Previous racing classes consisted of boats with V-bottom hulls that were very similar to pleasure craft and often were simply modified pleasure boats. But things began to change about 1962 when two boat builders, Dieter Schultz of Austria and Angelo Molinari of Italy, began exploring the superior performance characteristics, both in speed and handling, of tunnel-hull boats racing in the Mod OZ class.
Tunnel hulls enable the boats to float on air as well as water while speeding down straightaways.
The first tunnel hull boat came to the U.S. in 1964. It raced for a team then managed by Gary Garbrecht, who now is president of the P.R.O.P. Tour. The Mod-OZ class began to be known as Formula One about 1978. Formula One and the name stuck. Internationally, the class came to be formally known as Formula One in 1982.