High Performance Powerboat Racing: Now Driving Matters
In old-school offshore powerboat racing, the driver wasn’t a big factor. With today’s shorter courses, those days are gone.
July 1, 2011
You wouldn’t be visiting Boats.com if you didn’t have an interest in boats, but you probably don’t know a thing about offshore powerboat racing. That’s OK, don’t beat yourself up. Even in the high-performance boat community, most people don’t know much about it—or just don’t care to know much about it. And that’s OK, too. You can still own a 150-plus-mph go-fast catamaran without getting bitten by the racing bug and, trust me, avoiding that particular bite will keep your existing money pit from becoming a cash chasm.
When Miss Geico enters a turn, driver Marc Granet has to be aware of other boats taking the inside and outside lines.
So allow me, in two paragraphs, to give you the brief history of offshore racing. In the 1970s, 1980s, and even in the early 1990s, offshore racing was offshore, meaning it happened in open and often rough seas. The boats would head out 50 to 100 miles, turn around and come back. A rugged sport it was. A spectator sport it was not. For all intents and purposes, the person behind the wheel had to negotiate one 180-degree turn and could use as much ocean as necessary to get it done.
In the mid-1990s, offshore racing started to move closer to shore so that spectators—you know, the kind who buy products from event and team sponsors—could actually see the action. One lap on a long course in the middle of aquatic nowhere gave way to multiple laps on shorter courses with viewing areas and concession stands.
Which era was better? On this point, no one who follows the sport is neutral, and for a number of reasons. The topic has been beaten to death, there’s no correct answer, and I don’t want to be stabbed in my sleep—so I’ll steer clear of it. But on one point there can be no argument: Given that offshore race teams split cockpit duties between steering and throttling, when offshore racing moved inshore, the role of the driver got a whole lot more important.
“Offshore racing in the past was a brutal sport,” says Marc Granet, the driver of Miss Geico, a 50-foot-long, 4,000-hp twin turbine Mystic catamaran, that is probably the most recognizable boat on the offshore racing scene today. “You held down the throttle until you ran out of gas, broke, or made it back. But steering wasn’t a major part of the equation—from what the old guys in the sport have told me, you never heard, ‘Hey, that was a great turn.’ The throttleman and the navigator were everything. Steering just wasn’t that critical.
Carrying enough momentum through the turn is crucial for maximum exit speed.
“But as the courses became shorter and closer to shore—and a lot of that was driven by the demand in the marketplace created by extreme sports where spectators want to feel like they’re part of the action—the fundamentals of the sport changed completely. Now the driver had to be good and the boat had to handle well. The drivers and their equipment evolved together.”
So in today’s offshore races, drivers and their throttlemen have to negotiate multiple turns on closed courses with a fleet made up of several classes. That translates to finding the best lines through those turns in traffic that is both slower and faster, although in Miss Geico’s case, as the fastest boat in offshore racing, faster traffic hasn’t been much of a problem.
Compounding the issue is the fact that offshore race boats have gotten a lot larger since the 1970s. A 32-foot-long offshore race boat used to be pretty big. Now, 45- to 50-footers are not uncommon.
Do the math—lots of big fast boats running on a relatively short closed course a few feet from one another—and you get what Granet means about the fundamentals changing.
There is arguably no more demanding turn in offshore racing than the dogleg in front of Mallory Square in Key West at the annual Super Boat International World Championships. The straightaway leading to the turn runs by a long spectator-filled jetty and into Key West Harbor. The straightaway is preceded by rough water “outside” and a big “hole,” a spot where the bottom contour creates a consistent drop-off-like condition in the water. So once the boat gets past the hole, throttlemen tend to, in the words of Granet, “get in it.”
But they can’t get in it too much or the boat will miss the Mallory Square turn and become an unwelcome visitor to the spectator fleet. As a result, the turn has provided more than its share of roll-overs and spin-outs.
Miss Geico driver Marc Granet.
The Mallory Square dogleg also presents a fine example of the kind of turns today’s offshore racing drivers must negotiate efficiently and consistently in traffic. Granet, who teams up with throttleman Scott Begovich in Miss Geico, provides a description of exactly what it takes from behind the wheel: “Between the hole and the Mallory Square turn, that’s where you make up your time on the Key West course. As we approach the harbor we’re running 155, 165 mph. I actually start turning the boat before we pass the crowd—if I started later we’d slide right across the course and through the harbor.
“Everything is sloshing around thanks to the seawall, so the water is a turbulent mess,” he continues. “Now the boat is drifting. I can’t make a sharp move, but when the time comes I have to be smooth and aggressive. Once I can see the hotels, my eyes go right to the big round pin -- not the buoy but the big circle of about 100 feet, where we’re still running 135 mph before the turn. Then I really turn—my goal is to be as close as I can to the concrete marker. To navigate that turn as fast as you possibly can, you have to use the whole track, which means knowing who’s on the inside and outside of you. If you do it right, you come out of the turn with the fastest possible exit speed.”
Sound like a lot to handle? It is.
“And from clearing the hole to exiting the turn, it all happens in about 10 seconds,” Granet says. “Scotty and I are the captains of the boat together. But in the turns, the paradigm shifts from it being a throttleman’s boat to a driver’s boat. He sets me up so I can do my job, so I can set him up to do his job. The days of drivers in offshore racing being meat in the seat? Those days are gone. As I said, the fundamentals have changed.”
Matt Trulio is the editor at large for Powerboat magazine. He has written for the magazine since 1994. Trulio’s daily blog can be found on speedonthewater.com, a site he created and maintains, which is the high-performance arm of the BoaterMouth group.
