Race World Offshore's Key West World Championships has picked up a hometown backer with deep roots in the Florida Keys. Charley Toppino & Sons, the construction firm that has helped build the islands for more than a century, has signed on as a sponsor of the event, which runs from November 1 to 8, 2026.
The connection runs through four generations of one family.
Charley Toppino arrived in New York from Italy in 1906, aged just 14, shining shoes and labouring on the New York Tunnel Extension to get by. Within a few years he had founded Charley Toppino & Sons, Inc. and headed south to Florida to build up a construction crew. By the 1930s, roadway and bridge work had drawn the company into the Keys, and Key West became home for good.
The firm's fingerprints are on much of the infrastructure locals rely on without thinking twice about it, roads, stormwater outfalls, job sites across the island chain. It has worked for FDOT, the Navy, the Army and the Coast Guard over the decades, and its reach once extended well beyond Florida, including a 202-mile stretch of the Pan-American Highway built in Costa Rica during the 1960s.
The 2000s brought a shift from earthwork subcontractor to full general contractor, with staff numbers growing from 70 to more than 160. These days the third and fourth generations of Toppinos are running things, and the company has leaned further into storm cleanup work and charitable giving as the island community has needed it.
Today the business covers infrastructure, site development, general contracting, demolition and aggregates, with ready mix concrete supplied through sister company Monroe Concrete.
For a circuit built on speed and spectacle, there's a quieter side behind the scenes. Race World Offshore events depend on local infrastructure, docks, roads, drainage, all the unglamorous groundwork that lets a world championship function in a small island city for a week. Toppino's arrival joins a growing list of local businesses lending their own slice of Key West history to the event, following Key West Marine Hardware's signing as a sponsor, the third-generation chandlery better known to locals as "Los Cubanitos."
Charley Toppino & Sons describes its approach simply: show up, do it right, put your whole heart into the work. That ethos, four generations deep, is now tied to one of offshore powerboat racing's biggest events on the calendar.
