Diesel powerboat Guinness world speed record

Last March, this powerboat, with an hull developed by Fabio Buzzi’s FB Design, was able to enter into the Guinness World Record history, beating the previous record made in 1992.

The record of fastest diesel powerboat took place on the Como Lake, in Italy, and it was achieved thanks to a new engine that FPT Industrial developed together with FB Design. Born for the agriculture field, where it powers combines and forage harvesters and it was able to win the Diesel of the Year 2014 award, the Cursor 16 was turned into a marine engine capable of delivering a power of more than 1,700 hp.

FPT Industrial and FB Design have been collaborating for 35 years, and this partnership lately turned into a powerboat characterised by new innovative technologies, such as those for the turbocharging system where multiple electronic variable geometry turbo solutions have been introduced. Furthermore, the cooling system now features a single-direct circuit, with a water intake step-change solution inside the boat’s rudder.

The collaboration also resulted in new marine concepts, such as the aluminium extruded exhaust manifold on the last generation electronic Common Rail base engine, characterised by steel pistons.

In order to achieve this world record success, FPT Industrial relied on the great expertise of its plants and Research and Development centres. The plant of Pregnana Milanese, specialised in the customisation of marine engines, played an important role in the development of the Cursor 16, as well as the Turin Testing Centre and the R&D centre in Arbon, Switzerland. Here the engine was optimised and tested, using the great knowhow gained in other racing projects to modify the fuel injection system.

The Arbon R&D Centre has always been a great protagonist beneath rallies like the Dakar and the Africa Eco Race, due to the technological ground-braking innovations that characterised its history. Arbon is, in fact, the birthplace of the first diesel truck engine, of the Common Rail Injection system, of the first application of a variable geometry turbocharger on a diesel engine as well as the first Common Railon a Light Commercial Vehicle. Finally, in 2011, Arbon developed FPT Industrial’s patented HI-eSCR(High Efficiency Selective Catalytic Reduction).

All these innovations apply even to the racing the field, where FPT Industrial has found a great partner over three decades ago. FB Design and FPT Industrial have won 32 titles together, including 15 world championships in different classes and 17 International trophies: seven in Europe, four in South America and six in Italy. Buzzi’s hulls, powered by FPT Industrial, have won speed races throughout the 1980’s and triumphed in the 2012 New York-Bermuda race with the ‘Col Moschin’ boat, equipped with two C90 650 engines. These same engines even won a broaching during the Montecarlo-Venezia race in 2011with the ‘Kerakoll FPT’, while the ‘Red FPT’ was fitted with four N67 600 engines when it won the Marathon World Cup in 2010.

All these achievements, together with the latest Guinness World Record, testify the efforts of FPT Industrial in this field as well as the high performance and reliability of its engines, that are now closer to the final customer thanks to the new Cursor 16 marine, born from a world record-breaking engine.