Nicholas Clarke

Ex­treme Mea­sures dri­ver and own­er Jonathan Tardieu is hop­ing to come across rough wa­ters when the Carib Great Race rolls around on Au­gust 27. Rid­ing on a 29-foot For­mu­la III, Tardieu feels that dif­fi­cult con­di­tions will give his crew the edge over its D Class (60 MPH) ri­val Rab­ble Rouser, a 24' Skater Cata­ma­ran. "We've been hear­ing that the wa­ters have been calm and flat but that's not some­thing we want," he told the Guardian yes­ter­day. "Hope­ful­ly it will be chop­py and give the oth­er boats some trou­ble. Length is strength on the North Coast and that will give us an ad­van­tage."

The ves­sel, for­mer­ly Ex­treme, made its Great Race de­but in the ear­ly 2000s and was lat­er pur­chased by Tardieu in 2007. Af­ter break­ing down with fu­el trou­ble in its first run that year, the boat went on to place sec­ond in the D Class in 2008, first in 2009 and third in 2010. Hav­ing re­cent­ly up­grad­ed from a 225 V6 to a 250 V8 John­son en­gine, Tardieu, who will be joined by trot­tle­man Ricky Bel­montes, said his ex­pec­ta­tions were high for this year's race. "It's less than two weeks away and we're very ex­cit­ed. The boat is com­ing along nice­ly and we're hap­py with what we've seen so far. It looks very promis­ing." He added that he was look­ing for­ward to win­ning brag­ging rights over the Rab­ble Rouser crew. "We have a friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion go­ing on be­tween the two boats with a lot of 'pi­cong'. We en­joy hav­ing them as ri­vals and ex­pect that they will be chas­ing af­ter us."