Shaun Torrente won the last ROAR Offshore held on Fort Myers Beach. That was 2021, when his Super Stock catamaran ran down the fleet to close out the event as national champion. Nobody knew it at the time, but that race would also be the last one run on that stretch of Gulf water for five years. Hurricane Ian tore through the barrier island in September 2022, and one of American offshore powerboat racing’s longest-running dates quietly vanished from the calendar behind years of storm cleanup, insurance fights, and a rebuild that Fort Myers Beach is still finishing today.
Now Torrente owns the thing he won.
In June 2026, Torrente and fellow offshore racer Cole Leibel bought ROAR Offshore outright from previous owners Tim and Cyndee Hill, taking over an event that had sat dormant since the storm. They aren’t just backers with their names on a sponsorship deck. Per the event’s own organizing committee listing, Torrente is the race contact and Leibel the co-partner, which means a four-time UIM F1H2O World Champion and his Canadian racing partner are also the two people fielding calls if something goes wrong on race weekend, all while still planning to strap into their own boats. That’s an unusual amount of operational exposure for two active competitors.
The more interesting change is what the new owners did to the race itself. Where past editions ran a mix of classes, the 2026 event narrows its focus to exactly one: APBA Super Stock. It’s a class built for the accessible middle of the sport’s technical ladder, twin-engine catamarans and V-hulls between 28 and 40 feet, with engines generally producing 500 to 800 horsepower per side and top speeds around 80 to 100 mph, raced by a two-person crew of driver and throttleman. Offshore racing is expensive at every level, but Super Stock is the class designed to keep a wider field of teams from getting priced out entirely.
That narrowing isn’t an accident in timing. Earlier in 2026, Race World Offshore’s ten-year promotional partnership with the Union Internationale Motonautique turned Super Stock into the sport’s fourth UIM World Championship class, joining Class 1, Class 2 and Super Cat, a jump most grassroots-adjacent classes never get. ROAR Offshore itself isn’t a round of that UIM series; it runs as a standalone APBA Region 5 date, while the world-championship rounds live on Race World Offshore’s separate calendar. But it’s the same boats, the same teams and the same class that now carries real global stakes elsewhere on the schedule, which makes a single-class regional date a sharper proposition than it would have been two years ago.
None of that changes what it costs to watch from the beach: nothing. Every heat, plus four days of parties, boat shows and driver meet-and-greets built around it, is free, funded instead through a sponsorship stack led by title sponsor Margaritaville Beach Resort and Super Stock engine supplier Mercury Racing. Torrente has been direct about what he wants from that model: fans just show up, and, in his words, “go to the restaurants and bars.” That’s part of the recovery math for a town still rebuilding piers, boardwalks and storefronts more than three years after Ian; free racing that funnels tens of thousands of visitors into local businesses on a slow September weekend does more for that recovery than gate receipts ever could.
The on-water schedule follows a familiar offshore rhythm: practice and qualifying fill Friday, heat racing and a pit party take over Saturday alongside a boat show and a Porsche club car show in Times Square, and Sunday’s morning warm-up leads into the championship race and awards ceremony at Margaritaville. Once the boats are actually running, the number worth watching is the points board. Super Stock’s national standings already show a tight fight up front, and a strong result at a high-visibility free event like this one is exactly the kind of exposure a mid-pack team needs to keep a two-person, twin-engine program funded for another season.
For Torrente, the harder test starts after the checkered flag. Buying back the race he won last is a good story. Running it profitably, on a five-year-dormant beach, in a single-class format tied to a sport that’s suddenly playing for bigger stakes elsewhere, is the actual job now.
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