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Miami Herald July 3, 1983
ANOTHER STEP FOR OFFSHORE RACING
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There once was a day when offshore powerboat racing was the activity of a bunch of guys who would stick numbers on their fun boats and spend a weekend racing from Miami to the Bahamas and back. The crews sometimes showed up in wacky outfits, maybe dressed as Roman centurions complete with horse-hair plume helmets, and some of the boats were as small as 20 feet. The monster squatting in Bill Sirois' shop in North
Miami Beach is clear evidence that those days are gone forever -- and that
offshore racing may be about to take another step that will put it as far
beyond the way we know it now as Tony Garcia's 1982 world championship
catamaran was ahead of those old 20- "The initial intention was to be competitive by using stock engines that are cheaper and have much less power than we use now," Sirois said, standing next to the 50-foot Cougar catamaran that should be the first of the super-boats to begin racing on the 1983 offshore circuit. Owned by driver Al Copeland, the boat was built by Cougar in England and is being rigged at the Popeyes shop on Northeast 195th Street. "That idea was OK as long as there was only one of them. But once we knew that people were building three and four, we went to full race engines, and I'm sure they all did, too," added Sirois, Copeland's throttleman and team manager. As you walk along its side, the boat seems to stretch for about half a block. Fifty feet long and 12 feet wide, the aluminum monster has four engines tucked into its commodious stern section; each of the 700-horsepower Mercruisers drive a separate Mercruiser surface drive. Unlike the present 38- to 40-foot cats, in which the driver and throttleman sit 12 feet apart in separate hulls, the crew of Popeyes will sit side by side in a huge cockpit in the middle of the wing deck. There is room in back for two more crewmen in a rear cockpit, because the boat also will be used for long- distance records that require two or three drivers and a navigator. The first distance run planned is an August shot at the Miami-New York speedboat record that Michael Reagan and Bob Magoon will try to break this weekend. "You can see we really sit out on the open," Sirois said. "It was designed to keep our legs and feet out from under the dash panel. That's how people get hurt in these things -- smashing their legs on things when they're thrown out in a crash." On paper, the boat should top out at 125 to 130 miles per hour, compared to about 115 for a top-class 38-footer, but Sirois says he'll be happy with anything over 115. More important than raw speed, however, is the boat's ability to maintain high speed, say 90 m.p.h., in six-foot seas where a 40- footer would be slowed to 60. The boat will weigh about 16,000 pounds with 600 gallons of gasoline (it can carry up to 1,400 gallons for a distance run), giving it a ratio of 5.7 pounds of boat for every horsepower its engines produce. In their existing 41-footer, Copeland and Sirois have to push eight pounds of boat with each horsepower. In addition, because the super-boat burns up fuel twice as fast as the 41-footer, its power-to-weight ratio will improve at a faster rate toward the end of a race. Popeyes probably will be the first super-boat on the circuit, aiming for a debut in the Point Pleasant (N.J.) race in late July, but other boats won't be far behind. World champion Tony Garcia's wooden 48-foot Cougar cat, a sister ship to Popeyes with slightly shorter bows, is about two weeks behind Popeyes in the rigging process. Garcia's boat is at the KSW engine plant in St. Augustine, where it also is being rigged with four gas engines. But Garcia's boat will have only two propellers on Arneson surface drives, each turned by two engines. Once the boat proves itself, Garcia hopes to race again under the colors of the Michelob Light team. Ironically, Garcia's unprecedented winning streak stopped at six when he couldn't find a ride for the Detroit race. He and throttleman Keith Hazell had leased a boat, which they drove under the Arneson Drives banner. But they leased it from Eddie Trotta, who recently was convicted on tax-evasion charges. The Internal Revenue Service seized all of Trotta's assets, including the boat, just before the Detroit race, and Garcia couldn't find a competitive boat to lease. At Cougar's U.S. facility on Northeast 188th Street in North Miami Beach, the welders are busy cobbling up a 45-foot deep-vee hull for Miami's George Morales, who with throttleman Bob Idoni recently won the Detroit offshore race in a 38-foot Cougar cat called Fayva Shoes. This boat is a little odd, sort of a convertible. When Morales decided to build a super-boat, he also wanted to be able to run it in the small-boat class. Because he was afraid that this would be limited to boats under 45 feet, the boat was built 44 feet 11 inches long, with a couple of snouts that can be fastened to the bows to lengthen it to 45-3. While no one is talking about cost, development and construction of the supercats reportedly are running well over $500,000 each, and there are some in offshore racing who would like to see them voted out of competition. Critics say that only a handful of people can afford or find sponsors for super- boats. Sirois answers that you can't stop progress. "Ten years ago, Roger Haynes came along with a boat that had a $10,000 stainless-steel exhaust system and a fuel-injection system that cost $5,000," he said. "Everybody told him, 'You're nuts. Nobody can afford that.' Now every competitive boat runs with them." As for the argument that there will only be a handful of boats in the super-boat class, Sirois answers, "Face it, that's what you've got now. In the open-boat class, there are five or six guys who are going to produce the winner. The others might get a second or third if enough of the top boats break down, but there really is only a handful of top competitive boats now." |