Two Sides, One Machine: The APACHE STAR® World Record Heritage Edition

Dossier

The machine

APACHE STAR® World Record Heritage Edition — built to order

Livery

Two-sided, hand-painted and hand-aged. Cuba left, USA right.

Origin

The powerboat APACHE STAR, which set the Key West–Havana record in 2015

The film

THE BRIDGE: 90 miles apart — no dialogue, made entirely with AI

Festival

Higgsfield Global Film Festival 2026

Premiere

Parklichtspiele Buckow, Wriezener Str. 1, 15377 Buckow · 20 September 2026

The machine

One frame, two countries

There is a motorcycle in our workshop with two countries on it. Not two versions of a motorcycle. One machine.

Stand on its left and you are looking at Cuba: olive green, a hand-painted flag worn into the lacquer, CUBA 2015 stencilled across the side panel, a canvas expedition bag strapped behind the seat. Walk around to the right and you are looking at the United States: deep blue, stars and stripes laid across the tank, red headers, the same brown leather under you.

Ride past someone and they see one country. Ride past them again and they see the other. It is not a paint job with a concept attached — it is the shortest way we have found to say what this brand is actually built on.

The distance

Ninety miles

The powerboat APACHE STAR set the Key West–Havana record in 2015. The shortest stretch of water between the United States and Cuba is ninety miles, but on 1 August she ran the longer route, from Key West to Havana — around 110 nautical miles — in 90 minutes. The mark she broke had stood since 1958: six hours, twenty-four minutes and forty seconds, set by the American boater Forest Johnson on the longer run from Miami.

The boat was not new. She won world championships in 1992 and 1993 under the name Apache Heritage — a V-hull taking titles in an era of catamarans — and then disappeared. Roger Klüh had watched her win in Key West in 1992 and 1993. In 2011 he found her hull again under a torn tarpaulin in a Miami boatyard, and on 31 January 2012 he signed for her. The first time he saw her as his own: "It was love at first sight."

What followed was two and a half years and around seven thousand hours of restoration: a hull taken back to nothing and rebuilt around a free-floating titanium floor on spring bearings. Twin Mercury Racing bi-turbo engines, 2,700 horsepower together, over 115 knots in testing. Painted in a single colour developed for her: ApacheStar Orange.

And then the part nobody puts in the brochure: the first permit application was refused. Roger applied in the summer of 2013, received a clear no, lost his appeal in 2014 and applied again on 20 March 2015. The authorisation arrived barely four weeks before the run.

The full story is in our archive: How Roger Klüh set the Key West–Havana record in 2015 and The 2,700 hp boat behind the crossing.

Timeline

From 1958 to 2026

Sixty-eight years from the old mark to the machine. Pick a year.

Inheritance

The two sides are older than the motorcycle

The crossing was made on 1 August 2015 — one day after Roger Klüh's fiftieth birthday. He ran it in a racing overall carrying the number 50, orange on black.

That number is older than the record. The throttleman Richie Powers had raced under it with Don Johnson; when he joined Omar Danial on Apache Heritage, he brought the 50 with him, and she raced under it through the 1992 and 1993 world championships in Key West. It stayed on the hull when she became APACHE STAR — forty-five feet long, then as now.

And on that same racing overall, photographed on the quay in Havana: the Cuban flag and the Stars and Stripes, one on each upper arm. Both countries, on one garment, eleven years before anyone thought of putting them on a fuel tank.

The motorcycle did not invent that idea. It inherited it.

The rule

Why ninety miles became a design rule

Every brand that claims a heritage has to answer the same question eventually: what does it actually change about the things you make?

For us it changed a rule. Cuba is always on the left. The United States is always on the right. On the tank, on the side panel, on the helmet shell.

It sounds arbitrary written down. It isn't, and you notice the difference immediately when someone breaks it. A rule that never bends stops being decoration and starts being grammar — the machine reads as one object with two halves rather than as two graphics competing for the same tank. That is also why we never mirror a photograph of it. Flip the image and the lettering breaks, and so does everything else.

The film

The same rule, in a film

THE BRIDGE: 90 miles apart is the first film we have made, and the first thing we have made entirely with AI. There is no dialogue in it at all — not one word, no voice-over, no subtitles. Every image and every sound in it was generated.

It is our entry in the Higgsfield Global Film Festival 2026, and it has its cinema premiere at the Parklichtspiele Buckow on 20 September 2026.

It obeys exactly the same rule. Seen from the saddle, Cuba is on the left, with the bag, and the United States on the right, with the exhaust. Nobody in the film explains it and nobody needs to.

The film is not about the record. It is about the same ninety miles, and two people on either side of them. The boat proved the distance could be crossed. The film asks what it cost to wait.

Questions

Everything else