SailGP’s £5m F50 catamarans are built in a Southampton factory

Anyone who has been part of a crew during a typical sailing regatta will know that it can be a simultaneously frantic, thrilling, uplifting, terrifying, energising and exhausting business – even when top speeds fail to breach double figures. But regattas can be dull affairs when watched from afar and must have prompted more than a few spectators to ask: why can’t yacht racing be more like Formula 1?

It was a question said to have been on the mind of American software billionaire and double America’s Cup victor Larry Ellison when he set out to join forces with Olympic gold medal sailor and three times America’s Cup winning skipper Russell Coutts to launch the Rolex SailGP Championship in 2019 – an on-shore race series designed specifically to entertain the crowds.

It’s run along the lines of a typical ‘formula’ motor racing championship in as much as all competing boats must be built to a strict set of rules in order to make them identical. In this case, they are F50 50ft catamarans that fly across the water on high-tech foils at speeds of up to 60mph.

Each boat carries six crew (at least one of whom must be female) and costs a staggering £5m to build – £550,000 of which is accounted for by the carbon-fibre wing sails in heights of 18m, 24m or 29m, which have to be attached to the hulls using giant cranes.

The major expense of constructing the F50s hasn’t prevented SailGP from growing rapidly and, while it cost around £4m to get involved in the series at the beginning, it now costs £45m to buy a team outright. And, with a new addition arriving next year to bring the tally to 14 teams, the proposed cap of 20 is expected to be met soon.

Formula 1 champion Sebastian Vettel was among the first to sign up as a co-owner of the German Deutsche Bank team, followed by soccer star Kylian Mbappé (DS Automobiles France) and Hollywood actors Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, both of whom have stakes in the Australian Bonds Flying Roos team.

British Olympic sailing hero Sir Ben Ainslie is also heavily involved in the championship as the CEO of the Emirates GBR team, which was last year’s overall winner.

Teams are limited to a £7.4m annual budget, a sum soon absorbed by the costs of competing in a series for which the winner receives ‘only’ £1.5m (out of a total £9.7m prize pot) having travelled to 13 venues around the world.

While the idea for the series was a sound one, its success became all the more likely when Rolex came ‘on board’ as title sponsor from the start.

It’s well known that the mighty Crown doesn’t enter into such partnerships lightly or without extensive research, and its people know the difference between a sailing event that’s a goer and one that isn’t, since Rolex has been involved in the nautical world for more than 70 years and today backs six other world-class sailing events, a dozen top sailors and 15 yacht clubs.

“I don’t think we would be where we are today without Rolex,” says SailGP managing director Andrew Thompson before the Portsmouth round of this year’s championship. “It has made us a premium brand because it pushes us technically and gives us a market to aspire to. More broadly, it has attracted investors to SailGP who may not otherwise have considered getting involved.”

The Rolex Sail GP Championship has turned out to be something of a success story for British industry and craftsmanship, too. Shortly before the Portsmouth event, Motor Sport was given a rare chance to visit SailGP Technologies at Hedge End, Southampton, which had the feel of some of the F1 team facilities dotted around the counties of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire.

In this case, however, a 64,000sq ft former Amazon warehouse has been transformed into an ultra high-tech F50 factory producing three boats per year. Each takes 47,000 hours of construction time with the input of 150 people, 75 of whom follow the championship around the globe to help maintain the boats, with nine of those solely responsible for looking after the carbon fibre-tipped, titanium foils which enable them to ‘fly’ at up to three times the speed of the wind that’s driving them.

It was truly impressive to see how the design harnesses the power of nature during the Portsmouth round, at which a 20,000-strong crowd enjoyed some truly thrilling close-to-shore competition in perfect, sun-soaked conditions.

The 10 group races produced 10 different winners, with the knock-out format culminating in a four-boat final that saw Spanish team Los Gallos take the spoils to mark its second consecutive event win after its June victory in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

And was it as exciting as watching an F1 race? Some said it was considerably more so – and, at times, we were inclined to agree.

Remaining events in the 2026 Rolex SailGP calendar are Dubai (November 21-22) and Abu Dhabi (November 28-29). sailgp.com