Riva, Chris-Craft, Hacker-Craft and the J Craft Torpedo: The Classic Runabout, Built for the Open Sea

For most people, the phrase classic runabout summons a single image: varnished mahogany, polished chrome, a long foredeck, and the Riviera sun catching every curve. Riva gave that image its Mediterranean glamour. Chris-Craft and Hacker-Craft, on the other side of the Atlantic, gave it American poise and athletic confidence. Together, the Riva Aquarama, the Chris-Craft Capri and the Hacker-Craft Sport created one of the most enduring visual languages in twentieth-century design - a language built around the deep, liquid lustre of varnished wood, the inward sweep of the tumblehome, and the Dolce Vita spirit of the 1950s and ’60s.

The J Craft Torpedo carries echoes of all three. The lustre of the mahogany. The sweep of the tumblehome. The drama of a Nardi steering wheel beneath the hand. But inspiration is not inheritance, and resemblance is not reproduction. To describe the Torpedo as a modern Riva - or, worse, a Riva on steroids - is to miss what J Craft actually did. The classic runabouts were objects of the shoreline. They were optimised for the mirror-flat waters of Lake Como, Lake Garda and the harbours of Saint-Tropez, and they were notoriously fragile when the weather turned. The J Craft Torpedo was built to do what its inspirations could not: take that beauty to sea.

Table of Contents

The Founding Moment

Three People, Two Generations

Evolution, Not Revolution

What the Classics Could Not Do

Accepted by Both Worlds

Conclusion: Built to Be Trusted

1. The Founding Moment

Björn Janson, J Craft’s founder, understood that tension personally. The founding idea behind J Craft was born from the desire to preserve the glamour of the classic runabout while removing the fragility that came with it.

Janson built the shipyard in Visby, on the island of Gotland, in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The location was deliberate. Gotland is not Lake Como. The waters around it do not flatter a fragile hull. A boat conceived here cannot afford to be ornamental; it has to work. The founding question of J Craft was therefore not how to copy the past but how to build the boat the past could not - one that carried the visual romance of the classic runabout but possessed the structural integrity of a serious sea-going vessel.

The parallel J Craft has always drawn is to the eighth-century Viking evolution of the keel - they did not invent the longitudinal beam (Egyptians, Phoenicians and Greeks had used it for centuries), but they refined it into the deep T-shape that gave the longship its stability in rough weather and made those 4,000-mile ocean crossings possible. The Torpedo’s mission is a modern equivalent: to give the elegant serpent of the Mediterranean the keel it needed to survive the Baltic and North Seas. Viking discipline beneath Dolce Vita glamour.

2. Three People, Two Generations

The evolution of J Craft is the work of three figures over more than two decades.

Björn Janson provided the founding spark. He defined the aesthetic ambition - the Mediterranean look, the mahogany lustre, the marriage of Italian glamour with Nordic engineering - and established the early commitment to exclusivity that culminated in the first J Craft Cabrio Cruiser, M/Y Polaris, built for the King of Sweden.

Johan Hallén has been the shipyard’s Chief Master Builder for twenty-six years, overseeing every hull from the 1999 Polaris through to the current Torpedo RS. A former Swedish Navy mine diver and training officer, with deep experience in navigation and the discipline of military seamanship, Hallén brought a particular kind of rigour to Visby. He is assisted by Zoltán, his second-in-command. Hallén holds an honorary membership of the Como Yacht Club - Riva’s home water, the spiritual centre of the classic-runabout world - as J Craft’s representative. The classic boating world chose the J Craft master builder to represent the tradition that J Craft drew from. That is not a small thing.

Radenko Milakovic is the company’s custodian. He came to J Craft first as an owner: someone who loved the boats but wanted to understand whether their capability could be deepened. His attempt to retrofit his own Cabrio Cruiser with a Volvo Penta IPS pod system produced, in his own words, a vessel that “ploughed forward like a runaway shopping trolley” - at which point the only honest path forward was to redesign the hull from the keel up. The acquisition of the company followed from that experiment. Milakovic’s tenure has been characterised by what he calls slow luxury: protecting the hand-built nature of the boats while integrating the technology that allows them to do, calmly and without theatre, what the classics never could.

Together, these three figures have presided over two distinct generations. The first, the Cabrio Cruiser, was conceived by Janson and Hallén; it established the aesthetic but remained a demanding boat to drive, with four separate engine controls and a directness that asked a great deal of its owner. The second, the Torpedo, was conceived by Hallén and Milakovic; it kept the aesthetic and rebuilt everything underneath it.

3. Evolution, Not Revolution

J Craft has never been interested in reinvention for its own sake.

The move from the 38-foot Cabrio Cruiser to the 42-foot Torpedo was a complete redesign from the keel up - new hull, new propulsion, new electronic architecture, new interior volume - but it was undertaken in the spirit of the Porsche 911 or the Supermarine Spitfire: progression through successive marks, each one recognisably the same machine, none of them content to stand still. Continuity, in other words, of the kind that earns the right to evolve.

That is the context in which Radenko Milakovic’s observation makes its proper sense:

“The Cabrio Cruiser was the love child of Riva, Chris-Craft and Hacker-Craft. The Torpedo is the love child of the Cabrio Cruiser - which makes it the love child of a love child.”

The Cabrio Cruiser, drawn by Björn Janson and Johan Hallén, was J Craft’s first synthesis of the three mid-century names - the Italian glamour of Riva, the American athleticism of Chris-Craft, the structural seriousness of Hacker-Craft. The Torpedo did not start over; it is that boat’s own child, a second generation drawn from a first, drawn in turn from three. The lineage is unbroken - and it is a lineage, not a copy. That distinction is J Craft’s whole philosophy: each boat captures the beauty of a defining era - here the Dolce Vita of the post-war fifties and sixties - and pairs it with engineering built for today and craftsmanship that answers to no one. Era-defining design, engineered for the present, built by hand. It is why a J Craft never dates: the surface is timeless, and beneath it sits every modern system and convenience, and a seakeeping its owners feel in every mile - beyond anything the reference era, or since, achieved.

None of this is to diminish the boats that came before. The Riva, the Chris-Craft and the Hacker-Craft are beautiful still, and at first glance the Torpedo belongs, unmistakably, in their company - the same mahogany warmth, the same chrome, the same line, and indeed the same unmistakable lineage. The kinship is real; the love child of a love child does not deny its family. But linger a moment, and the likeness gives way to something subtler - two quite different ideals of beauty, an Audrey Hepburn and an Anita Ekberg, each lovely beyond argument, each entirely her own.

Where the classics were slender and restrained, the Torpedo is larger and far more curvaceous, its tumblehome more pronounced - more emphatic - than anything else the era ever put on the water. Seen properly, the hull carries the very silhouette the fifties idealised: full at the bow and beam, drawn in sharply at the waist, full again through the hips. The Riva gave the era its Italian glamour and the Chris-Craft its American swagger; the Torpedo answers with something the originals never had, a Swedish soul, the voluptuous glamour of an Anita Ekberg carried over the spine of Freydís Eiríksdóttir, the shield-maiden who sailed to the edge of the known world. The Torpedo takes the best of all three and makes it a design language entirely its own - and, beneath the surface, a capability entirely of this century.

4. What the Classics Could Not Do

This is where the J Craft Torpedo parts company with the boats it resembles.

A Riva Aquarama, a Chris-Craft Capri, a Hacker-Craft Sport - these are wonderful objects. They are also constrained objects. Their hulls are solid wood. They are heavy. They absorb water. They demand annual stripping. They cannot take a four-metre swell. None of that is a failure of craftsmanship; it is the physics of mahogany. The mid-century builders did not have access to the materials science that solves the problem.

The Torpedo’s hull is not solid wood. It is a vacuum-infused composite, built around a recyclable PET core and vinylester resin - exact to the millimetre, immune to moisture ingress, and rigid in a way no traditional mahogany hull can be. Over that structural shell sit twenty coats of hand-lacquered mahogany veneer. The boat looks like the inheritor of a tradition. Structurally, it is the inheritor of a different one entirely.

The propulsion is twin Volvo Penta IPS pods (IPS 400 to IPS 650), roughly thirty per cent more fuel-efficient than the shaft drives of the classical era, with joystick control at low speed and composed power offshore. At rest, a Seakeeper gyroscope holds the boat level, cancelling the roll that would otherwise creep in at anchor; under way, a Zipwake system takes over, automatic Swedish-made interceptors that trim the hull continuously, in real time, to keep her flat and composed through a sea. The Skyhook dynamic positioning system, its invisible, hull-integrated antennae giving nothing away, holds the boat on station in a current or a crowded marina; an equally invisible, hull-integrated Starlink array keeps her in contact with the world, and with her own systems, wherever on earth she happens to be. When a night turns black or a fog rolls in, a retractable FLIR thermal camera rises to give her eyes in the dark, then drops out of sight again at the touch of a button. The Volvo-Garmin glass cockpit allows the captain to bring the boat alongside a dock from a Garmin Quatix watch on the wrist. The solid wood components that remain are steamed and bent by hand, using techniques inherited from Viking shipbuilding.

None of this technology is on display. That is the point. The classics asked their owners to forgive their limits in exchange for their beauty. The Torpedo asks for no such forgiveness. The technology is there, and it works, and it is invisible.

Each boat takes between 8,000 and 10,000 hours to build, by hand, by twelve craftsmen and women in Visby. The yard is powered by renewable energy and heated with wood chips. Top speed is 47 knots; cruising range is 300 nautical miles. The Torpedo is certified to handle four-metre waves and has completed open-water crossings of the South China Sea, the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, parts of the north-east Atlantic and the Florida Straits.

5. Accepted by Both Worlds

The argument for the J Craft Torpedo is not, in the end, an argument that J Craft makes. It is an argument made on its behalf by the institutions that have welcomed the boat into their world.

In the old world - the world of the classics - J Craft has been a fixture at Monaco Classic Week following an invitation from the Yacht Club de Monaco, a distinction rarely extended to a contemporary builder. For four consecutive years, the Torpedo appeared at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, on the shores of Lake Como, presented alongside Rolls-Royce: Rolls-Royce of the land, J Craft Torpedo of the sea. And on that same lake - Riva’s home water - Johan Hallén holds his honorary membership of the Como Yacht Club. The classic world recognised the J Craft master builder as a custodian of its tradition.

Across the Atlantic, the same thing happened in a different register. At the Ocean Reef Vintage Weekend in Key Largo, Florida - a gathering of some of the most esteemed classic launches of the last century - the Torpedo took its place among them as the one contemporary boat in the fleet, and was welcomed and embraced by that community exactly as it had been in Monaco. It was there that Alfred Coyle, a former Air Force F-15 pilot, commissioned a Torpedo on the spot after a single weekend with the boat. The detail that decided it for him was the way it banks through a turn - gravitational forces moving through the body rather than against it, as in an aircraft - a composure he had only ever known in flight.

Two centres of authority - one centred on Lake Como and the Côte d’Azur, the other on the eastern seaboard of the United States - recognising the same boat. That is the proof. The classic-runabout world did not have to make room for the J Craft Torpedo. It chose to.

6. Conclusion: Built to Be Trusted

In twenty-six years, J Craft has built thirty-two boats.

That number is the measure of the company more than any specification sheet. Each Torpedo is a personal undertaking, configured to the intent of the owner who commissioned it. The Amazon Queen carries a custom Hohenzollern blue livery. The Sicotte family Torpedo includes a handcrafted Viking helmet, made for Jacques Sicotte’s son by the artisans in Visby. There is no two of anything. The boats are not built fast. They are not built often.

A classic runabout asks to be admired. A J Craft Torpedo asks to be trusted. That is the difference between paying homage to a silhouette and inheriting the philosophy beneath it.

The J Craft Torpedo carries the visual DNA of Riva, Chris-Craft and Hacker-Craft into water those boats were never built to cross - and arrives, calmly, having earned the right to be there.

The J Craft Torpedo is available for commission as a new build. For a closer look at how the boat’s technology disappears in use, the Invisible Confidence Journal piece picks up where this article ends.