Its crew has been threatened by pirates, lashed by storms and almost sunk by floating logs, but now there are blue skies for Earthrace, a biodiesel-powered trimaran, which sailed into the Spanish port of Sagunto and smashed the world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe by speedboat.

The £3m vessel, which looks more like the Batmobile than a boat and runs on recycled cooking fat, knocked 14 days off the record set a decade ago by Cable and Wireless Adventurer, a British craft…

It was New Zealand skipper Pete Bethune’s second attempt at the record. He abandoned his first last year after a series of disasters that included an attack from pirates off Nicaragua that left a bullet hole in the hull and his own brief imprisonment in Guatemala after a fatal collision with a local fishing boat.

This time Bethune was almost forced to abandon ship again when Earthrace crashed into logs in the surf off Borneo – wrecking the rudder, propeller and drive shaft – and progress was delayed by an expanse of floating rubbish 1,000 miles off California, a seven-day storm in the Indian Ocean and a six-week queue to pass through the Panama canal…

“We’re completely stoked to have achieved something so incredible,” says Bethune. “Earthrace’s success has proved that any form of transport can be non-damaging to the environment as well as being high performance.”

You gotta love a craft and team sponsored by “Burger Fuel”.