APBA Powerboat action

Cool stuff. I went a race way back '91, very impressive rigs!

On a somewhat related note (boat racing), this article was recently in our local paper, http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2012/07/st_tammany_man_makes_big_splas.html.

Hope you're ok with the thread hijack.
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Great video and I enjoyed the drag racing one as well

Glad to see you've discovered Unlimited Hydroplane Racing. My father took me to my first race in Miami back in the late 1960s at the old Miami Marine Stadium.
While they are very cool today with the turbine engines, they were equally cool back in the day when they had big airplane engines which earned them the nickname Thunder boats.

I liked the racing so much I returned every year until they finally stopped racing in Miami. All I had for a camera back then was a kodak Instamatic which didn't work very well at all but here's a few from when I got my first 35mm camera and telephoto lens. I got it just in time to capture the last of the Thunder Boats and the beginning of the turbine age.

Keep up the good work. You're on the right track of creating some memories of your own
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I think Chip Hanauer is one of the most fascinating stories in sports.

http://www.chiphanauer.com/lessons.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Hanauer

http://www.thunderboats.org/history/history0567.html

 

Of all the sports where it's said "TV dosent do it
justice", Unlimited Hydroplanes is definately the one.

Coming from Lakeland, Florida (home of Bernie Little
and Miss Budweiser fame) we attended the Miami
Unlimited Hydro events through most of the '80s.

It's absolutely stunning to see a boats that big and
heavy go as fast as they do in person.

Seems like back in the '80s, there was a boat race
of just about every type happening in Florida throughout
the year and Bernie Little was involved with them one
way or another, hard to find a more inviting group of people.

We met an SST140 driver from Naples who invited us
to a test he was doing on a private lake that was so remote
it was a miracle we found it.

Once the team got through their test, the driver offered to
let us give the boat a go for a few laps. Quite an interesting
sensation as balancing the power and trimming the boat with
toggle switches on the wheel to keep it straight and level.

Too bad it's all gone away, apparently the pencil pushers
made all these great events impossible.

BHW

 

I ran across Chip at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1999
when I was working for the BMW Motorsport Beck's Beer
LMR V12 team.

We were in the pits waiting for the Thursday night practice
session to begin. Chip was there in a PR capacity
for Michelin and was the first to render assistance
when Tom Kristensen took a tumble off the car
while practicing driver changes.

He was very recognizable but still spoke rather weakly,
a result of his massive upper torso injuries in Unlimiteds.

BHW

 

I remember those days fondly

The Miami Marine Stadium was such a great spot for boat racing and it really is sad they let it slip away. It was a spectacle to watch in person as you soak up the sound and speed under the shade of the grandstands. Always seemed that Miss Budweiser was the one to beat and Bernie Little was quite the character. I remember one year he showed up with a jet boat that he gave rides in between heats and did his best to get a few screams out of his passengers.

When my family moved to Naples I had a drivers license by then and continued to go back every year until they quit racing. I moved on to offshore powerboat racing which seemed equally as crazy for the drivers and spectacular for us spectators. One thing I have yet to see and experience is the drag boats and I have it on my list of things to do.

Here's a few more pics from my days spent at the Miami Marine Stadium and one from an Offshore Powerboat race of the Cocoa Beach pier.
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Great shot of Dirty Laundry....

APBA still sanctions the Offshore or did it break up into other management??

I know there were four fatals at the Finals last year...too many.

We really enjoyed the "East meets West" they used to hold in Corpus Christi..
RIP Jack Carmody.

 

I discovered unlimited hydroplane racing in Seattle in 1979 and have been a fan ever since. Bill Muncey won the first two races I ever attended in his Atlas Van Lines "Blue Blaster", which is currently being restored by the Hydroplane & Raceboat Museum in Kent, WA. Anyone who is a fan of the sport needs to visit the museum if they're ever in Seattle. You can find out more at www.thunderboats.org.

I attended the 1981 unlimited race at Miami Marine Stadium, and marvelled at the difference to the Seattle race. At Miami the boats passed very close in front of you, and the sound reverberating off the grandstand roof was deafening! The Pay N' Pak turbine boat was making its competitive debut (after having flipped during practice at the Tri-Cities race the preceding summer), and it was so quiet that you could actually hear the roostertail water falling back into the bay behind the boat! They had trouble with the salt water on the compressor blades, but took the cowling off and managed to finish.

I also attended the Sailfish Regatta for limited hydros in Jensen Beach the same year. The little boats were certainly fun to watch.

I have since attended unlimited races in Madison, IN, Syracuse, NY, and Philadelphia, but I usually go back to Seattle every 3 years or so and volunteer to conduct pit tours. Along the way I've met Steve Reynolds, Jim Kropfeld and Chip Hanauer, among others. It's a great sport to watch (though I wish someone would bring back the Merlin engine) and I wish that there was more of it. Nowadays, the season-ending race is in Doha, Qatar!

The current sanctioning body for the unlimiteds is called H1 Unlimited http://www.h1unlimited.com/.

 

To be honest I never tried to keep up with the politics of Offshore Powerboat racing.
I do remember when it was one big happy family and guys like Don Johnson raced. The boats were super bad and so was the competition. Then someone got the not so bright idea to start their own series and the division began. It certainly hurt more than it helped the sport.

I grew up in Naples with one of the guys that tragically lost his life last year in Key West. I was also there when Tom Gentry lost his life after spinning out in front of the Pier House. Earlier in the week I got to photograph the action from a helicopter and got some great shots and video of Gentry's boat. I was watching from a boat anchored just down from the Pier House when he rolled it. Both the Unlimiteds and the Offshore boats race on such a thin edge of control it really is amazing what they do. Its too bad they have to put their life on the line to do it. Here are a few more pics of guys that race on the wild side.
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Here's a couple shots that may be from the 1981 race. I don't have the slide handy to check the date.

Is this the Atlas Van Lines you're talking about or is it an earlier model they are restoring?
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that's cool, Chip was a bit like Senna in the "ruthless competitor with a heart of gold" sense.

do you think his voice issues were a result of physical injury, or some manifestation of PTSD? I've heard both theories and they both have some scientific merit. either way a fascinating story, I wish someone would make a movie about him.

 

From memory, Hanauer experienced one or two major blowovers in the Miss Bud. In one of them, he crushed his sternum, broke ribs, etc.

A friend of mine broke his sternum racing go-karts and it affected his voice in much the same way for months. Having broke a couple of ribs myself in go-karts, it's a horribly uncomfortable
injury, breaking a sternum must be awful.

BHW

 

Great pics!

 

Thanks for the shots! They bring back memories. You can see the Pak running without the cowling, and it also looks like they have at least one of the air intakes blocked off. Until they went to dorsal air intakes around 1986, the salt ingestion problem had not been solved.

Yup, that's the Blaster. The cowling behind the cockpit had been enlarged for 1981 for reasons not known to me. It wasn't for driver safety, since they were still not belted in; maybe Muncey had added something to the engine that required a bit more room. He was desperate to get on even terms with the Griffon-powered Miss Budweiser that had been cleaning his clock throughout 1980, and that ultimately cost him his life. In the 1981 season finale at Acapulco, he set up the boat to run dangerously light in the final heat, and he was, in fact, ahead of the Bud when the Atlas blew over backwards and landed on him. Until about a year ago, he was still the winningest unlimited driver of all time.

The deaths of Muncey and Dean Chenoweth less than a year apart led to the first use of seat belts in 1983, the first trial of a canopy in 1985, and the definitive cockpit design (still fundamentally what is in use today) by the Miss Budweiser team in 1986. Within a few years the canopies (cut down from F-16 units rejected by the USAF) became mandatory. There has been only one death in unlimited racing in the last 25 years.

 

Reminds me of the good old days of powerboat racing in south Florida when I lived in Ft Laud. I had a 28' Checkmate with twin 350 mags. About 80 mph top end and had such a blast at the races and the Poker Runs I competed in. Lots of those teams were funded by the "square groupers"!

 

A lot of great memories from those days. As I recall,
the excuse for no longer running Unlimiteds at the
Miami Marine Stadium was the grandstand portion
was compromised by Hurricane Andrew.

However, we see concerts and other events taking place
there so it dosent make a lot of sense why they don't
come back unless the salt water affects the turbine
engines.

The craziest boat we saw there was an improvised and
enlarged tunnell hull with eight (8) on board engines in
orange Arcadia colors which must have been around 1986
or '87.

We got up close as the boat was placed in the water and mechanics
ran up and down the length of the engine bay making
adjustments to the engines.

Suddenly, one of the crew members approached us and said
"You guys better clear out if here, when the engine start this
while area will get soaked". We'd just gotten out of the blast
zone when the motors fired up sending a wall of water soaking
the whole area where we were just standing with our video and
still cameras.

Out on the circuit, the eight motor boat never really ran
very well, it oscillated violently sponson to sponson which
must have beaten the driver up pretty good.

In the same session, Jim Kropfeld smashed the circuit record
in the Miss Bud and went on the win the event. The victory party
at the Jockey Club went on far into the night.

BHW

 

I had once heard for the apparent abandonment of Miami Marine Stadium as a racing venue had to do with protecting endangered manatees. But that is only hearsay.

I remember seeing photos of the oddball Arcadian tunnel hull, but I never saw it race, and even though I assumed that the effort would be futile (as it turned out to be), I still would have liked to have witnessed it.

There have been a few tunnel-hull unlimiteds over the years, both inboard and outboard. The late Don Aronow campaigned one for awhile, first with two Indy-style Cosworth V-8s and later with Chrysler Hemis, to little avail. Eventually the boat was redone as a four-engined outboard and actually finished third in a World Championship regatta near Houston.

 

I went on the Google to see if I could find out what happened to the stadium.

From various sites I gathered that the boats had become too fast for the stadium so they quit holding Unlimiteds there. Then Hurricane Andrew damaged the stadium and the city condemned it.

However, an inspection of the site showed the stadium to be structurally sound. The city of Miami still didn't want anything to do with it and let it sit.

Graffiti artists moved in and proceeded to use the bare concrete as their canvas literally covering the entire stadium with graffiti. Its interesting that the stadium was constructed entirely of poured concrete which was unfinished. Those of us that were there can fondly remember how hot it was outside on the shoreline and how much cooler it was when you went inside the stadium

So the stadium now sits covered in graffiti and the city of Miami still doesn't want it. Fortunately, a group has formed in an effort to restore the stadium and bring it back to its old glory. I don't know if they could still hold Unlimiteds there but it would be a shame to lose such a space and have it replaced by condos or something.

 

But they've got a $1+B to build a baseball
stadium.

Unfortunately, Bernie Little passed away a few
years ago and with his passing we lost the biggest
motivating factor in driving boat racing of all types.

He drove the Miami event and even brought
F-1 tunnell hulls to Lake Parker in Lakeland
one year, that was neat.

We'd run into Bernie everywhere boat racing was
happening, and a few sports car races too.

 

Great shots!!

Thanks!

 

I think it's safe to say that unlimited racing had a love/hate relationship with Bernie Little. On the one hand, his showmanship and drive helped publicize the sport and keep it going during tough financial times. On the other hand, his team's huge budget (courtesy of his longtime friendship with the Busch family) scared away other potential sponsors who didn't want to spend the kind of money that it would take to beat him.

Think about it: the Budweiser sponsorship that started in 1963 was among the first big-time sports sponsorships of a racing team in the U.S., and one of the longest lasting.