GUEST EXPERT
Marit Strømøy – F1 powerboat driver
I have been a professional F1 powerboat driver for 14 years. When I’m not racing the F1 boat, I enjoy a Finnmaster Husky 7. The question I get asked quite often is: ‘What have I learned from racing that I can use in everyday boating?’
There´s no doubt that driving an inshore racing catamaran is very different from driving a normal pleasure boat.
The Finnmaster Husky is more comfortable, more social and I can catch far more fish in it than in my F1 Baba boat!
I use everything I’ve learned from racing boats in my everyday boating, but more importantly it was in everyday boating I learned the first basics of racing. Reading wind, waves and weather are similarities, but in an F1 boat you have very little time to think and react.
In F1 we race on closed circuits with very protected sea conditions. It’s all about balancing top speed and acceleration through six or seven turns on a 2km racecourse.
Unlike a racecar circuit, the surface you race on is in constant change and the key issue is to read the water and the wind. We try to keep as little as possible of the boat actually touching the water, while preventing the front of the boat from taking off on waves and wind. We use a superfast powertrim to tune the angle on the engine and a powerlift to adjust the height of it.
A F1 boat is around 19ft/5.8m long, weighs 550kg including the driver and has an engine of around 400hp. There’s no neutral or reverse, only forward. Inside the cockpit there’s a foot throttle,
powerlift and power trim buttons on the steering wheel. We’re strapped inside a bucket seat with a six-point harness, full face helmet, head and neck restraints device, racing overall and kevlar racing vest. As you’ve all probably understood by now, competing in a raceboat is another game than driving a pleasure boat.
Marit Strømøy is currently the only female F1 driver. In 2015 she won the World Championship round in Sharjah becoming the first woman to ever have won a World Championship race in any topclass in international motorsport. In the 2019 season she was 3rd overall in the F1 World Championship.