An Insider’s Preview to the Key West Worlds
Teams to watch at offshore powerboat racing’s biggest event.
October 11, 2014
Early in November, 50-something offshore powerboat racing teams and thousands of their fans will descend on Key West, Fla. And for one raucous week—reportedly the biggest revenue-raising week of the year for nation’s southernmost city—powerboat racers and their ardent followers will be in high-octane heaven.
Captured on its way to 2013 World title in the Unlimited class in Key West, Miss GEICO is favorite to take the top spot again. Photo by Andy Newman.
Three days of racing—November 5th, 7th, and 9th—for Super Boat International World Championship titles, mixed with a nearly 24-hour party called Duval Street make for endless good fun for the go-fast boat crowd.
The annual SBI Key West Worlds happen just one month after the organization crowns its National champs at its annual event in Clearwater, Fla. And those results, at least in terms of points accumulation, have zero effect on crowning World title holders a month later in Key West. The Key West Worlds are, for all intents and purposes, a stand-alone mini-season. The three days of racing, not the season leading up to them, determine which teams in each class will go home with a World championship.
Still, you can’t ignore what happened during the regular SBI season if you’re handicapping, much less trying to pick winners across the various SBI classes for the Key West Worlds. And as a journalist who covers the sport, I just can’t resist making predictions. So here’s my take on who will win what in this year’s Key West mini-season.
Superboat Unlimited Class
By showing up and racing hard at every SBI event this season, the SilverHook/Lucas Oil V-bottom took the National Championship in this class in 2014. That said, its chances of beating the likes of Miss GEICO, CMS, and Spirit of Qatar 613, which not long ago switched from Mercury Racing 1350 engines to a pair of 1650s, are slim at best. A V-bottom with twin 1,075-hp engines just can’t hold its own against a slew of catamarans with twin 1,650-hp mills, unless by some sort of divine intervention all of the catamarans break down.
The Stihl Superboat-class team heads into the Key West World with a National Championship under its belt. Photo by Jay Nichols/Naples Image.
So which team will take the title? The CMS cockpit duo of Randy Scism and Bob Bull is a perennial threat, but they haven’t logged much time together in Bull’s 48-foot Marine Technology, Inc., catamaran this year. According to throttleman John Tomlinson, Tor Staubo, the owner and driver of Gasse (another 48-foot MTI cat) plans to compete in Key West in November, but Tomlinson and Staubo have logged even less time in the cockpit together this year than Scism and Bull. No matter who mans the cockpit of the Spirit of Qatar 613, the 41-foot Victory-built cat has yet to prove itself in the United States. And the fate of the much-awaited Envy team effort—a 50-foot Mystic cat—remains in flux. If the team does make it to Key West, it will be there for “testing sessions under race conditions,” meaning the Envy cat won’t run hard against the rest of the class.
I have to go with Scott Begovich and Marc Granet to repeat as back-to-back Unlimited-class World Champions in the 42-foot Miss GEICO victory catamaran on this one. They ran almost as many events as SilverHook/Lucas Oil this season, and race time plus test time tend to equal World titles in offshore racing.
Superboat
The 38-foot Stihl Skater and 40-foot Broadco MTI catamarans squared off at one race after the next during the 2014 season, but in the end Stihl took the Superboat-class National Championship in Clearwater. The cockpit teams of J.R. Noble and Mark Kowalski in Stihl and Chuck Broaddus and Grant Bruggemann in Broadco are well matched in what has become as close to a “”factory catamaran battle”—Skater versus MTI—as you’ll ever see in offshore racing.
Two wild cards heading into Key West—Team AMSOIL and WHM Motorsports—can’t be ignored in the Superboat class. Led by throttleman Bob Teague, the AMSOIL Skater 36-footer started mid-season and notched two first-place finishes and one second-place finish on the Offshore Powerboat Association circuit. The veteran WHM Motorsports team of Billy Mauff and Jay Muller—last year’s world champs in the class—heads to Key West in a brand-new 40-foot Skater catamaran with equally brand-new 750-hp Sterling engines. Either of these teams could throw a wrench into the plans of the Stihl and Broadco teams.
But that’s a long shot—the likely battle for world supremacy in the Superboat class comes down to Stihl and Broadco, and based on regular season performance I have to give the advantage to Stihl.
Stock Class
With the 2014 National Championship trophy on the shelf in its shop and a couple of dominant recent performances its credit, The Hulk/Redline Oil 32-foot Doug Wright cat throttled by Dan Lawrence and driven by Rob Nunziato, the boat’s owner, is my pick to take the World title. The team members have appeared to get more and more dialed in setting up the boat and working together as the seasoned has progressed, and they head into Key West with confidence.
Back-to-back National championships and a boat that seems to get faster and faster have The Hulk/Redline Oil looking strong to take the Stock-class title. Photo by Andy Newman.
That said, the experienced crew of driver/owner Chris Schoenbohm and famed Stock-class throttleman Gary Ballough in SOS Venezuela, a 32-foot Doug Wright with a recently widened tunnel, aren’t about to hand it to them. (Schoenbohm and Ballough will share the cockpit for the first time in Key West, but both are cagey and competitive Stock-class veterans.) Nor is throttleman Ryan Beckley and his driver Tanner Lewis in Beckley’s 30-foot Skater, DoublEdge Motorsports.
This is by far the toughest class in which to pick a world champion, because all of the top three teams this season—Hulk, SOS and DoublEdge—have incredibly talented, experienced crews in their cockpits and have logged a lot time competing this year. But once again, even though I have friends in every cockpit, I have a hard time seeing The Hulk team not taking the world title this year.
Superboat Vee
Like the SilverHook/Lucas Oil team in the Superboat Unlimited class, Absolutely Not, a 30-foot Fountain V-bottom owned by Mark Gibbons, took the SBI National Championship by showing up at every event and racing hard—even after Gibbons sustained significant shoulder injuries early in the season. Steve Miklos, the owner and throttleman of Sun Print, has described Absolutely Not as “the new sheriff in town,” and says he sees the boat as stiff competition heading into the worlds.
If Steve Miklos can get his new 30-foot Phantom V-bottom dialed in, he has a good chance of taking the Superboat Vee World title in Key West. Photo by Pete Boden/Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.
The ever-competitive Miklos comes into Key West with a new 30-foot Phantom raceboat that ran strong against Absolutely Not in Clearwater, but thanks to a mechanical failure did not finish the race. (Sun Print and Absolutely Not were the only Superboat Vee-class teams that showed up for the event.)
Less than thrilled with parity restrictions placed on the Snowy Mountain Brewery V-bottom—a 29-foot Outerlimits that absolutely dominated the class for two seasons—Michael “Doc” Janssen, the boat’s owner, sat out for almost all of the 2014 season. Based on my recent conversations with him, it’s likely he’ll show up in Key West with his slippery-fast 29-footer, but Snowy Mountain Brewery fans can expect a surprise or two from the team.
Absolutely Not displayed consistency in 2014, but was dominated by the “old” Sun Print boat in the first three races in the season. The Absolutely Not team smartly continued racing when the Sun Print team stopped for the next three races while finishing its new boat, and claimed the title. Still, I believe that if Miklos can get his new ride dialed in between now and the time the first green flag flies in Key West, he’ll take the world title in the class.
That’s it with the exception of the Production Classes—my special bonus prediction—where I expect the 38-foot Fountain Black Pearl in P3 and the 30-foot Phantom Two Cruel in P4, to continue with their winning ways in Key West.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of it, and I suspect that after they read this, every team I didn’t pick will want to prove it. And they might just do it. After all, it’s a brand-new mini-season.
