Marit Strømøy Brings Racing Galla Back to Wallmans Oslo

Marit Strømøy has invited friends, sponsors, team-mates, family and race fans to the annual Racing Galla at Wallmans Oslo on Wednesday, April 22. The event, which has grown into an over-ten-year tradition, serves as the official season kick-off for Strømøy Racing and promises a three-course dinner, live music and show from Wallmans’ artists, and a few surprises.

Tickets are available from the Strømøy Racing webshop.

The choice of venue is fitting. Strømøy spent seven years performing at Wallmans Salonger, completing more than 1,000 shows, before powerboat racing and its demands on her time took over. Now she returns each year to the same stage, this time to celebrate the season ahead rather than close out a show.

From Sandefjord to Sharjah

Strømøy’s story begins in Sandefjord in 1976. Her father, Leif, had raced since the mid-1960s and ran a boat workshop with his wife Kirsten. In 1989, at the age of twelve, she tagged along to a national race meeting at Tvedestrand and ended up competing by chance. She has not stopped since.

She progressed through the S-550 catamaran class, winning the European Championship three times (1996, 1998, 1999) and the Nordic Championship twice before stepping up to F2 in 1999. In 2007, she made her F1H2O debut as the first woman to compete in the World Championship in the modern era.

In 2011, racing for Team Nautica with a boat built by Baba Racing, she took pole position at Portimão, Portugal – the first woman to earn pole in any top international motorsport class. She led for fifteen laps before a collision ended her race. Four years later, in Sharjah in December 2015, she converted a different opportunity into victory, becoming the first woman to win an F1H2O World Championship Grand Prix.

I’m not racing to run a feministic campaign. I’m racing Formula 1 powerboats because I’m good at it and because I truly believe that I can win.Marit Strømøy

She has five career podiums from 103 Grand Prix starts. Her best championship result came in 2019, when she finished third overall. In 2024, running a Mercury four-stroke V8 360 APX engine – a development project she has pursued since 2023 – she finished seventh in the championship, with fourth place at the Regione Sardegna Grand Prix of Italy her best result of the season.

A team built on family

Leif Strømøy died suddenly of a heart attack in 2009. The same year, Marit met Italian mechanic Andrea Colombo, then working at Team Abu Dhabi. They married and now run Strømøy Racing together from the workshop in Sandefjord. In 2012, they expanded the team to include a junior programme, which has developed drivers through GT15 and F2. Andrea also built a two-seater F1 boat in 2013, used for demonstrations and promotional work across Norway.

Strømøy Racing is the largest and oldest powerboat racing team in Norway. The Energima sponsorship, which has run for more than a decade, funds much of the team’s programme, including Marit’s parallel music career that has seen her record professionally alongside racing at the highest level.

Music alongside the racing

Strømøy began piano lessons at age seven and secured her first professional singing contract at twenty. The seven-year Wallmans tenure and more than 1,000 shows gave her a parallel career that she has maintained throughout her F1H2O years. She has competed twice in Melodi Grand Prix, Norway’s Eurovision Song Contest qualifier, and continues to tour with her band. In November 2025, she released the single “Last to Know”, recorded at Stargate Studios in Trondheim.