The fact that the Sunseeker XS2000 ever existed under the Sunseeker name remains a reason for joyful bemusement
In the 1990s, Audi built perfectly pleasant but fairly nondescript German saloon cars and hatchbacks. In 1995 the company showed a mad concept sportscar that looked like a cross between a turtle and a bar of soap.
It’s lovely, everyone said, but obviously it will never enter production. Then in 1998, it entered production almost unchanged as the TT, confounding everyone because it was just so completely alien to anything the marque had done before.
It was a similarly left-field move when Sunseeker launched the XS2000 the following year – it was just so un-Sunseeker! Yes, the company had previously developed high-performance boats with powerboat racer, Don Shead, but those were the fast, elegant weekenders of the Hawk range – the 27 Hawk, 29 Mohawk, 37 Tomahawk and 43 Thunderhawk. Yes they were low, sleek and highly capable, but they were recognisably Sunseeker.
With up to 1,100hp on tap and input from Italian designer, Fabio Buzzi, the XS2000 was a race boat in disguise
The XS2000 was developed by Italian powerboat racer and designer, Fabio Buzzi. If you’d put this boat into the London Boat Show without badges and asked people
to guess who’d built it, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would have opted for Sunseeker. This wasn’t a fast weekender. It was a barely civilised out-and-out race boat!
Yes, it did technically have overnighting accommodation but you couldn’t reach it from the cockpit. You had to access it from a hatch on the foredeck so forget going down there while underway.
Sunseeker did modify Buzzi’s original cockpit layout of four stand-up racing bolsters, retaining the front two but incorporating a bench seat aft and adding a sunpad over the engine hatch. But this was basically a production racing boat in disguise, and it really wasn’t a very convincing disguise.
An absurdly narrow beam and fewer seats than a 20ft bow rider left you in no doubt about its purpose
Constructed of hand-laid FRP Kevlar/balsa/e-sandwich, the hull had two steps to reduce drag and a squared-off spoonbill bow designed to create lift in the event of stuffing it into a wave at high speed.
There was a bathing platform back aft, but it was mostly there to support the twin Trimax racing drives and rudders and to protect the Rolla five-bladed propellers that were spun via two-speed gearboxes by either twin 420hp Yanmar diesel engines or a pair of 550hp Mercruiser petrols.
Bizarrely, there was also a twin 350hp option, in case anyone wanted a slightly slower high-performance race boat. But when we sea trialled this absolute weapon of a machine, we achieved about 65 knots on test with the bigger diesel engines.
Even then, Sunseeker was convinced that there was another 5 knots to go with a little bit of fine tuning. But it was an utterly bonkers and ultra-cool boat back in the 90s, and it’s become even more so with the benefit of hindsight.
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Sunseeker XS2000 Specifications:
Year: 1999
LOA: 39ft 4in (12.0m)
Beam: 7ft 7in (2.3m)
Power: Twin Yanmar 430hp diesel engines
Speed: 70 knots est
Price when new: From £175,000
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