Fabio Buzzi was an Italian motorboat builder and racer.
Biography
Fabio Buzzi was born in Lecco in 1943, from a family tied for centuries to the art of building and design. His powerboat racing career started in 1960. He graduated in mechanical engineering in 1971 from the Polytechnic University of Turin where he took a degree in mechanical engineering with a thesis on a self-constructed vehicle. He built his first race boat in 1974, a three-point hydroplane called "Mostro", the first boat ever built in Kevlar 49. He set a world speed record with this boat in the class S4 in 1978. On 17 September 2019, Buzzi and two others were killed when their boat crashed against the San Nicoletto dam in Venice. Buzzi and his crew were attempting to establish a new Montecarlo to Venice record.
FB Design
In 1971 Buzzi founded FB Design, to build leisure, military and racing boats. On board La Gran Argentina, a Fabio Buzzi-designed FB 55, Argentinian pilot Daniel Scioli was a three-time winner of the World Superboat USA Championship and captured 4 European titles. The boat's hull was modified in 2000 into a long-distance record setter. Scioli went on to set the Miami-Nassau-Miami record with an average speed of 100 mph. Initially the company focus was on race boats. When offshore power boat racing declined in the late 1990s, the company used its experience in high speed boat manufacturing to build military and fast patrol boats.
Death
Buzzi and two aides were killed on September 17, 2019, while racing a powerboat in Italy. This occurred when Buzzi's hit an artificial reef near the finish line just after setting the record for traveling from Monte Carlo to Venice. Giampaolo Montavoci, the president of the Italian Offshore and Endurance Committee, confirmed the death of Buzzi and the two fatalities of his two assistants to the BBC. "The boat took off and flew 30 meters through the air, landing on its stern on the other side of the causeway, where the victims died on impact," an official at Venice's port authority said, according to the Times of London. Buzzi, 76, a ten-time powerboat champion, apparently misjudged how much space he had available for his boat to enter the lagoon, and instead hit barriers installed to prevent flooding in Venice, a crash not uncommon in the crowded waters there, where many visiting cruise ships, motorboats and yachts may not be aware of the presence of the safety barriersunder water.
