It was in 2020 when, in the midst of the lockdown Alejandro Agag and Rodi Basso, Founder and Chairman and Ceo and Co-founder of E1 respectively, walking along the banks of the Thames laid the foundations of a project that has become, within four years, a worldwide event.
We are talking about the E1 Series, the world championship of electric powerboats sailing on the foils.
How do these boats “fly”?
The foiling system makes it possible to reduce friction as much as possible, which no longer involves the entire hull, but only a portion of the appendages.
To do this safely at high speeds requires hours and hours of study, added to incredible experience and expertise.
And behind the “flight” of Racebirds is Italian ingenuity.
Mario Cap onnetto of Caponnetto Hueber, the guru in the foil world; Brunello Acampora of Victory Marine, an offshore expert; and Matteo Parsani, a former NASA engineer and now a professor of applied mathematics and computational science at KAUST in Saudi Arabia, are the hard core of the team that has taken these boats and their technology to the highest level of development.
Image source: www.kaust.edu.sa
From competition to everyone’s boats
the E1 UIM World Championship is an incubator of ideas, a platform where issues related to sustainable mobility at sea can be shared, a space, in short, in which to lay the foundations for the future.
A future that in this case also speaks Italian.
The RaceBirds, the boats with secant carbon foils and rear elevator with which the world championship is being raced, were indeed born from a design by Sophi Horne’s Norwegian SeaBird Technologies, but they were then engineered and built in Italy taking advantage of the direct contribution of two heavyweights such as Brunello Acampora of Victory Marine, who has long experience in the world of offshore hull design, and Mario Caponnetto of Caponnetto Hueber, considered today’s guru in the world of foils.
These two aces were joined by a third: Matteo Parsani.
A Bergamasque, former engineer at Nasa, Parsani now teaches applied mathematics and computational science at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
Considered among the most prestigious universities on the international scene it also has the Shaheen III, one of the most powerful computers in the world.
“We asked Professor Parsani to help us develop software that can make the foils and hull of RaceBirds perform even better while also reducing noise pollution in the water generated by the propellers. Today the technical and physical limit found in racing is 51 knots then cavitation comes into play and the boat falls into the water,” comments Rodi Basso, CEO of the company.
But the bar is set to be raised even higher.
“As an event that turns over several stages around the world we are working to obtain, as early as the 2025 season, ISO 20121 certification as a zero-impact event.”
