When Formula E launched in Beijing in 2014, it arrived with a clear mission. Electric racing was intended to demonstrate that battery-powered vehicles could be exciting, fast and commercially viable while promoting a cleaner future for transport. More than a decade later, the landscape has changed dramatically. Electric vehicles are now a mainstream product in many markets, China has become the global center of EV innovation, and conversations around climate change have entered a more fractious mode. The newest electric racing championship, E1, finds itself entering the market at a very different moment. The series, featuring all-electric hydrofoiling RaceBird boats competing in waterfront cities around the world, still promotes clean technology, but its leadership increasingly believes that sustainability is no longer enough to capture public attention. Instead, E1’s future may depend on demonstrating that electric propulsion simply delivers a better experience. I talked to E1 (and Formula E) founder Alejandro Agag, Sports.com Predict Team Miami pilots Timmy Hansen and Rianna O’Meara-Hunt, and Sports.com Predict Team Miami team principal Steve Curtis. They described a championship that is rapidly evolving from an environmental showcase into one of the world’s most technically fascinating forms of motorsport.
E1: Creating A Different Conversation About Electric Mobility
Agag has spent much of his career launching new forms of electric motorsport. Having founded Formula E before turning his attention to Extreme E and now E1, he has witnessed first-hand how attitudes towards electrification have changed. “When we launched Formula E electric was the future,” says Agag. “Manufacturers were going full electric. Mercedes came in, BMW, and Audi.”
Today, Agag believes the public conversation has moved on. “Sustainability has really lost a lot of its attraction, which is a pity, because the climate problem has not changed, it’s worse than before,” says Aga. “Activists have been incredibly bad for the cause. To destroy a piece of art or to block a highway has exactly the opposite effect. It really repels people. It produces a divorce between the public and sustainability, because those activists wrongly embody environmentalism.”
As a result, E1 is no longer trying to build its identity around sustainability alone. Instead, the championship is increasingly focused on technology, engineering and performance. That does not mean environmental benefits have disappeared. Rather, Agag believes electric mobility is now succeeding for more pragmatic reasons, looking towards the personal car market.
“China is not going to lead because of sustainability reasons,” says Agag. “People are not going to buy an electric car because they’re worried about the environment, but because it’s so much cheaper and so much better, and those cars are being made in China right now. If you look at Chinese electric cars, they are incredible, and they cost $20,000.” Established manufacturers around the world will eventually have to reach similar standards of price and quality if they want to remain competitive.
E1’s Challenge Electrifying The Water
If electric cars have already become familiar, electric boats remain something of a novelty, although Sweden is trying to position itself as a leader in the field. Marine electrification presents a very different engineering challenge from road transport. Water creates constant resistance, charging infrastructure is still limited, and power requirements are prohibitive for longer distances. But Agag still sees clear opportunities.
“Especially small crafts are going to be all electric,” says Agag. “That’s going to come from regulation, especially in lakes and rivers, where regulations are going to ban combustion, because it’s very polluting. You get leaks of oil, and you get pollution going directly into the water that with electric you avoid. Regulation is going to drive that change, and you need to have the technology ready.” E1, he argues, exists partly to accelerate the development of those technologies by providing a competitive testing environment.
Sports.com Predict Team Miami team principal Steve Curtis, however, offers a more nuanced assessment of the challenges ahead. He is the most successful offshore powerboat racer ever, with nine UIM Class World Championships under his belt, the highest total by any individual in the premier class of offshore powerboat racing. He was the youngest-ever World Champion in 1985, and the first Briton to achieve this accolade.
Curtis points out that high-performance marine applications still demand enormous amounts of energy. “The problem with electric with a boat is you’re always under load, so you don’t get any regen,” he says. “You can’t go 100 miles, which is a small journey in a boat. You just can’t get the power,” which he says makes the fastest categories of offshore racing problematic for electric powertrains.
Yet Curtis is far from dismissive about electric propulsion. Instead, he sees hybrid systems playing an increasingly important role. “If you look at a lot of the big ships out there, they’re diesel electric, so an electric engine pushes them,” he says. “It’s more efficient to use the diesel motor as a generator and run an electric motor from that than to drive the thing directly.” Advances in solar generation, onboard energy recovery and battery technology could gradually transform recreational boating too. The future, in other words, may not be exclusively electric overnight, but the direction of travel appears increasingly clear.
Why Driving An E1 RaceBird Rewrites The Rulebook
The comparison between road and water has some parallels in terms of technology, and one of the surprises about E1 is how many road racers have come across from wheeled vehicles to boats. From the outside, spectators might assume that an experienced racing driver would simply transfer their skills from four wheels to the water, but the reality is considerably more complicated.
Timmy Hansen arrived in E1 as one of rallycross’s biggest stars and with considerable success in Extreme E. He expected that many familiar racing principles would carry across. “I just thought it was steering wheel and racing lines, and you have the track, so it must be somewhat similar,” says Hansen. “This went well in the first training.” Then the competition intensified. “As people were going faster, you realize what you need to do with the trim and how you need to drive the boat to go even faster. It’s so different to cars.” In racing cars, lap time is largely found through the corners. In E1 RaceBirds, the straights become the greatest challenge. “Going fast on the straight is where you really need to put in all the work with a boat. It’s really upside down everything.”
Drivers spend much of every straight balancing the boat on its hydrofoils. “The critical thing is to get the trim right so that you are absolutely as high up on the foils as you could ever be to get the maximum speed,” explains Hansen. “But then you’re also very much on the limit because if you miss the foiling, you miss the effect. The more of the boat you have in the water, the more resistance there is. You want to have as little boat in the water as possible. To slow down, we don’t even lift. We just put the hull down in the water to slow down and stay flat out. It’s also about the engine height at the back. We take half of the propeller out of the water, because even the propeller is causing drag.”
The sensation, Hansen says, is one of constantly operating on a knife edge. Any mistake in trim causes the boat to settle back into the water, dramatically increasing drag and costing valuable speed. “It really feels like you’re on the limit,” he explains. The physics are so different that many instincts developed in circuit racing must be deliberately unlearned, particularly in cornering. “The shorter the corner, the more aggressive you can be in the boat because there’s also a momentum thing, whereas the speed itself helps you to lift out of the water. If you had speed coming in, you have more speed in the middle, making you come out faster. That’s not usually how it works in cars. There, the slower you come in, the faster you go out, and you balance it that way.”
He describes the process almost like solving an engineering puzzle. Understanding the underlying physics is only the first step. The real challenge is translating those physical principles into instinctive driving techniques that become second nature at racing speed.
How E1 Racers Read The Water
Hansen’s teammate Rianna O’Meara-Hunt’s experience mirrors his despite her arriving from a completely different racing background. Having built her career in karting and GT racing, O’Meara-Hunt entered E1 with virtually no boating experience beyond riding jet skis. Within a single week she learned how to launch, park and drive a RaceBird before earning the license needed to compete.
Yet adapting to competitive racing required far more than basic boat handling. “I’ve always worked with a surface that never changes unless it rains,” says O’Meara-Hunt. “The tarmac is always the same, and you’re always going around the same corner, choosing the same line, whereas in these RaceBirds, you’re having to read the water a lot and choosing where to place the boat, depending on how choppy it is.”
Every passing vessel creates fresh waves. Wind conditions evolve throughout the day. The actions of competitors reshape the surface from one lap to the next. Drivers therefore spend much of each lap reading the water ahead, selecting different lines depending on changing conditions while simultaneously managing trim, lift and power delivery. “It is very different,” says O’Meara-Hunt. “The water is changing every single second.”
Ironically, one of the most familiar aspects is the steering wheel itself. “It’s got paddles, which you’d use to change gears in a car,” says O’Meara-Hunt. On a RaceBirt, these operate trim and lift rather than gear changes. “It’s nice to be able to feel like you’re doing the same movements. The radio button’s in the same place, and we have a boost button, so that’s new to me as well, learning where to put those boosts in. But when you’re in the cockpit, it does feel the same as when you’re in a race car.”
That familiarity, however, disappears the moment the boat begins flying. One of the biggest lessons she has learned is not to overdrive the boat. When the RaceBird is balanced correctly on its foils, the fastest approach is often to remain calm and avoid making unnecessary corrections.
Learning An Entirely New Discipline With E1
Curtis believes that explains why drivers from such varied backgrounds can succeed in E1. “There’s a lot to be brought from motorsport,” he says. “You’ve got some brilliant drivers here from F1 powerboat racing, and you’ve got Dani [Clos], who’s been a test driver in the F1 car.” They have all shown flashes of speed, yet none has been immediately dominant. Instead, success comes through understanding an entirely new discipline.
However, it’s a discipline that combines elements of other types of racing. “It’s like driving a GT car, because it’s moving around,” says Curtis. “There’s a lot to be brought from foiling, you got a great mix of different disciplines here, and the foiling guys do well, but not all of them.” Every driver arrives with useful experience, but every driver still has something significant to learn.
One of the frustrations, according to both Curtis and O’Meara-Hunt, is the limited amount of testing available. Drivers typically receive very little practice before qualifying begins. O’Meara-Hunt recalls that additional practice sessions before her debut in Jeddah transformed her confidence, whereas arriving in Dubrovnik with only a single session before qualifying left far more unanswered questions. Curtis believes additional access to standardized foiling boats away from race weekends could accelerate learning considerably, allowing competitors to develop feel and understanding rather than experimenting during precious race sessions.
E1 Going Beyond The Environmental Message
Like the technology itself, the championship remains in its formative years. O’Meara-Hunt describes E1 as still being “in its infancy”, while Curtis notes just how dramatically performance has improved since the first season. “When it all first started off, there was 10 seconds of lap difference,” he says. Those margins have now shrunk dramatically as drivers, engineers and teams collectively understand the boats more deeply.
Hansen sees similar momentum. He believes the races are becoming increasingly competitive, while the championship itself continues to grow in stature. “The races are exciting, but most of all, when you’re there in person, the events are so impressive,” he says. Future expansion could come through additional fleets of boats operating in different regions, making a larger global calendar more practical while reducing the logistical complexity of transporting equipment around the world. Electric propulsion itself may help unlock many of those venues. Unlike traditional powerboat racing, electric RaceBirds can compete in environmentally sensitive waterfront locations where combustion-powered racing would struggle to gain permission.
Despite the de-emphasis of sustainability for E1, this remains a key element of the powerboat racing series. For Agag, environmental benefits remain important but are no longer the primary sales pitch. For Curtis, electrification represents an engineering challenge whose solutions will eventually spread throughout the wider marine industry. For Hansen and O’Meara-Hunt, the attraction lies in mastering one of the most technically demanding racing machines they have ever encountered.
Putting this all together, E1 represents an innovation in electric motorsport. Formula E spent much of its early life proving electric racing could exist. E1 is increasingly trying to prove something different: that electric technology can create entirely new forms of competition that would be difficult, or perhaps impossible, to achieve with conventional combustion engines. If that proves true, the championship’s greatest contribution may not ultimately be changing opinions about sustainability. Instead, it may be demonstrating that when engineers are freed from trying simply to replace combustion engines, they can invent something altogether new.
