There is a name that, for anyone who loves fast motorboats, needs no introduction: Tornado. A brand now reborn, and in the most symbolic way possible: with a brand-new boat, the Tornado T40, the first craft built by Novamarine following its acquisition of Tornado Yachts. The unveiling is set for Friday 24 July 2026, at 9pm, in the Piazzetta of Poltu Quatu, Arzachena — in the heart of that Costa Smeralda which has always been the Tornados’ natural stage.
Tornado T38
Taking on the Cigarettes
To understand why this rebirth matters, you have to go back to 1968 — the date the brand itself gives as its birth, when offshore pioneer Carlo Marchiolo founded the Tornado yard in Fiumicino with one clear idea: to carry racing performance over into pleasure boats. Yet by then the Tornado name was already a banner of Italian powerboat racing: under those colours ran the Tornado Racing Team of Vincenzo Balestrieri, offshore world champion in 1968 and 1970, with hulls that entered legend such as the Yellow Tornado and the Black Tornado, protagonists of classics like the Viareggio-Bastia-Viareggio.
There is one detail that captures the era better than any other: the Black Tornado that Balestrieri raced from 1970 was none other than Don Aronow‘s own “The Cigarette” — the American’s boat that had snatched the title from him the year before, and which Balestrieri, won over, bought and repainted in his own colours. The transatlantic Cigarette boats, after all, were the machines to beat, and the same fascination drew Marchiolo towards pleasure boating.
His first pleasure boat was a 30-foot open craft with two 200hp outboards, avowedly inspired by those very hulls. He owned up to it without the slightest hesitation in the interview BAM dedicated to him in March 2004, when it dubbed him “the Red Baron”: “I built a 30-footer with two 200hp outboards, drawing quite openly on Don Aronow’s Cigarettes.” And he added, with his taste for provocation: “My father used to say it too: when something is beautiful, you should copy it and try to improve it.” From that instinct grew a yard — which would settle in Fiumicino, on the Isola Sacra along an arm of the Tiber estuary — faithful to a philosophy it would never betray: “I build spartan boats, made for cruising, for touring, for being at sea as much as eight months a year.”
And the passion for racing never faded. In the 1990s, aboard the Tornados, Adriano Panatta won the Venice-Monte Carlo in the Touring class — that most evocative of offshore classics — a feat later repeated. Yes, that Panatta: the tennis champion who, together with Antonio Gioffredi, a Class 1 world champion, wrote one of the most curious and successful chapters in Italian powerboat racing with the Tornados. “As a builder, my boats won the Venice-Monte Carlo several times in the Touring class,” Marchiolo remembered with pride.
A timeless cult
If the victories built the myth, it was the production boats that etched it into collective memory. The Tornado 38, one of the best-selling Italian speedboats of all time and among the most successful boats ever built in Italy, is the Fiumicino yard’s most representative model: flush profile, an impeccably clean bow, the quintessence of the Mediterranean sport-cruiser. A model Marchiolo, with his customary irony, defended against the industry’s obsession with novelty: “I’ve been building the same model of boat for 25 years, always exactly the same, and it is always enormously successful.” It is no coincidence that the 38 stars in our Classic Boat section, where readers have shared their own examples with us — as in our feature on cult sporting classics or the profile of Tictwo, a 1998 Tornado 38 Classic maintained in complete fidelity to the original design.
The new chapter: Novamarine and the T40
Today that story picks up again in Olbia. Novamarine, the Sardinian yard listed on Euronext Growth Milan and a specialist in high-performance craft, acquired the Tornado Yachts brand in the summer of 2025, with the declared aim of building new boats and refitting the historic models entirely at its own Su Arrasolu facilities.
The first concrete result is the Tornado T40. While preserving the sporting soul that defines the brand, the T40 offers new engine options and greater power, together with safe, assured seakeeping. Length overall is 12.30 metres, the fuel tank holds 900 litres, top speed is 40 knots, and she can carry up to 10 passengers. Numbers true to the tradition: fast, essential, Mediterranean.
The evening at Poltu Quatu will also pay tribute to the brand’s history: guests will receive one of 200 limited-edition copies of the book Tornado, l’impresa del mare, and the documentary film Tornado, il mito will be screened ahead of the official reveal of the T40.
The Italian speedboat that took on the American muscle is ready to return to the water. And this time, the challenge is to the future.
