Tullio Abbate and Giacomo Sacchi lined up together on the UIM F2 World Championship grid at San Nazzaro this year, uncle and nephew, racing under the same family name that has been carried on Lake Como for more than a century. Neither result decided a championship. But together they carry forward a story that began with a shipwright’s son on a small lake in Lombardy, long before either of them was born.
Races UIM F2 • heads the family yard
m. Alberto Sacchi • Champion Marine, Monaco
Races UIM F2
Runs the Portezza yard with mother Albertina
b. 1974 – d. Jan 1995
Runs the Olbia yard, Sardinia
The founder
Guido Abbate was born on 6 August 1913 in Garzeno, above Lake Como. He grew into one of the pioneers of Italian powerboat racing, a shipwright who put engines on flat-bottomed boats and helped invent the three-point hydroplane hull. In 1946, shortly after the war, the Italian Powerboating Federation gave him its first gold medal, for Pamblo, his prototype fast runabout driven by a surface propeller.
Guido’s yard at Tremezzo, on the shore where the lake divides, became a gathering place for the sport’s early names. Engineers such as Giulio Alfieri, who would go on to lead Maserati, and speedboat champion Mario Verga were regular visitors in the early 1950s. Verga set a world speed record on the water in 1953 in an Abbate hull, powered by the same engine as Juan Manuel Fangio’s Formula 1 Alfa Romeo.
Guido married Paola Zanotta. They had three sons: Tullio, Carlo, known to everyone as Chicco, and Bruno. Guido died on 1 May 1988. Thirty years later, to the day, the village of Portezza named a small square after him.
Tullio: the racer who became a builder
Tullio Abbate, the eldest, was born on 14 July 1944 in Tremezzo. He was racing by sixteen, winning the European Championship at Cannes in 1960 as a co-pilot. Three years later he built and drove his own boat to victory in the Centomiglia del Lario, at nineteen, carrying the number 5 that became his lifelong emblem. The race’s silver trophy, topped with a bronze propeller, could only be kept outright by a driver who won it three times. Tullio eventually did.
His father would not hear of building in fibreglass. Tullio went ahead anyway, breaking away in 1969 to build GRP boats on his own. When Guido retired in 1975, Tullio took over the family yard too and expanded it considerably, delivering as many as 250 boats a year by the mid-1980s.
The Sea Star series, launched in 1979, became his signature design, restyled repeatedly over the decades while its basic lines endured. His client list read like a who’s who of the era: Ayrton Senna, for whom Abbate built the Senna 42 after the two met at the Monaco Grand Prix; Gilles Villeneuve; Bernie Ecclestone; Niki Lauda; Björn Borg; Jacky Ickx.
Formula 1 world champion Alain Prost commissioned an Abbate Offshore Model 36, naming it Mister Nicolas for his son. The boat was later loaned to a film producer and used by Jean-Paul Belmondo for a helicopter-to-boat stunt in the 1983 film Le Marginal.
In 1986 Tullio founded Champion Marine SAM in Monaco with Stefano Casiraghi, the exclusive Abbate dealer for the Principality and the Côte d’Azur. Separately, he raced Offshore Class 1 alongside Jacky Ickx and Matteo de Nora. His daughter Cristina Abbate and her husband Alberto Sacchi took over Champion Marine in 1995.
Tullio raced on into his own boatbuilding career, winning more than 250 races and setting a final world record in 1997 at an average of over 223 km/h. He was honoured with Italy’s highest sporting distinction alongside Theo Rossi di Montelera and Fabio Buzzi.
Tullio Abbate:
“With the sound of my boats, I was able to enchant Herbert von Karajan as well as Diego Maradona.”
Tullio Abbate died on 9 April 2020 in Milan, aged 75, after contracting COVID-19. He had five children: Monica, Cristina, Paola, Lucia and Tullio Jr.
Chicco: the quiet one
Carlo Abbate, always Chicco, was born on 3 August 1945. As a young man he raced a little, following his brothers, but soon realised it was not for him. When Guido died in 1988, Chicco took over the historic Portezza yard and kept it running as a boat storage and maintenance business.
He worked alongside Bruno in building the Grandola ed Uniti yard and the Primatist line, with Pininfarina’s design input. His nephew Tullio Jr later described him as the family’s moderating presence.
Tullio Abbate Jr:
“Zio Chicco was truly the wise one of the dynasty.”
Chicco married Albertina. Their son Simone now runs the Portezza yard alongside his mother. Chicco died on 30 November 2025, aged 80, the last of Guido’s three sons.
Bruno: back to racing, then a family loss
Bruno Abbate, the youngest, was born on 26 July 1951. He grew up working in the family’s boatyards and, in 1973, began racing for himself, winning the European inboard 500cc Sports Class title that year. When his father’s yard passed to him, he launched his own range, Primatist, in 1977.
His racing peaked in 1987, when he won the European, Italian and Mediterranean Class 1 Offshore championships in Gancia dei Gancia, a CUV-built monohull powered by three Isotta Fraschini diesel engines to a design Bruno drew up himself, alongside co-drivers Lamberto Gancia and Tony Gumbiner. The boat was rarely the fastest in the fleet, and the title was only settled at the final round in Guernsey, when a rival crew’s disqualification handed Bruno’s team enough points to take it.
Bruno Abbate:
“Back in 1947, my father was running surface propellers similar to those we use, which everyone laughed at and then copied.”
He married and had two sons, Guidino and Marco.
In January 1995, Guidino Abbate, a promising young powerboat racer, was killed in a road accident near the Argegno bridge, aged 20. Massimo Bordoli, 24, died with him. Bruno founded the Special Team in his son’s memory, and the Primatist “G” line, launched later that year, was named for him.
Bruno counted well beyond the powerboat world among his friends: the singer and author Giorgio Faletti, and F1 powerboat champion Guido Cappellini, who has raced under number 74 ever since, Guidino’s birth year, in tribute. The actor Jerry Calà was more than a friend, partnering Bruno as co-pilot aboard the Primatist 46 in the Venezia-Montecarlo race. Bruno supported the Fondazione La Rosa Blu Onlus, a charity for people with severe disabilities near Grandola ed Uniti, which named a gym in Guidino’s memory. Bruno Abbate died in July 2008, in Milan. His son Marco took over Primatist and now runs the family’s yard in Olbia, Sardinia.
Two generations on, still racing together
Today, Tullio Abbate’s son, also named Tullio, heads the family yard at Schignano and races in UIM F2 for Team Autovision. He is a two-time UIM World Endurance Champion in his own right, winning titles in 2010 and 2019, the latter through victory at the 24 Heures Motonautiques de Rouen.
His nephew, Giacomo Sacchi, son of Cristina Abbate and Alberto Sacchi, races the same championship under a Monegasque licence, having joined the family business at Champion Marine in 2022.
Tullio Abbate Jr:
“It’s a boat tailor-made for a very special client, she’s going to the Costa Brava.”
That was Tullio Jr, on the Miss Villa d’Este, launched last year as the modern evolution of his father’s 2011 Villa d’Este Special. In June this year, at San Nazzaro, uncle and nephew took to the same stretch of water together in the UIM F2 World Championship, a family that has been building and racing boats since before either of their grandfathers was born.
John Moore is the editor of Powerboat News, an independent investigative journalism platform recognised by Google News and documented on Grokipedia for comprehensive powerboat racing coverage.
His involvement in powerboat racing began in 1981 when he competed in his first offshore powerboat race. After a career as a Financial Futures broker in the City of London, specialising in UK interest rate markets, he became actively involved in event organisation and powerboat racing journalism.
He served as Event Director for the Cowes–Torquay–Cowes races between 2010 and 2013. In 2016, he launched Powerboat Racing World, a digital platform providing global powerboat racing news and insights. The following year, he co-founded UKOPRA, helping to rejuvenate offshore racing in the United Kingdom. He sold Powerboat Racing World in late 2021 and remained actively involved with UKOPRA until 2025.
In September 2025, he established Powerboat News, returning to independent journalism with a focus on neutral and comprehensive coverage of the sport.
