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Aside from the enormous technical challenges, creating Mirabella V was the result of vision, courage and exceptional levels of collaboration between owners Joe and Luciana Vittoria and yacht designer Ron Holland.
by Jonathan Eastland
photography by Andrew Bradley
11/01/2004
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| VT Shipbuilding 247 |  |
Joe Vittoria has a penchant for setting extraordinarily high goals, and a
knack for reaching them.
 Visionary owners Joe and Luciana
Vittoria stand beneath their yacht’s
92-foot-long boom.
Their 12
years of experience in
the charter market helped
shape the design of
Mirabella V. (Click on image to
enlarge)
Thirty years ago he helped orchestrate the
leveraged
employee buyout of Avis, a gutsy move that caught the
attention of
corporate America and, aided by creative and
aggressive
marketing
campaigns,
eventually resulted
in Avis becoming the
largest car rental
company in the
world. In his “retirement,”
Vittoria challenged
conventional thinking again, by
going to
Thailand to
build a series of
large, composite, luxury high-performance
sloops. Logistical problems
plagued the manufacturing
operation, but the
exquisite yachts he
produced
performed
beautifully and became the foundation of
an
extremely
successful yacht charter company.
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So the
vision of creating the
world’s largest sloop, eclipsing all
previous notions of size,
scale
and
performance, is a
natural extension of Vittoria’s
think-bigger,
try-harder
personality.
“I’d always had
this idea for a
revolutionary sailboat,
somewhere in the
one-hundred-ninety-foot range
and capable of good upwind
performance. Twenty knots plus didn’t seem
impossible
to me,”
Vittoria
said.
The vision began taking on new
substance
and even larger form when he
brought in
designer Ron Holland.
“When Ron came to the project, things
happened
very quickly.
We decided
to go so far beyond
the envelope that it changed my
previous thinking
about the
boat’s statistics, even though I
could still
visualize the
look,” Vittoria said. “Ron presented
several profiles, but it
was
my
wife, Luciana, who chose the
lines he worked
up.”
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