Sunseeker’s alarmingly rapid superboat

“If the price doesn’t wipe the smile off your face, you’re guaranteed a ride that will keep you grinning all day,” says Simon de Burton in Boat International. The Sunseeker Hawk 38, which will set you back more than £535,000, is a special limited-edition superboat created to celebrate the boat brand’s late founder, Robert Braithwaite, who founded the firm in the 1960s and died last year.

It is a fitting tribute, says de Burton. The acceleration when you open the twin Mercury 400R engines is “as exhilarating as the most adrenaline-inducing sports car” and makes Sunseeker’s claimed top speed of 62 knots “seem not only plausible, but possibly modest”. It is almost alarmingly rapid, but the power is well under control and the boat turns as though on rails.

You can “forget about romantic overnight stays” – there’s no cabin and no galley either – but it’s great fun to drive and hard to beat if you want to go fast safely and draw attention. The first ten production hulls will be dedicated to Braithwaite with a signed plaque in the cockpit. After that, output is expected to be stepped up to 20 boats per year.

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The Hawk 38 superboat is Sunseeker’s first true performance boat in more than a decade, says Hugo Andreae in Motorboat & Yachting, and “as far as the driving experience goes, it’s the real deal”. This is a “focused driver’s machine guaranteed to get you to the beach first”. It leaps across the waves, the acceleration “rapid and unrelenting”, and it fires past 40 knots in roughly the time it takes to read this sentence.

Above all, this boat has “the performance to deliver on its promise, the robustness to cope with it and the seakeeping to ensure that performance is accessible to the type of people who will buy it”. The yacht “looks the business” too – “long, low, lean and purposeful” – and is a “focused and enjoyable day boat that puts Sunseeker back on the performance map”.