Prince Sultan on Team Aoki’s rise to top of E1 raceboat series

Just two races into the second season of the UIM E1 World Championship presented by PIF, Saudi Arabia-backed Team Aoki is sitting second in the 2025 standings. Last year, it finished eighth of nine teams; the transformation has been impressive.

The world’s first all-electric raceboat series, E1 has made a major splash in the motorsport world since its inception after attracting a host of celebrity team owners including Virat Kohli, Rafa Nadal, Tom Brady and Will Smith, who was in attendance in Doha for the series’ latest round.

At the helm of the team currently second in the championship, however, is American DJ and record producer Steve Aoki. His eponymous outfit – made up of Saudi rally driver Mashael Al-Obaidan and Spanish ex-F1 test driver Dani Clos – won the first race of the season in Jeddah and followed it up last weekend with a second-place finish in Qatar.

Team Aoki is also backed by Prince Sultan bin Fahd bin Salman, the chairman of the Saudi Water Sports and Diving Federation (SWSDF). With a driver, team investor and series presenting sponsor all from the Kingdom, E1 has a distinct Saudi flavor.

Providing both a sporting spectacle and important messaging around marine sustainability, E1 was an attractive proposition for Prince Sultan – a keen freediver who has repeatedly seen ocean damage firsthand.

“The emphasis on sustainability is an absolutely vital part of my involvement in E1,” SWSDF chief Prince Sultan told Al Arabiya English in Doha. “I am obsessed with the ocean and started diving when I was 15; it has been heartbreaking to see how the coral has died at many dive sites I have visited.

“We are not just pushing sports like E1 forward, we are trying to improve awareness of the ocean and our efforts to regenerate it.”

In the first season of E1, the backing of the SWSDF meant Team Aoki had two Saudi pilots: Mashael Al-Obaiden and Saud Ahmed. Al-Obaidan remains for 2025 and after another Saudi-backed team entered the competition this year – Team Alula, owned by Lebron James – Prince Sultan is now supporting Team Aoki as an individual investor.

“We want the team to become a pathway for Saudis who would like to participate in the sport,” Prince Sultan says. “The aim is for Team Aoki to be a stepping stone for Saudi athletes.

“Mashael is here already and she is a great pilot, she’s awesome. I remember when we interviewed her and she said to us, ‘if you only want me to come to the team to drive, I’m not interested. I only want to race if you want me to win.’”

“That’s what I wanted and I think with that mentality, despite having some setbacks last year, we can be competitive. She has shown that we are all learning and growing with the sport and I think now we have a winning team together. ”

The reward for that faith in Al-Obaidan came in the first race of the 2025 campaign Jeddah as Prince Sultan and Team Aoki celebrated their first ever triumph in E1. Standing atop the podium, Al-Obaidan – an experienced driver who has competed multiple times in the Dakar Rally – felt moved by the occasion.

“When they played that Saudi national anthem, I had to take a deep breath,” Al-Obaidan recalls to Al Arabiya English. “It was just a ‘wow’ moment that I will never forget. I saw people’s eyes, I saw them twinkling and how everyone was smiling and happy.

“That means a lot to me because I am going after my passion and pushing myself to win; Saudi Arabia deserves to actually see the result of their enablement, and this was it.”

For Prince Sultan, too, it was a milestone moment in his involvement with the nascent sport, which sees each team given identical electric raceboats with only limited scope to make adjustments. The level playing field means that races are always exciting and often produce different winners.

“Jeddah was a beautiful experience,” says Prince Sultan. “I don’t think that words can do justice really, but it’s a combination of a lot of hard work, a lot of training, learning from mistakes, putting a great team together.

“It’s a beautiful feeling. We enjoyed it and had a great team dinner afterwards with a few of the competing teams joining us too. But then that race was done. We won, we celebrated, got out of the way and focused on the next race.

“That’s how you navigate a series like this – by not getting ahead of ourselves and staying humble because the athletes on the other teams are absolutely amazing and they are tough competition.”

Although E1 is still in the early stages of its development, with last week’s Doha race only the seventh the series has ever held, Prince Sultan insists the sport is on an explosive growth trajectory – aided significantly by its collection of celebrity owners.

Of those, he reserved particular praise for Aoki, with whom he shares a close working relationship.

“Steve is one of the nicest guys you’ll meet and he cares so much because he is a huge free-diver who loves the ocean,” the SWSDF chairman explains. “He has many, many platforms to get his message across and because his father also used to do powerboating a long time ago, there is a lot of meaning to him being involved in E1.

“Honestly, I see no limit to how big E1 can get. It’s such a level playing field because the boats are equal in weight and technology – that’s the beauty of this type of racing and it means there is a large amount of overtaking. It has everything people are looking for in an entertaining motorsport series.”