Flight testing the Seabreacher X – the 300 horsepower bionic shark

Though it fails to fit into any traditional man-made watercraft category, the Seabreacher X is remarkably comfortable in the water, turning quicker than anything made by man and happily skipping across the tops of the waves at 50 mph. This is not surprising given that it's based on a shape refined over 420 million years at the top of the ocean food chain – the shark. Give it more horsepower than Valentino Rossi's MotoGP bike, make it so light that it has the power-to-weight ratio of a Bugatti Veyron and you get the Seabreacher X. Its semi-pressurized hull enables it to tickle your adrenalin glands both above and below the waves, and it rates as the most outrageous boy's toy I have ever sampled.   The ONE we got to try was fitted with a 255-horsepower Rotax engine from a Sea-Doo RXP-X.

Now, to really put the Seabreacher in perspective, let's first look at its performance relative to some things you might know.

The essence of really usable performance is not how much horsepower a vehicle has, but how much weight each horsepower has to push around – it's simple Newtonian physics.

Newton's Second Law of Motion states that force = mass multiplied by acceleration (F = M x A).

So acceleration equates to force divided by mass, which is why performance enthusiasts prize a high power-to-weight ratio, because it is essentially an indication of a vehicle's acceleration potential.

The table below gives you an idea of some of the hardest-accelerating road-going vehicles in existence, and how they compare with the best racing machinery from the world's premier car and motorcycle race series: