Will Smith, Tom Brady, and More A-Listers Now Own Electric Boat Racing Teams. Can E1 Break Through?
Will Smith will be rooting on his Team Westbrook in Qatar this weekend at the second race of the 2025 E1. Smith is one of the A-list celebrity owners—the most recent announcement was LeBron James—that the fledgling boat-racing circuit has been able to gather in its two years of racing.
The nine-owner roster also includes Tom Brady, Rafael Nadal, former soccer great Didier Drogba, singer Marc Anthony, DJ Steve Aoki and several others. Aoki’s two-member team took the season’s opening race in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia last month.
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Rodi Basso, the former business director for McLaren’s motorsport business, helped design the battery for the Formula E racecars. He came up with the E1 electric boat-racing concept in 2020 and found financial backers a year later. In a relatively short period, he and the E1 series CEO, Alejandro Agag, who founded Formula E and Extreme E, had signed up Nadal, Anthony, and Aoki, and eventually the others became team owners.
“We will cap the number of teams at 12 from the current nine,” Basso told Robb Report, following the opening race in Jeddah. “In five years, we plan to have those 12 teams in 15 races around the world.”
The raceboats are 23-foot, one-pilot, single-design foilers called RaceBirds, which have to race at the same spec. A male and female pilot swap places during different races of the series. The all-carbon-fiber boats weigh just 1,764 pounds.
They were designed by SeaBird Technologies and Victory Marine, and the propulsion came from Mercury Racing. The 150kW electric motor, powered by a 35 kWh battery, can push the foiler to 50 knots. But racing is not about maintaining this all-out speed along a straight line. The pilots have to manage the boat’s limited energy carefully around the circuits, while also adapting to race conditions.
Team Brady won last year’s world championship, with stiff competition by Smith’s Team Westbrook and Anthony’s Team Miami, but several teams have swapped pilots for this season, so it’s not clear who will dominate 2025. “The teams were all within two or three seconds of each other in Jeddah, and between first and second, was only three tenths of a second,” says Basso. “The competition is very tight.”
The bigger question is whether the series will have the legs to continue into multiple seasons. Attendee numbers at the first race in Jeddah were nearly double that of last year—6,000 in 2024 compared to 10,000 last month. “We’re also seeing an increase in sponsorships,” says Basso. (Mainstream sponsors like Cox have signed on, but so have yacht builders like Azimut.) The series is about halfway to its $1 billion valuation target, says Basso. But the celebrity owners have had an uneven public presence. Not many are showing up to each race, at least en masse, to help draw the spectators. Smith will be the only owner in Doha.
The owners are all at the “peaks of their careers and are very good business people,” says Basso, and believe in the “potential” of E1 racing. “This offered the right ratio of cost and quality and let them be part of something purpose driven,” he says, adding that several have sold shares of their license at five times the initial evaluation. “They’re already capitalizing on this bet,” he says. “They are stakeholders and are keen to get the platform at 360 degrees to grow so they can benefit from it.”
It will also have potential technological benefits beyond boat racing, Basso says, noting a partnership with a tech company that manufactures battery cells for aerospace applications.
The series last year featured A-list race venues like Venice, Monaco and Miami, with the same spots slotted for this year, as well an as-yet undisclosed venue in the Caribbean, another undisclosed stop in Europe, and the races in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which is attempting to position itself as a mainstream tourist destination.
E1 is different than professional powerboat racing, says Basso, which retains at best a small niche following. The SailGP racing circuit, which has struggled financially since its inception five years ago, has developed a similar business model to E1, but on a much larger, more expensive scale.
With the limited appeal of boat racing, how does E1 plan to break into the mainstream? “We’re not only a sport but an expression of technology, so we’ll distinguish ourselves for the sustainability side of the racing,” he says. “We’re also lifestyle. That means a connection to the premium aspects of the hospitality sector, which makes us a bit different compared to the others.”
Maybe. In the meantime, there’s the racing which is fun, exciting and quiet. Here’s where to watch it.
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