Rapido sailboats: carbon trimarans built for range without giving up speed
Rapido Trimarans builds carbon cruising trimarans exclusively through Triac Composites in Vietnam, pairing a founding team steeped in Corsair Marine's production era with an exclusive design partnership with Morrelli & Melvin. The result is a small, tightly focused lineup built around speed, watertight compartmentation and, in its newest model, cabin volume that closes the gap with cruising catamarans.
Origins and ownership
Paul Koch's path into trimaran building began in 1986 with OSTAC Yachts (Ocean Sailing Trimarans and Catamarans). From 1994 to 2010 he led Corsair Marine, where Rapido's own account credits him with introducing composite technologies and production methods that reshaped the international trimaran market. In 2006 Koch launched a composites operation of his own in Vietnam; many of the roughly 100 technicians who now staff Triac Composites have worked alongside him since. Triac Composites, the exclusive builder of every Rapido, was co-founded in Vietnam by Koch and Richard Eyre in 2014, on a site about 40 minutes from central Ho Chi Minh City with direct river access to the sea. Seahorse, however, credits the Rapido Trimarans brand itself to directors Koch and James Sganzerla, who had run Corsair Marine together across that same 1994–2010 stretch, with Eyre joined by Phil Johns and Damien Judd contributing the corporate and production-management expertise behind the operation; between them, Seahorse reports, the team carried 60 years of experience building more than 1,500 trimarans. Multihulls World separately describes Koch, an Australian with a long-standing passion for multihulls, as the driving force behind Rapido's 2014 creation.
The designers
Rapido's boats are drawn exclusively by Morrelli & Melvin, a firm Seahorse credits with America's Cup and Jules Verne Trophy-winning designs alongside cruising multihulls and Olympic Class one-designs. Koch and Eyre engaged the firm's co-founder Pete Melvin for the project that became the Rapido 60, an idea the two traded during the run-up to the New Zealand America's Cup; Seahorse puts Koch and Melvin's working relationship at roughly 30 years, calling it a level of trust uncommon between designer and builder.
Construction through the eras
Triac builds high-load components — crossbeams, chainplates and bulkheads — in prepreg carbon, autoclave-cured, work done on an 8.5-meter pressure autoclave alongside a seven-axis Kuka robotic milling machine running a 23-meter track for tooling and molds; construction is certified to CE Category A. That standard has moved over time. Sailing Magazine's October 2017 review described the Rapido 50, then a new Morrelli & Melvin trimaran reaching the market, as built in E-glass and carbon fiber, with a build goal of a strong, fast, offshore-capable and unsinkable boat — ahead of the fully carbon, foam-sandwich construction the yard uses across its newer models. Every hull carries watertight bulkheads. For the Rapido 60, YachtWorld reported that Morrelli & Melvin ran finite-element, computational-fluid-dynamics and fluid-structure-interaction modeling alongside the firm's own velocity-prediction software; the yard says that work predicted a very strong hull, a claim it says a structural test upheld, with the boat springing back to its original shape once the twisting load was released. YachtWorld put the resulting hull at roughly half the weight of a 60-foot performance catamaran.
Lines and generations
The Rapido 60 came first and quickly became the brand's calling card: Multihulls World describes it as the boat that put "the brand created by Paul Koch" on the map in the fast-cruising trimaran world, and four had been built by the time the yard's newest model arrived. The 50 and 40 followed, taking up the same super-fast cruiser formula but adding folding arms so the boats could fit a standard marina slip instead of a wide multihull berth; by the time the 53XS debuted, Triac had also completed three 50s and twelve 40s. That newest model, whose name stands for Xtra Space, enlarges the nacelle to give volume Multihulls World compares to a cruising catamaran of similar length; derived from the 50 and unveiled at the Cannes Yachting Festival, it pairs a full-carbon build with curved, asymmetrical Morrelli & Melvin daggerboards that dive up to 13 feet and an in-house-built rotating carbon wing mast, reaching mid-20-knot speeds. Yachting World reported that the first example, Picomole, was commissioned by a former Neel 47 owner chasing better performance, and that delivery skipper Diego Moreno sailed it to its debut show via the Suez Canal as a shakedown voyage.
Who Rapido is for
Rapido's lineup rewards cruisers who want trimaran speed without giving up the marina practicality folding arms provide, and who are drawn to the engineering story behind the boats — a single, decades-long design partnership and one Vietnamese yard built around aerospace-grade carbon work. The 53XS in particular targets sailors used to catamaran interior volume who don't want to trade away trimaran performance to get it.
