Sport, Science, Celebrity: Behind E1's New Era of Marine EVs

When E1's Chief Scientist Carlos Duarte, distinguished professor of marine science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, was first approached about helping to build a new powerboat series, his instinct was to say no.​

“I never thought that I would be working on sports, particularly motor sports, because I don’t really enjoy much noise and fumes and actually burning fuel for fun,” Carlos recalls.​

Electric propulsion changed the equation for him though.

“Electric motor sports have a different value proposition,” he says, because they allow boats to operate “without introducing chemical pollution and noise that comes from combustion engines”.​

On land, electric vehicles have already become a familiar part of the energy transition.

On water, Carlos points out, electric mobility is “lagging behind 15 years” and still routinely cedes rivers, lakes and coasts to internal combustion.​

E1 is pushing to close that gap currently. By putting fully electric foiling powerboats in front of a global television audience, the series is trying to compress those 15 years of delay into just a few seasons.​

Efficiency as a competitive edge

For Ben King, Co‑Team Principal of Team Brady, the lure of E1 was always about more than silverware.

“E1 is an incredible platform for promoting sustainable technologies, for helping to restore the health of our oceans,” he says.

Joe Sturdy, who is the other half of Team Brady's leadership duo, has a background in Formula 1 engineering and sees E1 as a kind of laboratory.

“We are a team of engineers, most people in the team have got some kind of engineering background. We have a no-stone-unturned approach when it comes to performance and creating efficiency within the team and within everything that we do,” he explains.​

On the water, that means endlessly refining how the electric powerboats fly on their foils, managing power delivery and battery usage to extract maximum speed from a finite energy budget.​

Off the water, it means applying the same mindset to logistics, operations and even clothing.

“It’s been great to translate that approach across to the sustainability work because we can have the same approach,” Joe says.

“We look for marginal gains in all areas, just small improvements, building on what has been done before, not being scared of imperfections and just trying to trend towards having the impact that we want to have.”​

What is E1's Blue Impact Championship?

The Blue Impact Championship, an initiative introduced after E1’s first season, gave structure to all that ambition.

The idea came about after E1's organising body decided to bring an element of competition to the sustainability endeavours of each of the teams, with a trophy presented to the league's most sustainable team at the end of every season.

Carlos describes E1 as “a sport with a purpose”, where the aim is “not just to entertain and advance technology of electric mobility, but also to deliver the highest possible positive impact on aquatic ecosystems".

So, how does the Blue Impact Championship work? Teams are judged by an independent jury on the rigour and scale of their projects, from cutting emissions and noise to tackling plastic waste and improving water quality.​

For engineers, it is effectively a parallel competition to the racing itself.

Carlos argues that this competitive framing matters for energy and technology as much as for conservation.

“Sports is about breaking the limits of the possible,” he says, and competition “to deliver impact pushes the boundaries of the type of impact that we can deliver.”​

In Blue Impact, he likes to say, “regardless of who wins, we all win”, because the collective portfolio of projects accelerates the adoption of cleaner technologies in waterways worldwide.​

Yet the inaugural title still had to go to a single team, and this year the jury converged on Team Brady.​

A blueprint for the marine energy transition

Carlos believes that experiments like E1’s can influence far more than a single sport.

Electric powerboats, he argues, can “advance technology, in this case, electric mobility on water”, and in doing so demonstrate new pathways for people and industries to “contribute to solving problems in the ocean".​

Crucially, he thinks the days of waiting for policy alone to drive the transition are over.

“It has become crystal clear that the solution is not going to come from policy makers and governments. It has to come from broadly from society,” he says, with the private sector and sport acting as “great mobilisers”.​

What's more, E1's ability to communicate messages of sustainability to large audience is multiplied greatly by the A-Listers that are involved in running the teams. 

With icons like Tom Brady, Rafael Nadal and Steve Aoki in charge of the crews, E1 hopes that its message of sustainability will reach far more people that it otherwise would.

The technology is where E1's influence really comes alive, though.

“If everybody just looks at the marginal gains and looks at just taking small steps in the right direction together, everyone can benefit from it,” Joe explains.​