After welcoming Francis Joyon into Brest, Dame Ellen MacArthur ranked his “awesome” achievement as one of the greatest feats in sailing history. Then, with a twinkle in her eye and steel in her voice, she said it was possible to go under 55 days.

“I think it is possible to get it below 55 with the bigger boats,” MacArthur said. MacArthur had done her arithmetic before Joyon had departed at the end of November and expected her record to be significantly improved.

“I thought it would go by over ten days, I said that,” MacArthur said. “So many things can come into the equation, but with average weather and a bigger boat you’ll go faster, which is why I knew he’d break the record as long as he didn’t break the boat.”

Where does this end? Will MacArthur come back with a 115ft boat, does the future hold 200ft multihulls? “It depends what the human being is capable of dealing with,” she said. “Because the boats get bigger, but the human machine running them doesn’t change size.”

MacArthur did not sound remotely chippy as she analysed Joyon’s feat, but just provided the perspective of one who knows what it takes. “Judging from my average speeds I could easily have taken a week off my record,” she said. “I was five days ahead at Cape Horn and I could quite easily have picked up two days in the South Atlantic if I had had good wind.”

Is she hungry to get her record back? “It’s not about having it back. It’s not [a case of] ‘he’s got it, you’ve got it,’ ” she said. “But it creates another opportunity to have another go.”

MacArthur, 31, sounds like someone planning her next attempt on the record but insists a tilt at the 2012 Vendée Globe is likely to be her next big venture.

The memories, good and terrifying, came flooding back to MacArthur while she watched Joyon. She is one of the few people on the planet who knows where he has been mentally and physically. She ranks this record as the hardest feat in yachting. “Yes, I think it is,” she said. “You can’t describe how stressful it is sailing a boat that fast for that long.

“The Vendée is hard, stressful and competitive and you’re tired, but you don’t have the same mental drain as this. In the Vendée there are times when you can take it easy, whereas in a multihull if you get things wrong you will flip, that’s the reality you’re living with the whole time.”

Her final word? “I think he’s [Joyon] had a very similar experience to me, but obviously [it has lasted] two weeks less,” she said, laughing.