In the early 1970s, Sweden’s outboard racing scene had a problem that was entirely internal.
Evinrude and Johnson were sold by rival distributors, and those distributors were competing as hard as the racers they backed.
In Stockholm, AGB held the Johnson franchise.
Huzells, run by Bill Huzell, had Evinrude, and Huzell was determined to win.
When Lars Strom won his first major race, Huzell took notice.
Strom had come through the Swedish outboard scene the long way, working in marine dealerships while learning to set up and drive fast.
The breakthrough came in the winter of 1972/73, when the call came from Evinrude Sweden: Huzells would give him the new 65SS engine, purpose-designed to win the UIM SE class.
The condition was straightforward.
Buy a new catamaran from Italy.
Strom drove to Cremona with his father and collected a Clerici hull.
The combination worked immediately.
In 1973 he won the European SE Championship in Lappeenranta, Finland, defeating Roger Jenkins, the OMC factory-backed driver, in the process.
Huzells went from sponsor to serious racing partner.
Then, for the 1974 season, they went further.
The person responsible for what came next was Anita Torpman, Huzells’ PR manager.
She signed ABBA as brand ambassadors for Evinrude.
Lars is precise about the distinction: it was a commercial arrangement between Huzells and the band, not a personal deal involving him.
Speaking to Powerboat News, he said:
“They weren’t a sponsor. They were a brand ambassador. Huzells paid ABBA to use them. Make it 100% clear: I did not have a direct contract with ABBA to sponsor me. It was Evinrude, Huzells, that had it.”
What Torpman’s campaign produced was hard to ignore.
Huzells printed t-shirts featuring Lars’s Clerici race boat alongside the ABBA name and sold them in large numbers.
All four members of the band wore them.
At the 1974 Stockholm Boat Show, Huzells put the Clerici/Evinrude on the stand, ran the Bond film Live and Let Die on a continuous loop, and distributed the t-shirts to the public.
Torpman’s plan also called for Lars to bring his race boat to promotional shoots where Huzells would photograph the band alongside it.
He said no.
“They called me and said: Lars, you’ve got to bring your race boat, we’re going to meet up with ABBA, promote Evinrude and your racing. And I said I don’t have time for that. I was so focused. I was young and not thinking clearly about what I should have done.”
It was not a straightforward mistake to make.
Sponsorship in motorsport was still new in the early 1970s.
Commercial branding on racing cars had only arrived with the Lotus Formula One team in 1968.
Outboard circuit racing was further behind the curve.
And Lars had a more personal reason to be unmoved by the ABBA connection: he already knew roughly who they were, and it had not made much impression.
Benny Andersson had grown up in the same part of Sweden and as a teenager had played in a pop group called the Hep Stars.
Lars remembered the band, but music was not his world.
Racing was.
“I wasn’t into music at all. I was into racing. So when they talked about Benny, I didn’t know at that time what ABBA was going to be. But if I had known, my God.”
On April 6, 1974, three months after the boat show, ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with “Waterloo”.
By the time the Swedish racing season got underway, they were the biggest act in the country.
Lars won the European SE Championship again that year.
He won it again in 1975 and again in 1976, four consecutive titles that put him among the most successful outboard circuit racers in Europe.
He also won the Amsterdam 3-hour race in 1975 and returned repeatedly to the Paris 6 Hours, finally winning the OE class in 1980 with co-pilot Sture Sjoberg after years of trying.
In 1983 he raced his F1 V8 boat at the Stockholm Grand Prix, part of the UIM World Championship, on the Riddarfjärden waterway in the centre of the city in front of an estimated 250,000 spectators.
The Huzells relationship did not survive 1976.
That year, OMC changed policy across Europe, withdrawing from independent distributors and going direct.
Huzells lost the Evinrude franchise, and the commercial structure that had produced the ABBA campaign went with it.
Looking back, Lars is both candid and amused.
“I missed the boat. But I still had part of it, because Huzells sold so many t-shirts with ABBA and my race boat on it. It was everywhere. When I tell people about this now, they don’t care about my racing. They want to know more about ABBA.”
He has kept the racing history alive regardless, through his blog at svera.se, which now runs to hundreds of thousands of words of meticulously documented European outboard history, including photographs that would otherwise have been lost entirely.
Fifty years on, Anita Torpman’s instincts look rather good.
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.
