al thani yacht

AL MIRQAB Kusch Yachts

• Inspiration

AL MIRQAB has 11 Photos

Al Mirqab News

In Pictures: $200 Million Dollar Mega ...

Similar yachts.

MINERVA | From EUR€ 630,000/wk

• Yachts >
• All Yachts >
• All Motor Yachts Over 100ft/30m >

If you have any questions about the AL MIRQAB information page below please contact us .

A General Description of Motor Yacht AL MIRQAB

This motor yacht AL MIRQAB is a 133 m 437 (ft) colossal steel boat which was crafted at Kusch Yachts and concieved by Kusch Yachts and Tim Heywood. Accommodating 60 guests and 60 crew members, motor yacht AL MIRQAB was formerly (Project May). The balanced superyacht was envisaged from naval architects Kusch Yachts and Tim Heywood. Andrew Winch undertook the interior design.

The yacht belongs to Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister - Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani. During the fourth annual World Superyacht Awards ceremony, in the motor yacht categories, Kusch Yachts 133m Al Mirqab won the coveted Motor Yacht of the Year, as well as an award for the interior design by Andrew Winch, and a Judges commendation for the exterior styling by Tim Heywood. The exterior styling award itself went to Francesco Paszkowski for Onyx, built by Sanlorenzo.

Build & Yacht Design with respect to Luxury Yacht AL MIRQAB

Kusch Yachts was the naval architect involved in the professional superyacht design work for AL MIRQAB. Her interior design was realised by Andrew Winch. Kusch Yachts and Tim Heywood is also associated with the yacht general design work for this boat. Germany is the country that Kusch Yachts completed their new build motor yacht in. After the formal launch in 2008 in Wewelsfleth she was afterwards delivered on to the proud new owner following sea trials. Her main hull was constructed with steel. The motor yacht superstructure is made largely with aluminium. With a beam of 19.5 m / 63.98 ft AL MIRQAB has massive size. A reasonably deep draught of 5m (16.4ft) affects the list of certain harbours she can berth in, contingent on their specific depth at low tide.

Max/Min Speed & Main Engines On M/Y AL MIRQAB:

Coupled to the AL MIRQAB engines are twin screw propellers. Her total HP is 13400 HP and her total Kilowatts are 10000. For bow thrusters she utilises X2.

Accommodation Aboard Superyacht AL MIRQAB:

The enormous luxury yacht M/Y AL MIRQAB can accommodate as many as 60 people in addition to 60 qualified crew.

A List of the Specifications of the AL MIRQAB:

Miscellaneous Yacht Details

In October 2009 AL MIRQAB sailed to Palma, in Spain. This motor yacht also navigated the waters including Illes Balears during Sept 2009. As the yacht comes with a helicopter pad onboard, AL MIRQAB can transfer guests and cargo to and from another place.

AL MIRQAB Disclaimer:

The luxury yacht AL MIRQAB displayed on this page is merely informational and she is not necessarily available for yacht charter or for sale, nor is she represented or marketed in anyway by CharterWorld. This web page and the superyacht information contained herein is not contractual. All yacht specifications and informations are displayed in good faith but CharterWorld does not warrant or assume any legal liability or responsibility for the current accuracy, completeness, validity, or usefulness of any superyacht information and/or images displayed. All boat information is subject to change without prior notice and may not be current.

Quick Enquiry

OCTOPUS | From EUR€ 2,200,000/wk

KISMET | From EUR€ 3,000,000/wk

Savarona | From EUR€ 350,000/wk

The Best Yacht Concepts From Around The World

The Stunning Ritz Carlton EVRIMA Yacht

Gliding Across Tokyo’s Sumida River: The Mesmerizing Zipper Boat

CROCUS Yacht: An 48 Meter Beauty by Admiral

• Zuretti Interior Design
• Zuretti Interior
• Zuccon International Project
• Ziyad al Manaseer
• Zaniz Interiors. Kutayba Alghanim
• Yuriy Kosiuk
• Yuri Milner
• Yersin Yacht

• Superyachts

AL MIRQAB Yacht – Stunning $300 Million Superyacht

He commissioned AL MIRQAB, delivered in 2008 from the German shipyard Kusch Yachts and designed by Winch Design, a UK-based design company.

The AL MIRQAB yacht blazed a trail in yacht building trends at the time of its construction because of the numerous large-scale amenities included in its structure.

AL MIRQAB yacht interior

The AL MIRQAB yacht was designed by Winch Design to reflect a perfect cross between a Bentley and the Starship Enterprise, with its palatial family-orientated interior.

She accommodates 55 crew members and 18 guests.

A wide variety of amenities makes this yacht a trailblazer of design.

There is an internal swimming pool with balconies, a large gym, a sauna, and a hairdressing salon.

A notable feature of AL MIRQAB is the underwater viewing room, forward of the pool.

This yacht feature is a family favorite with its pirate’s theme design.

The deck salon has a terrace feel with fountains and casual seating around the sculpture as a centrepiece.

The exterior was designed by Tim Heywood Design, with permanent cantilevered sun wings.

The helicopter pad is fitted with a refueling station that was a first when it was built.

The aft was developed from other projects with additional entertaining and relaxation spaces which delivers a stately arrival and departure for the yacht’s guests.

The steel hull is paired with underwater lights that were a first when it was built.

The mast that towers above the yacht’s superstructure is shaped like a funnel so that the fumes from the engines do not affect guests.

The family lounge is designed to reflect butterflies with a gentle and relaxing concept.

The construction was executed by Kusch Yachts at their shipyard based in Germany.

The design was developed in 2008 with Peters Werft leading the team.

AL MIRQAB is the biggest yacht Kusch Yachts have built at its impressive length of 133m(436.3 ft).

Specifications

AL MIRQAB is 133m(436.3 ft) in length, with a 19m(62.3ft) beam. She displaces 9604GT and has a max speed of 23kn with her five diesel-electric Wartsila engines.

Her cruising speed is sustained at 21kn. She is one of the largest superyachts in the world.

The at anchor stabilizers give a significant amount of comfort to the guests during their experience on the yacht. AL MIRQAB yacht has an annual $20 – $30 million running cost.

Do you have anything to add to this listing?

• Peter Werft
• Tim Heywood
• Winch Design

Love Yachts? Join us.

Related posts.

TALISMAN C Yacht – Unimaginable $60M Superyacht

MADAME GU Yacht – Exclusive $150 Million Superyacht

SOARING Yacht – Grandiose $120M Superyacht

007 Yacht – 49.0m Luxury Superyacht

Forget a private jet or a villa – The former Prime Minister of Qatar actually owns this $300 million megayacht – The 436 feet long vessel has one of the largest spa’s on a yacht, a pirate-themed underwater viewing room for the kids, and even a hairdressing saloon.

You may also like

A line of 85-metre Rolls-Royce designed superyachts on the horizon

Saudi crown prince MBS has bought a chunky stake in Azimut-Benetti, one of the world’s leading megayacht builders

This gorgeous 144-foot superyacht impresses with nearly all-glass interiors by Piero Lissoni, an infinity pool overlooking the sea, and a sprawling master suite.

Thousands have signed a petition calling to convert a $120 million superyacht seized from an oligarch into a hotel for Ukrainian refugees. Captured by French authorities, the 280 feet long luxury vessel has private balconies, a transforming swimming pool, and lavish VIP suites.

Designed for a sci-fi loving wealthy enthusiast – This 276 feet long helium-powered flying superyacht has ultra-luxurious interiors and even a swimming pool.

Scared of getting his superyacht seized, this unsanctioned Russian retail billionaire has turned off the location transponders of his $250 million yacht for more than 3 months now. As long as a football field the vessel comes with a beach club, spa & zero speed stabilizers.

A billionaire family who loves the outdoors is all set to take delivery of their 269-foot-long superyacht in a few months. Built by Lurssen, the sleek vessel has a 30-meter-long sun deck, a spacious beach club, an outdoor cinema, and even a barbecue and pizza oven for scrumptious summers

Climate activists blasted Taylor Swift for the hefty 178,000-mile flight log of her private jets, generating 1,200 tons of CO2 last year. Yet, there was barely a whisper when Jeff Bezos’s escapades on his $500 million Koru yacht belched out 496% more CO2 than all of Swift’s flights combined.

After four secretive years in the making, the lavish 249-foot superyacht has finally been handed over to its billionaire owner.

Find anything, super fast.

• Destinations
• Documentaries

Motor Yacht

Al Mirqab is a 133m motor yacht built in 2008 by Peters Schiffbau in Wewelsfleth. The yacht's stunning exterior was designed by Tim Heywood, whilst her interior design is the work of Andrew Winch Designs.

Built for Middle Eastern Royalty, Al Mirqab is one of the largest and most beautiful yachts on the water.

The magnificent yacht won the coveted ‘Motor Yacht of the Year’ award at The World Superyacht Awards 2009 and won ‘Best Interior Design’ in the motor yacht category for her Andrew Winch-designed interior. Al Mirqab has an aluminium superstructure and a steel hull with a generous beam of 19.5m and a 4.9m draft. She can accommodate up to 60 guests and is capable of carrying up to 60 crew members onboard.

The 133m displacement yacht is capable of an impressive 23 knots flat out, with a cruising speed of 21 knots. She also features ‘at anchor stabilisers’ which work at zero speed, increasing onboard comfort at anchor and on rough waters.  

• Yacht Builder Kusch Yachts View profile
• Naval Architect Kusch Yachts View profile
• Exterior Designer Tim Heywood Design View profile
• Interior Designer Winch Design View profile

Yacht Specs

Other kusch yachts, related news.

• For the record
• 2023 Archive
• 2022 Archive
• 2021 Archive
• 2020 Archive
• 2019 Archive
• 2018 Archive
• 2017 Archive
• 2016 Archive
• 2015 Archive
• 2014 Archive
• 2013 Archive
• 2012 Archive
• 2011 Archive
• 2010 Archive
• 2009 Archive

• Can Ben Ainslie and Jim Ratcliffe win the America’s Cup for Britain? on x (opens in a new window)
• Can Ben Ainslie and Jim Ratcliffe win the America’s Cup for Britain? on facebook (opens in a new window)
• Can Ben Ainslie and Jim Ratcliffe win the America’s Cup for Britain? on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• Can Ben Ainslie and Jim Ratcliffe win the America’s Cup for Britain? on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Tarquin Cooper

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

“We probably had more gin and tonics than we should have,” says Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chairman and CEO of the chemicals giant Ineos, as he looks back on his first meeting with the five-time Olympic medallist sailor Sir Ben Ainslie. It was in 2018 when a mutual friend, the yacht broker Chris Cecil-Wright, introduced the pair at the private members’ club 5 Hertford Street. “It wasn’t an approach really, just a drink,” says Ratcliffe. “And the conversation naturally drifted onto the America’s Cup.”  

He would later joke that it was “the most expensive gin and tonic in history”, after he agreed to back Ainslie’s second campaign to win the coveted Cup, for a reported £110mn. Ainslie had been explaining how the team was at the time backed by a consortium. “I might have said as a throwaway line, if we did get involved, we’d have to do the whole thing rather than sit in a committee,” Ratcliffe recalls. “We’re not very good committee people.”

Ineos Team UK (now Ineos Britannia ) was launched to campaign for the 36th America’s Cup in Auckland, New Zealand in 2021. Despite a disappointing start, which saw them place last in the preliminary regatta, they came top in the round robins and challenged Luna Rossa in the Prada Cup final for the honour of challenging Emirates New Zealand in the America’s Cup final. They lost, but it was the furthest a British team had come since 1964.

For Ratcliffe, 71, the mission is a question of national pride. “It’s the oldest sporting trophy, and a trophy we’ve never won. Sailing is part of the British DNA. We did rule those waves for a few centuries, but we’ve never won the America’s Cup. It would be quite a thing.”

We were three blokes in our 60s who liked sport – why not? Sir Jim Ratcliffe

Ainslie is Britain’s most successful Olympic sailor, winning four golds and a silver between Atlanta 1996 and London 2012, but the America’s Cup has been an ambition since he first set eyes on competing yachts while sailing as a seven-year-old in Falmouth harbour: “I was in total awe of the majesty of these boats, and hooked from then on.” He was part of the winning American team, Oracle USA, for the 34th Cup in 2013 but, like Ratcliffe, he is spurred by the national challenge “of having never won it”. 

Ratcliffe grew up in Failsworth, Lancashire, the son of a joiner who went on to run a factory making laboratory furniture. He studied chemical engineering at Birmingham University, did an MBA at London Business School in 1980, then worked for Esso before going into private equity. He formed Ineos and began to buy up assets from BP and ICI; by 2007 he had petrochemical plants and refineries from Scotland and mainland Europe to Canada. The 2023 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Ratcliffe’s net worth at around £29.7bn, making him the second most wealthy individual in the UK at the time.

He is passionate about sport and adventure. He’s an avid runner, once ran and cycled 600km across Namibia, has climbed the Matterhorn and trekked to the Poles. He says Ineos’s move into sports was a logical progression of that interest – today the company’s portfolio includes Formula One , cycling, Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-2:00 marathon record and now Manchester United. The Qatari businessman Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani had initially hoped to acquire the football club outright, but withdrew from bidding in October, leaving Ratcliffe to buy a 27.7 per cent minority shareholding for a reported £1.25bn. He is set to invest a further $100mn by the end of the year, but would not be drawn on details of the negotiations or future plans for the club.

“There were three of us running Ineos, all in our 60s,” says Ratcliffe, “We’d all been very successful, we’d all worked for a long time, we’re all from the north of England. We all generally liked sport, so why not? It was a bit of fun and a challenge. I think most normal blokes like sport. I know some people go off in different directions, they might like opera or classical music, but the majority enjoy sport.” 

Ratcliffe and Ainslie meet every four to six weeks in one of the Ineos offices, depending on where Ratcliffe is. Today it is the Monaco office, which occupies a couple of floors of a building less than 200m from the Casino de Monte Carlo. Inside it’s all motor racing and Hollywood glamour; a photo of Steve McQueen looms large by the coffee bar; vintage steering wheels and retro prints of Monaco and Le Mans line the walls; miniature Grenadiers (the name of the pub in London where Ratcliffe came up with his idea of making his own version of a Land Rover Defender ) sit on a wooden bookshelf: the windows offer wide views over the harbour. But the largest presence is Ratcliffe himself, whose lean 6ft 4in frame stands over everyone else, Ainslie included.

The secret to their working relationship is that Ratcliffe treats Ainslie like any other of his business interests. “We have board meetings for all our businesses, so we don’t treat sailing any differently to one of the chemical businesses or other sports teams,” says Ratcliffe. Ainslie admits he can’t afford to arrive unprepared. “You can’t turn up here and not know if there’s an issue, have analysed it and understood it because Jim has this knack of understanding what the core of an issue is and trying to get to the bottom of it.” 

“Everything is a learning,” continues Ratcliffe of the decision-making process. “You just sort of home in on it and try to figure out why it’s gone wrong and what we can do to get it back on track. It’s very much consensus driven. There’s no point being hysterical and screaming death. That doesn’t really help. We’ve always said, if there’s any bad news we need to know today. Good news can wait.” 

It’s an insane piece of technology – a wonder of science Sir Jim Ratcliffe

Ratcliffe likens it to F1, where the teams are all engaged in a high-stakes R&D battle to produce a winning car each season. “We’re in a much better place than we were in the previous America’s Cup but, as ever with these things, you don’t know until you actually see all the boats on the water.” Uniquely, Ainslie and the crew can tap into the expertise of the Ineos Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team – Ineos is a one-third equal shareholder. “We are the first team that have really engaged heavily with the F1 industry,” says Ratcliffe. It’s a mine of expertise they can call upon. While the Ineos America’s Cup team is about 200, the Mercedes F1 team, based in Brackley, is 1,000 strong. “There’s a whole host of experts across the group that we can tap into. It’s a huge partnership,” says Ainslie.

“There are lots of similarities between F1 and the America’s Cup,” adds Ratcliffe. “They’re carbon-fibre structures, they’ve both got foils or wings. The calculations are just the same – one’s working in water, one’s working in air, but it’s just a fluid with a different density.”

Besides the designers there’s also the performance expertise of the cycling team Ineos Grenadiers they can dial into. “There’s a lot of expertise that we can understand how to get better performance from our athletes, from sports psychology to physio, you name it,” adds Ainslie. The collaboration has seen the cyclors join the likes of Geraint Thomas and the rest of the Ineos Grenadiers cycling squad on training camps in Mallorca. Although they’re more likely to come from rowing than cycling – Matt Gotrel won a rowing gold in Rio – they were just about able to keep up. “A half-decent cyclist will get up the Sa Calobra climb in 45 minutes but these cyclors are getting there in 30,” says Ratcliffe. 

The official boat design, meanwhile, the AC75 , bears as much resemblance to a traditional “displacement” yacht as Top Gun: Maverick ’s Mach-10 Darkstar does to the Wright brothers’ biplane. “It’s an insane piece of technology, a wonder of modern science,” enthuses Ratcliffe.  

In 2013 hydrofoils were first introduced into America’s Cup yacht design. Acting like an underwater wing, they lift the boat out of the water, freeing it from all resistance. “It’s more like being a pilot these days,” says Ainslie. “There’s a huge amount of energy in these boats,” adds Ratcliffe. “It’s 10 storeys high, 25m long, it travels up to 100kmph and sails on a foil the size of a coffee table. It’s a disaster if you crash them.” Then, in a friendly warning shot across the bow of his skipper, he reminds Ainslie he only has one of them to play with. 

Serious crashes are rare, but in 2013 British sailor Andrew “Bart” Simpson died when the catamaran Artemis capsized, prompting a slew of safety reviews. “We take safety very seriously,” adds Ainslie. Each crew member wears a helmet, carries oxygen and a knife and there are spare air canisters in the cockpit.

The main challenge is getting to the starting line at all. And even then the America’s Cup is brutally unforgiving. First, Ineos Britannia must win the challengers’ regatta just to earn the right to take on the Cup holder, Emirates Team New Zealand . Only then will the real battle begin. The preliminary round takes place in Barcelona in late August, with the final, the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Match , taking place from 12 to 27 October. 

“The next six months are obviously crucial. It’s hard work but it’s what you live for,” says Ainslie. For Ratcliffe, all eyes are on the prize – and there’s only one in this game. “Queen Victoria asked who came second in 1851 and was told, ‘There’s no second, Ma’am, you know,’” he says. “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think winning was possible. There’s no point – no interest – in coming second.” 

Promoted Content

Explore the series.

Follow the topics in this article

• Cars, bikes, planes and boats Add to myFT
• Sport Add to myFT
• Ben Ainslie Add to myFT
• HTSI Add to myFT
• Tarquin Cooper Add to myFT