Image courtesy of The E1 Series: Lagos Lagoon
The E1 Series When the Lagoon Turned Electric: E1 Lagos and the Design of Future Water Cities
Lagos Lagoon, Nigeria, Africa
The E1 Series, founded by Alejandro Agag (creator of Formula E) and Rodi Basso (former Ferrari and NASA engineer), represents a radical pivot in how we experience marine mobility. As the world’s first electric powerboat championship, E1 proves that speed and sustainability can move in the same direction.
By bringing the series to the Lagos Lagoon on 4–5 October 2025, E1 entered uncharted waters, both literally and symbolically. Lagos became the first African host city, joining a circuit that had already included Venice, Jeddah, and Monaco. In doing so, Nigeria positioned itself as a key player in the global narrative of sustainable innovation, where marine technology and civic ambition converged on water.
For Lagos the E1 GP became an act of infrastructural diplomacy, a gesture that showed Africa’s megacities are not simply adapting to the future, but shaping it at a pace that belongs to the times and to the tide.
Image courtesy of The E1 Series: The RaceBird
The Lagos Lagoon as Cultural Terrain
Stretching over 50 kilometres, the Lagos Lagoon is a living ledger of movement, a confluence of commerce, migration, and rhythm. Historically, it served as a vital trading artery, connecting the Atlantic to inland economies; today, it remains the pulse of Lagos’ economic and ecological identity. Yet beneath its surface lies fragility, a landscape under increasing pressure from rapid urbanisation, pollution, and encroachment.
To stage a global electric race here is to confront that complexity head-on. The lagoon becomes a metaphor for Africa’s balancing act, between preservation and progress, nature and technology. Around the racecourse, the urban edge of Lagos unfolds like a cinematic backdrop: the skyline of Victoria Island, the sprawl of Ikoyi, and the vibrant bustle of Makoko’s floating community. A city in perpetual negotiation with water.
Geographical Symbolism Moving Forward
The Lagos Lagoon, long regarded as a utilitarian threshold, now reenters cultural consciousness as a site of futuristic potential. The event invites architects, planners, and policymakers to reconsider how water can become civic infrastructure, not a boundary to the city but an extension of it.
This gesture resonates with global movements toward amphibious urbanism, from the floating neighbourhoods of Copenhagen to the tidal parks of Singapore. Yet in Lagos, the symbolism carries deeper weight: water is both heritage and horizon, chaos and possibility. In this light, E1 Lagos becomes a symbolic pilot project for reimagining African infrastructure as living, adaptive ecologies of energy, culture, and movement.
The Peronalities Behind The Electric Wave
All teams race with the same RaceBird hydrofoil, In this sense, every team functions as a hybrid of brand, story, and performance. The championship’s real intrigue lies in its people, the constellation of athletes, creatives, and visionaries who have turned electric racing into a global conversation. Their faces are not just symbols of celebrity; they are conduits through which technology, culture, and ambition converge.
One of the defining features of the E1 Series is the way it fuses elite sport, celebrity, and sustainable technology into a single ecosystem of narrative and performance. Through its team ownership model, E1 has transformed what could have been a purely technical championship into a cultural experiment in visibility and meaning.
Global figures such as Tom Brady, Rafael Nadal, Didier Drogba, Virat Kohli, Steve Aoki, Marc Anthony, and Sergio Pérez are narrative anchors as well as investors. Their involvement provides three key dimensions to the championship’s identity. First, it extends visibility, drawing vast audiences from across sport, music, and entertainment into a new conversation about marine technology. Second, their reputations lend symbolic legitimacy, positioning E1 not as an experimental novelty but as a credible, aspirational platform for clean-energy sport. And third, each brings a distinctive cultural lens: which all serve to humanise the technology and personalise the sustainability message.
The pilots themselves further this idea of diversity and representation. E1 mandates that each team field both a male and a female pilot, a progressive departure from most motorsport conventions. This policy reinforces the series’ underlying belief that the future of high-performance sport must also model inclusivity. The pilots come from a variety of disciplines, jet-skiing, powerboating, motor racing, and marine engineering, embodying a hybrid skill set that reflects the sport’s newness. Figures such as Anna Glennon (Team Miami), Emma Kimiläinen (Team Brady), and Cris Lazarraga (Team Rafa) exemplify the adaptability, courage, and technical fluency that define this new generation of racers.
Ultimately, the personalities behind E1 matter because they embody the spirit of transition. They represent the bridge between old-world prestige and new-world sustainability, between competition and collaboration, fame and function. Through them, E1 becomes more than a race; it becomes a cultural prototype for how innovation can be humanised, how technology can carry narrative, and how design can act as diplomacy.
Design, Technology, and Convergence
At the centre of this spectacle was the E1 RaceBird, designed by SeaBird Technologies and Victory Marine. With its sleek hydrofoil form, the RaceBird is engineered to “fly” above water, a representation of minimal friction and maximum efficiency. Events like the E1 Lagos GP hold meaning beyond sport. They are performances of perception, shaping how the world imagines Africa’s relationship with innovation, ecology, and urban future.
The RaceBird, an artefact that redefines what progress can look like when engineered with restraint. The Lagos Lagoon, in turn, becomes a stage for negotiation, a space where progress meets preservation, where spectacle is tested against stewardship, and ambition measures itself against ecology. In reframing African infrastructure, the E1 event challenges the landlocked imagination of development.
In much of Africa, infrastructure has historically been understood in static, land-based terms. By bringing a world-class electric boat race to the surface of the Lagos Lagoon, the E1 Series disrupts that paradigm. It transforms water, often overlooked in planning frameworks, into a stage for innovation.
This redefinition matters because it challenges inherited hierarchies of infrastructure. In Lagos, where waterways are frequently dismissed as chaotic, informal, or underdeveloped, the E1 racetrack asserts that fluidity itself can be structured. It reframes mobility not as the mastery of terrain but as the art of adaptation, a lesson that resonates far beyond sport.
Ultimately, the E1 Lagos GP reframes African infrastructure through the lens of possibility. It suggests that progress need not always be poured in concrete; it can float, shimmer, and glide. It proposes a shift from infrastructure as imposition to infrastructure as conversation, a dialogue between environment, technology, and identity.
Between Spectacle and Stewardship
Moving forward, the lagoon can be read as a living prototype for a wider continental conversation. From the creeks of the Niger Delta to the harbours of Mombasa or the tidal inlets of Cape Town, similar water ecologies could evolve into platforms for cultural engineering, renewable energy projects, or amphibious public spaces. The E1 Lagos GP thus becomes a blueprint and a mindset demonstrating how African modernity can emerge from its own geographies rather than imported models.
In that sense, Lagos has done more than host a global sporting debut; it has articulated a vision of design as diplomacy, where geography itself becomes the medium of negotiation between past, present, and the sustainable futures still forming on the horizon.
The deeper challenge lies in balance. Spectacle thrives on immediacy; stewardship demands continuity. One seeks applause, the other endurance. For a city like Lagos, the opportunity and the responsibility is to ensure that the global gaze kindled by E1 translates into long-term ecological literacy and infrastructural care. The floating track may vanish after the race, but its ethical footprint should linger, compelling local institutions, designers, and policymakers to reconsider how water can be engaged, protected, and reimagined.
In this way, the lagoon is not only a stage but a mirror, reflecting back the values of those who choose to design upon it. If innovation means building systems that move faster and lighter, then stewardship must mean building cultures that think slower and deeper. The real success of such an event will not be measured by the decibels of applause, but by whether, after the spectacle fades, the water still breathes and whether the world now sees it differently.
The Current Ahead: Mapping the 2025 Season
As the electric boats cut through the lagoon, they traced invisible lines of ambition, a vision of how Africa might design its way into the future. E1’s arrival in Lagos was not just a race; it was a cartographic gesture, redrawing the boundaries of what African design, culture, and urban diplomacy can mean.
As the wake of the Lagos GP is archived into memory, the current that began in the Middle East continues to ripple outward. The 2025 E1 World Championship opened on 24–25 January in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where the Red Sea hosted the debut of a new global sport built on silence and speed. The following month, on 21–22 February, the series moved to Doha, Qatar, bringing electric performance to the Persian Gulf.
By early summer, the current had shifted to Europe. On 13–14 June, the championship arrived in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where medieval walls met the shimmer of hydrofoil wakes. Two weeks later, on 27–28 June, it advanced inland to Lago Maggiore, Italy, testing the RaceBirds on still waters surrounded by alpine air. The rhythm continued on 18–19 July in Monaco, where the Riviera reframed electric racing as a spectacle of precision and prestige, proof that luxury and sustainability could share the same shoreline.
Then came Lagos, on 4–5 October 2025, the sixth stop, and the first in African history. Here, on the waters of the Lagos Lagoon, Africa entered the map of electric motion. What had begun as a sporting experiment now unfolded as a cultural statement: that innovation, identity, and geography could flow together in the same current.
The season now turns toward its conclusion in Miami, set for 7–8 November 2025, where the RaceBirds will glide across Biscayne Bay, closing the year’s circuit in the cradle of American coastal culture. From Jeddah to Miami, each city has served as both host and metaphor. Points on a map of transformation. For Lagos, this race was never simply an event; it was an introduction, an opening chapter in a larger narrative of design, diplomacy, and African motion. The lagoon has now entered the record of this global experiment, its waters carrying the resonance of a city in transition.
For more on the series and its evolving schedule, see the official E1 website e1series.com.
This article forms part of O Journal’s ongoing exploration of design diplomacy, observing how technology, geography, and culture converge to shape the future landscape of human experience.
