William Leithe-Martinsen lines up for Team Sharjah for the first time this weekend, as the 2025 UIM F4 European Champion returns to the UIM F4 World Championship at Viverone for rounds three and four of the season.
The Norwegian has had two days in the new boat before racing, both spent on flat water at San Nazzaro rather than in competition. The first day was largely spent working through set-up issues, the second doing race-length laps alone on the circuit, a quiet build-up to a weekend that puts him under the wing of a four-time F1H2O world champion.
William Martinsen
The first day was kind of like picking out problems, fixing everything and getting comfortable. The second day it was just about doing laps. But it was flat water, and I was all by myself, so it’s quite different from a race.
The boat itself has history at Team Sharjah. It is the same hull previously raced by André Faye Solvang and then Khalid Sultan Al Mazmi, who crashed it during a race last year. The damage was serious enough that the team did not continue its F4 campaign for the rest of that season. It has since been repaired.
Martinsen is not starting from zero on equipment. Roughly half of what he is running this weekend is his own, carried over from his European campaign with Black Pharaoh.
William Martinsen
The boats are the same, and the gear cases I have are some from my old racing, and also props. So it’s kind of like a fifty-fifty mix. We don’t really know how it works yet, but I guess we’re going to find out.
The move reunites him with Solvang, who won the F4 world title for Team Sharjah in 2024 before stepping up to the team’s F2 programme in 2025, and who races the same Viverone weekend in the European Championship.
William Martinsen
We’ve talked about it, seven years of friendship and racing. It’s really good. We’re teammates within different teams now, and we talk about racing, about his laps, about everything.
At the centre of the operation is Scott Gillman, the four-time F1H2O world champion who has run Team Sharjah’s driver line-up since the emirate absorbed his Gillman Racing outfit ahead of the 2024 season.
William Martinsen
It’s a professional team, a great team, and a lot of good people. Even though it’s a new boat and I hold the sign for everything, I’m still going to get a lot of good intel on what to do and how to manage this boat.
The arrangement runs in both directions. Martinsen described feeding results and set-up feedback back to the team as they develop the boat toward next season.
William Martinsen
We’re just now trying to get this boat as good as possible and keep on developing it for next season.
Whether the move becomes a longer route up the grid is, for now, an open question. Solvang’s own path from Sharjah’s F4 title to its F2 seat is the obvious precedent, and Martinsen did not rule out following it.
William Martinsen
A goal for every driver is to keep on moving up the classes. Sharjah is a great team with great equipment.
If it happened in powerboat racing during the last forty years the chances are that Chris Davies was there either photographing it or writing about it.
During that time, he has travelled the globe covering both offshore and circuit racing for series promotors, race teams, PR companies, and a whole raft of publications.
