'We haven’t flipped yet, but we’ve been close': Making waves on Lake Como with Will Smith and Star Wars-style electric boats
Adam Hay-Nicholls heads to the shores of Lake Como to see the Star Wars-style boats taking on the glamour of Formula 1.
You join me on a shore of Lake Como for a scene from a James Bond film. We are at the palatial Villa d’Este, the famed grande dame hotel that’s hosted the Who’s Who of Hollywood, from Chaplin to Clooney and Garbo to Gaga. A hundred impeccably-dressed and well-heeled guests, drawn from around the world, sip Telmont Champagne on the gravelled terrace. Others totter into Riva tenders to get a closer look at the action. On the water, almost silent, is the stealthy spectacle they’ve come to witness: A bunch of 'Star Wars'-inspired hydrofoil speed boats duking it out around a rippling race track marked by buoys.
This is Spanish entrepreneur Alejandro Agag’s latest production. Having created the first electric car racing championship, Formula E, more than a decade ago, and done the same with off-road rallying in the form of Extreme E, he has now taken to the seas. Formula E was about making electric motorsport credible, and giving car manufacturers a global platform to develop and show off their EV tech. Extreme E was about taking cameras to places where the environment is under threat and funding climate initiatives. E1 Series, this all-electric regatta, intends to make battery-based mobility glamorous.
'On water, every single lap is completely different; the water’s getting rougher, the wind, the turbulence, the current; there’s a lot going on'
There are 10 teams fielding two drivers each: a man and a woman. In addition to the drivers and technicians, the bijou paddock that’s been formed alongside the Villa d’Este’s floating swimming pool is populated by investors, socialites and influencers. Forget grandstands full of punters like you’d find at Silverstone, or Wimbledon or Wembley for that matter. This is essentially a garden party. I daren’t imagine what the cost of this event is divided by the number of spectators in situ. Tickets can be bought for €1,500 a pop, which includes lunch and an open bar. Yet E1’s proposition is that motorsport is no longer merely competition, it’s content. E1 Series is custom made for watching on TikTok. It’s got crashes, speedy technology and sexy locations. It’s highly ‘clippable’, it’s aspirational, and it boasts personalities that social media goes crazy for.
Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Jaguar; many well-known automotive brands invested in Formula E. They all have a fan following. Now I’m sure boatbuilders have their own loyal base, but Sunseeker, Benetti and Princess don’t have the same cut-through. The pilots don’t have the same name recognition either: Sir Lewis Hamilton isn’t battling Sir Ben Ainslie out there, alas. So Agag had a brainwave. Celebrities can bring their own brands. They can invest in teams and be the face of the series.
Marcelo Claure, Will Smith and Rafael Nadal are all invested in E1 Series, adding Formula 1 style glamour to this new event.
E1’s team owners include movie star Will Smith, DJ Steve Aoki, basketball legend LeBron James, NFL GOAT Tom Brady, footballer Didier Drogba, cricketer Virat Kohli, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, pop star Marc Anthony, and tennis sensation Rafael Nadal. They post about E1 to their millions of Instagram followers. Some, apparently, get quite hands on with the teams themselves. I’m told Brady is almost unbearably competitive, and Nadal is much the same. Jamie Copas is E1’s CEO. He explains the model of team ownership: ‘The celebrities are investing their time, their brand and their social media profile. It’s about their engagement.’
I asked Thibaut Courtois, who plays for Real Madrid, why he signed up. ‘I love the water, boats. My wife, she loves it, she has her skipper licence. And obviously the electrical thing, it’s not polluting the nature. Electric propulsion, I think it’s the way forward.’ Would he like to drive one of these E1 boats himself? ‘I’m 6ft 7in. Unfortunately I can’t fit.’
Aside from the very expensive hotels and indulgent spreads, the logistics and operational costs, much of the budget goes towards the boats, christened RaceBirds. These stock racing machines, which cost about €1 million, are fascinating pieces of engineering, with advanced propulsion and hydrofoils that can lift them clear of the water. Carbon-fibre foils reduce drag and the RaceBird makes significantly less wake than a conventional powerboat. The result is a cross between a fighter jet, a Formula E car and that thing Pierce Brosnan rode up the Thames in The World is Not Enough.
Don’t imagine it’ll go as fast as an F1H20 world championship powerboat, though, because it doesn’t. An F1H20 boat has a 400bhp internal combustion engine and a top speed of 140mph. E1’s RaceBird’s electric motor produces 200bhp and can only muster 58mph. Despite that, when the racing is close and they start banging into each other, it’s exciting.
‘I wish they were faster, but we do still go airborne a lot,’ says Sara Price, 33, who is the first American woman to win a stage of the Dakar rally, and who races in E1 for Will Smith’s team. ‘We haven’t flipped yet, but we’ve been close. But it’s pretty safe. Off-road is way harder on your body.’
The 20 drivers — or pilots — are drawn from different disciplines, which is also compelling. Ten come from four-wheeled motorsport, six from powerboating, two from sailing, and there’s one jet ski champion and one kitesurfer.
Oban Duncan, 19, is a ten-time British powerboat champion. She’s also a health-and-safety consultant in Glasgow. This endeavour doesn’t seem very health-and-safety-ish, I proffer. ‘No, it isn’t, but it’s my passion. I’d be very bored sitting at home if I wasn’t here.’ She undertook testing duties when the RaceBird was still in its development. Having grown up on the water, does this give her an advantage over those that only raced on land before? ‘The RaceBirds are so different to any other powerboat,’ she says, ‘because of the hydrofoils. It’s a lot harder, it’s about balancing the boat.’
Before getting into motorsport, Jamaica’s Sara Misir, 28, was an equestrian. ‘It’s the pilots who make a difference. Everyone gets the same thing; same weight, same engine, so it’s about strategy, team communication, and adapting to your surroundings. It’s not like on a race track where the surface and the braking points stay the same. On water, every single lap is completely different; the water’s getting rougher, the wind, the turbulence, the current; there’s a lot going on. Also the locations we visit are very different. Lake Como is fresh water and deep. Jeddah is open water, saltwater, with very different waves and grip levels.’
'We have great potential, given the team owners we have: Tom Brady, LeBron, Marc Anthony, Will Smith. We have Miami. We need to have New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC. We need to make it bigger, consolidate it, make a fanbase'
Catie Munnings talks to Erik Stark of Sierra Racing Club.
I would have thought those with powerboat racing experience would have a marked advantage, but apparently not. Catie Munnings, 28, who also works as a TV presenter, says she’s had no difficulty adapting despite coming from rallying. ‘I was matching the lap-times of the powerboaters straight away. The throttle, the steering wheel, the racing instincts; it’s all the same. I love it. Where the main difference, though, is that with cars the more you push, the more aggressive you are, the more you’re rewarded. Here you don’t, you just fall off the foil. You need to have a real feel for it to be competitive. One advantage I think we have over the powerboaters is that the way you trim, which is controlling the angle of the engine, is the complete opposite of how you would drive a boat without foils. In a way, we car racers don’t bring any bad habits.’
Munnings and many of the other pilots didn’t even have their powerboat licence before getting called up. ‘I got it in November and the first race was in January. It was very last minute. Imagine racing in the World Rally Championship three months after driving a car for the first time. The thing is, the boats aren’t that hard to drive, they’re just hard to get the maximum from. You basically stay on full-throttle the whole time, even around hairpins. When you start to turn, the drag from the foil pitches you into the corner and it’s like applying the handbrake. You’re concentrating on the trim levels, moving the engine at 0.1 of a degree at a time to power out of corners, and that’s the tricky bit.’
'When you start to turn, the drag from the foil pitches you into the corner and it’s like applying the handbrake'
The series is now in its third season, and has already visited Jeddah, Venice, Puerto Banus, Monaco, Doha, Dubrovnik, Lake Maggiore, Lagos and Miami. Luanda, in Angola, and the Bahamas appear on the calendar for the first time this year.
‘The future is in the USA,’ Agag tells Country Life. ‘We need to expand a lot there. We have great potential, given the team owners we have: Tom Brady, LeBron, Marc Anthony, Will Smith. We have Miami. We need to have New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC. We need to make it bigger, consolidate it, make a fanbase.’ There are eight races scheduled in 2026. I’d like 12 races a year, with six of them in the USA. And we have room for another couple of teams.’
Who is paying for all this? Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) own 50% of E1. The main commercial partners are Hublot and Bombay Sapphire. Angola and Nigeria are putting money in to sponsor Smith’s Westbrook Racing team and Drogba’s Global Africa team and will host the rounds in Luanda and Lagos in September and October respectively. In addition to its social media reach, the series is broadcast in more than 140 territories. In the UK, you can watch it live on ITV4, ITVX and YouTube.
Powerboating was big in the 1980s, but it got overtaken by Formula One and MotoGP. E1 hopes that its many overlaps — motorsport, celebrity culture, telegenic locations, innovation, sustainability and environmental storytelling — can draw Gen Z to the water’s edge. The plan is to grow its young, tech-savvy, glamour-hungry audience and attract bigger blue chip sponsors. But PIF announced in April that it’s to stop funding LIV Golf, citing mounting losses. War in the Middle East is causing the money taps to be turned off. That’s got to make Agag nervous.
E1 is exclusive and excessive. It feels rather like pre-war motorsport or F1 in the 1960s and ‘70s, when there were no sponsors. A lot of money was spent on having a good time and they’d worry about how they’d settle the bill on Monday. Once upon a time we’d have referred to it as a playboy’s sport — but of course half the heroes here are women, and cheers to that.
Whether E1 proves a commercial success remains to be seen, but in the meantime, it sure is a lot of fun.
