Formula

Formula sells a race boat's bottom to families, and it has been doing it under one family's name since 1976. Don Aronow started Formula Marine in North Miami Beach in 1963 and named it after the partnership he had assembled to race Miami–Nassau; the deep-V 233 was the first hull, and he had sold the company within about a year to the outfit that already owned Thunderbird. Fuqua Industries took the pair in 1969, and Vic Porter bought Thunderbird/Formula out of Fuqua in 1976. Three generations of Porters run it now from Decatur, Indiana, where Trade Only Today counted 575,000 square feet, roughly 365 people and about 250 boats a year — the output of a yard building to order rather than to a forecast, which is what the FormulaFlex programme launched after the 2009 crash amounts to in practice: gelcoat, fabrics and materials chosen boat by boat, and, as the president told that reporter, a process that takes longer.

The decision that recurs is the bottom. In 1997 the yard put a stepped hull with three running surfaces under the 382 and called it FAS3Tech, and Soundings records what happened next: 62 of the conventional deep-V 382 SR-1 built from 1995, then 372 of the stepped hulls between 1997 and 2019, with the tooling still producing on request into 2021. A yard that replaces its own best seller with a shape and then builds that shape for twenty-two years is telling you what it thinks a boat is for. Yachting, going over a 370 Super Sport, described the working-out: multiple transverse steps, longitudinal strakes, a keel pad, 21 degrees of deadrise at the transom, stitched multidirectional glass with modified epoxy in the first two laminates against blistering, and components cut by numerically controlled routers to a thousandth of an inch.

The range splits that bottom two ways and the model names say which is which. A Super Sport is the open half — the boat bought to be driven, where the cabin is a place to change out of a wet swimsuit:

A Performance Cruiser is the same hull argument with a night aboard attached to it, and the numbers are why people pay for the combination: BoatTEST clocked a 34 PC at 48.3 mph on twin 380-horsepower 8.2 MAGs, which is sportboat speed out of a boat that sleeps four.

Scout watches 314 live Formula askings, averaging $276,439 across a range that runs from bowriders to boats of fifty feet, so read that average as a fact about the size mix rather than as a price of entry. The published shelf is the narrow end of it: 2 boats over 2 of the yard's models, 2006–2007, asking $89,990 to $116,999. What makes a builder that never sold easy to shop is that the difference between any two of its boats is a decision somebody signed rather than an accident of ownership — nobody bought this badge, cheapened it, and sold it on.

The honest notes start with what even the admiring reviews put in writing. Yachting's tester of the 370 Super Sport, who liked the boat, still recorded that reaching the mid-berth requires a bit of crawling, that he wanted at least one hatch big enough to get out through the foredeck in an emergency, and that the circuit breaker panel is tucked out of the way under the dash. Those are not defects so much as a statement of where the attention went, which on this yard is the bottom and the cockpit. The louder argument is about the finish behind the finish. On the offshore forums an owner will tell you a 1995 336 is in incredible condition three decades on and that he would buy another tomorrow, while in the same thread a Norwegian owner of a 1998 382 FASTech reports the headliner down, water leaking everywhere, rubrail bolts broken or loose, the deck lifting away from the hull all round the boat and water taken up into the stringers and foam — and other posters answer that the boat reads like a neglected or salvage hull rather than a Formula. Both accounts can stand. They also send a buyer of a twenty-year-old one to the same three places: the deck-to-hull joint, the fasteners under the rubrail, and a moisture meter on the stringer bays.

The step has a bill of its own, and it is not a maintenance bill. On the owners' forum a man with a 271 FASTech found that his hull caught on the forward edge of the trailer bunk every time he launched, so that he had to back the trailer in until the water was up to the tow vehicle's rear tyres; Teflon on the bunks did not fix it, and the answer the other owners gave him was a trailer built with bunks angled for a stepped bottom, from one of three named specialists. Reviewers make the same point about driving one: a stepped hull wants the drives trimmed differently entering a turn from what a V-bottom taught you. Neither is a flaw. Both are things the brochure has no reason to mention and the first season will teach you anyway.

Buy a Formula if you want a boat built to order by people whose surname is on it, and if the premium over the volume brands reads to you as a purchase rather than a tax — the yard itself takes about a fifth of its business in trading pre-owned Formulas, which tells you it is not embarrassed by its own used market. Buy elsewhere if you want the most feet for the money, if you trailer and have not priced a trailer built for a stepped hull, or if you need a boat that every yard in the harbour has worked on before. The two hulls above are the doors in — the 370 Super Sport for the driving and the 34 PC for the weekend — and the rest of what we watch under power is on the powerboat shelf.