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Miami Herald October 18, 1985
CREW STILL TINKERING AS RACE APPROACHES
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Growling like an angry animal, the 38-foot catamaran surges across the four-foot seas off Dania Beach at 75 miles per hour, mere loafing speed as owner-drive Vince Vento cuts the wheel for a wide right turn. Ten feet across the broad wing deck in the throttleman's cockpit, Keith Hazell is scowling, hearing sounds from the port engine that he doesn't like and keeping the twin 750-horsepower engines down to 4,000 revolutions per minute. Panasonic, the Active Cat that Vento and Hazel have been campaigning in the national offshore power-boat circuit, is doing about the same thing she did at Northport, Mich., a couple of weeks before, when faulty fuel injectors cooked an engine minutes before the race. That prevented her crew from crossing the starting line and scoring the guaranteed 100 points that would have put them in second place in the national standings. The boat powers effortlessly over a quartering sea as Vento turns downwind, but a few seconds later a sharp "pop" comes from the port engine compartment, followed by a softer, steady "rat- a-tat-tat." Hazell throws up his left arm in disgust and motions for Vento to take the boat back in through Port Everglades and head for home at Hazell's Harbor One Marine on 15th Street in Fort Lauderdale. There the problem is diagnosed as a damaged valve, a holed piston or a blown gasket. The question will be answered for sure when the engine is torn down. "Another small and expensive problem solved," Vento grins after he and Hazell decide to follow their first instinct and replace both engines instead of rebuilding the damaged one before Saturday's 154.9-mile Apache Offshore Challenge race, which starts north of Baker's Haulover, crosses the Gulf Stream to North Cat Key, runs north 10 miles to just south of Bimini, then shoots across the stream again to a mark south of Port Everglades. "We had discussed having the injectors rebuilt before, but for some reason we didn't do it. Now we have to use another set of engines and have the injectors rebuilt." The Apache race is a revival of the old Sam Griffith- Bacardi series, which takes the four biggest classes twice across the Gulf Stream before finishing off with three brief dashes up and down the Florida coast between a northern mark two miles south of Port Everglades and a southern mark off the Sunny Isles Pier. Boats in two smaller clases will not cross the stream but will run six round trips between the coastal marks for a total of 111.5 miles, and the three smallest classes will do four coastal laps for a 74.3-mile race. 60 boats expected The expected 60-boat fleet will be based at Turnberry Isle Yacht and Racquet Club on U.S. 1 in North Miami Beach. The boats will leave Turnberry Isle at 10:15 a.m. Saturday and parade out Baker's Haulover to the starting line about three miles to the north, where the Superboats and Open Class will begin the race at 11:30 a.m. Vento is still counting on a third-or-better finish to give him second overall going into the championship races in November at Key West. Another Miami cat, Seahawk, has clinched the U.S. 1 number that marks the 1985 regular-season title for Sal Maglutta and his crew. Vento last raced offshore in 1979-80 in Flapjack, a 30- foot Sutphen vee-hull in the Pro Stock class. Moving up to a state-of-the-art Open Class cat five years later is like an auto-racing driver deciding to start out in Indy cars five years after giving up midget racers. Not only has there been a phenomenal increase in the speed of the boats, the cost of building and running them has climbed astronomically. Vento, a Miami entrepreneur who owns VCC security systems, ordered his boat last April. It is built of kevlar and carbon fibers, and he figured then it would cost $280,000 to $300,000 to run the entire nine-race season and the week-long Key West championships that follows. Before the Northport race, he totaled the costs and found he had already spent $387,000 and could easily drop $50,000 more before the season is over. Experimentation Vento says that a lot of the unexpected expenses were the result of "constantly experimenting. For the first four races, we couldn't get the drives just right," he said. "At one point we spent more than $15,000 putting extension brackets on the back of the boat to improve the performance -- and it didn't work. The speed picked up but the trim and steering went all to hell. "We never had an engine failure," Vento added. "The only time an engine went wrong was when when Keith didn't open a fuel valve all the way and we ran too lean. Keith felt so bad about that that he bought the new heads and block." Hazell is one of the best known engine builders and throttlemen in this high-speed sport. He throttled for Jerry Jacoby when they won the 1982 world championship against all odds in a 37-foot Cigarette deep-vee, and for Tony Garcia when their Arneson Drives boat took the world title and became the first offshore craft to finish a race at an average speed of more than 100 miles per hour. "What we just had was nothing," Vento says after the boat comes in from a test run where it hit only about 70 percent of its top speed of 112-115 mph. "When you get out there and you say to yourself, 'What the bleep am I doing here?' then you know it's running right." To people accustomed to sailboats or cruising power boats, the speed of the offshore cats is almost bewildering. As Panasonic rumbles out of Port Everglades for a test run, a 22- foot sailboat is just entering the mouth of the jetties from the seaward side, running dead downwind. Ten minutes later, Panasonic shoots past the sailboat again on her way back to Hazell's marina. The catamaran has covered about 12 miles in that period, but the sailboat has barely moved a half-mile. Panasonic is a white boat, with a big, reddish-orange
rising sun painted at the rear of each of her twin hulls. The brilliant
rays of this sun spread forward and upward toward her bows. Vento says
Panasonic executives weren't crazy about the graphics, perhaps worried
that the boat might evoke some But so far people have applauded the design and there have been no repercussions, except for the occasional long-haul truck driver who is somewhat hazy about political symbolism and gets on the CB radio to growl about "the lousy commie boat" he passed on the highway. Vento considers the rewards and frustrations of the past season and says yes, he expects he will do it again next year, especially now that he has worked out a new deal with his sponsor. "I guess the key is that we'll run as long as we're having fun," he says. He thinks that over for a minutes and adds, "But having fun is winning." |