

Through the late 1990s and 2000s the studio built an enviable reputation on the competitive European racing circuit, collecting Copa del Rey titles and world-championship results. In 2010 Shaun Carkeek left to found his own practice, and from that point the firm continued as Botín Partners, with Adolfo Carrau established as a principal partner. The thread running through three decades is consistent — light, fast, beautifully resolved racing yachts.

The TP52 and America's Cup record

If there is one class the studio owns, it is the TP52. Botín Partners is the most successful design office in the history of the class, and its boats have set the pace through season after season of the 52 Super Series — widely regarded as the most competitive monohull fleet in the sport. When the world's best owners and crews line up in box-rule 52-footers, it is overwhelmingly Botín hulls at the front. If you want to understand how a Botín 52 compares with Invicta, see the Melges 40 versus the TP52.

The firm's America's Cup pedigree is just as serious. Marcelino Botín served as a principal designer for Emirates Team New Zealand during the late 2000s, and the studio later designed a New York Yacht Club monohull challenge for the 36th America's Cup. Across those campaigns the office has also contributed to offshore and grand prix yachts that have contested the great classics — the Rolex Sydney Hobart, the Fastnet and the Rolex Middle Sea Race among them.

Design philosophy

What unites a Botín TP52, an America's Cup monohull and the Melges 40 is a way of thinking about speed. The studio works the full design loop in-house — hull and appendage development, structural strategy and the velocity-prediction software that forecasts how a given shape will perform before any carbon is laid. The signature is a hull that is light, powerful and easily driven, paired with twin rudders so the boat stays balanced and controllable as it heels and accelerates. For the underlying principles, our explainer on yacht hull design covers how form, stability and waterline length combine into boat speed.

The firm is also unafraid of the hardware that delivers righting moment. It brought that conviction to the Melges 40 — a topic worth understanding in its own right, which our guide to what a canting keel is sets out plainly. The result is boats that reward good sailing and punish sloppiness, exactly the character a competitive owner-driver fleet wants.

The Melges 40 connection

The Melges 40 came about when the American builder Melges and Botín Partners shared a conviction about where one-design racing should go next. Botín had explored a canting-keel grand prix boat, and Melges had owners ready to step up from smaller classes into something bigger and faster. First built in 2017, the Melges 40 became the studio's first all-carbon keelboat for the strict one-design market — a roughly twelve-metre, eight-to-nine-crew windward-leeward racer with a canting keel that swings up to forty-five degrees. As the only all-carbon, canting-keel, strict one-design boat of its kind, it remains genuinely unique.

That is the lineage Invicta carries onto Moreton Bay and the wider east-coast circuit from the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron. The same design office that dominates the 52 Super Series and has shaped America's Cup monohulls drew the boat Invicta's crew sails — which is much of why the Melges 40 punches so far above its size. To see how that pedigree translates into a specific racing yacht, read more about the boat, and brush up on any unfamiliar language in our sailing terms glossary.