Shaped like a shingle, but powered by a herd of 3000 horses on top, this fastest of racing boats is in a class by itself.
By John Crouse
Reprinted from Popular Mechanics, June, 1976
Officially, they are unlimited-class hydroplane racing boats. There may be 30 in existence, with half that number ready to take the water this summer. To their hundreds of thousands of fans, they are unlimited hydros, thunderboats, gold cuppers or just unlimited - the fastest racing machines afloat.
They do have a few limitations, but the money an owner can spend to try to win is not one of them. The American Power Boat Association (APBA) rule book states that todays three-point unlimited hydroplane must be at least 28 feet long and can be powered by any inboard-mounted engine, which in turn can be naturally aspirated, supercharged, turbocharged, or turbine. No matter what the power source, it must be transmitted in the water by a propeller or screw, and steering has to be by means of one or more submerged rudders. Competition is held on a two-and-a-half or three-mile oval course. This effectively eliminates the jet-powered rockets that can approach 400 mph in a straight line but count never compete the first turn. Airfoil adjustments that could be made by the driver during a race are not allowed. Part of the skill in designing and driving an unlimited, in fact, is to keep from turning it into an airplane - and the disaster that follows.
The APBA rule says nothing about building a 50-footer with five engines, but added size and machinery can increase weight and lose in the trade-off for more speed, although tandem multi-engine installations have been tried. Competitors can make as many engine changes between heats as time will allow, however, and the rule means that backer can pour unlimited cash into the sport.
Earlier this spring, the Unlimited Racing Commission announced that the sport's most successful driver, Bill Muncey, had acquired Dave Heerensperger's fabled Pay 'n Pak, the most successful boat in unlimited racing history. Included in the package deal were some 30 World War II vintage Rolls-Royce aircraft engines, which pop for $10,000 and up each, if you can find them. Muncey will campaign at least one of the three Pay 'n Pak hulls this season under the Atlas Van Lines colors. He is a vice-president for the worldwide moving company, but reportedly made a six-figure deal with Heerensperger personally.
The start of something big
The first recored unlimited powerboat race took place at Queenstown, Ireland, in 1903 - and was won by a woman! Dorothy Levitt drove the 35-foot Napier displacement hull with a 75-hp Napier engine at a sizzling 19.35 mph to beat out a French entry to win the first British International Trophy race. In 1959, Roy Duby would drive George Simon's Rolls-powered Miss U.S. through the traps at Guntersville, Ala., at 200.419 mph - a mark that still stands today. The British International Trophy later took on the name of Harmsworth, a source of fierce rivalry between the United States, England, Canada, and France until its hibernation in 1962.
The "Grey Fox of Greyhaven," the late Gar Wood, dominated the 25 years the Harmsworth trophy was awarded, winning eight times as driver and eight more as owner with his noted Miss America hulls. England took it five times, Canada three, and France once. Wood, the wiry little inventor of the dump truck who may have held more patents than anyone at the time of this death shook up the water-speed world in 1932. In that year, he drove Miss America X, a 38-foot mahogany beauty powered by 4 12-cylinder Packard aircraft engines with a combined horsepower of 7600, over a measured course at 124.915 mph, while her four engines suck in five gallons of gasoline per minute.
Today's class of unlimiteds began after World War II when a surplus of aircraft engines became available. Big machines and big moneyed owners entered competition, and some race results were taken to court as hard-fighting tycoons tried to bend the rules. The present Unlimited Racing Commission was launched in 1958 when a brash young driver from Detroit, 26-year-old J. Lee Schoenith, told the venerable APBA that the sport seemed to be getting out of hand and needed its own special organization. Schoenith became the first racing commissioner for the big boats, and with is his own Gale unlimiteds, won three national championships along the way. Under his guidance, the Unlimited Commission has pioneered such safety requirements as mandatory medical checkups for each driver the morning before each race, fireproof clothing, kill switches and other regulations that keep drivers alive in a sport filled with inherit dangers.
Accidents happen
Even so, the big boats have their bad days. At the 1966 President's Cup race on the Potomac at Washington D.C, expert drivers Ron Musson, Rex Manchester and Don Wilson were killed in two accidents, followed by Chuck Thompson in a Detroit race one week later.
Recent races have been gratifyingly accident-free, while speed, maneuvering control and reliability of the big roostertailers keep inching up. As of last year, the most successful for winning in this fastest-boat league has been to have someone like Ron Jones design you a pickle-fork hull with a supercharged 3000-hp World War II Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in it, the kind that sent British Spitfires and American P-51s chasing after German Messerschmitts. But now you will need two more major parts: a nitrous oxide tank and injector to squirt an additional 300 horses into the engine when you want to get out of a turn in front of another boat. And you need a near-genius crew chief, who rivals most the top driver as the most important ingredient of the sport.
Pay 'n Pak's crew chief Jim Lucero, who reportedly went along with the boat and engines to Atlas Van Lines in the Bill Muncey deal, practices alls sorts of magic to keep the big mills humming and the hulls intact. To win, the thunderboats are often pushed beyond their red-line points by means of exotic fuel blends (such as 10 percent nitromethane and 90 percent methanol), plus spurts of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). They must also contend with the hazards of high-speed collisions with other boats, cocoanuts, sea cows and floating beer cans that are as rock reef when hit at high velocity. Latest Jim Lucero creation is a new cab-over hydro, previewed here, which the circuit expects may be the boat to beat this coming season. If she tests out according to designer Lucero's expectations, Bill Muncey will drive her.
World record holder
Other designers and power sources are represented on the unlimited courses. Two year ago, a turbine-powered hull, Pamala Clapp's U-95, make the scene but sank after setting a new U.S. course record. Some racers feel that the U.S.-made turbocharged Allison aircraft engine, which flew in P-40 Warhawks, may have a stronger block and better low-end and medium-range torque. So far, however, no one has been able to make it hang together long enough to beat the likes of Pay 'n Pak, Miss Budweiser or Weisfield's (now Olympia Beer). Pak's world record of 16 wins tops the 14 formally posted by Muncey in Miss Thriftway. Now the fans are waiting to see what Bill Muncey can do with the current Pak and the new Lucero cab-over, both campaigning under the blue-and-white Atlas colors.
The post war boom in thunderboats started when 30 new hulls were built and the circuit went nationwide in 1947. Designer Ted Jones introduced his surface-riding prop in 1950 on his famous design, Slo-mo-shun IV, first to have the propeller lift the hull enough so it ran on three points - the two sponsons and the lower half of the propeller. Owner Stan Sayres took the through the traps on Seattle's Lake Washington at the then incredible speed of 160.323 mph, 21 mph faster than the Indy "500" was run on land that year. Sayres's record topped the 141.740 mark set 11 years earlier on Scotland's Lake Coniston by the ill-fated Sir Malcolm Campbell in his Bluebird II. Earlier, Campbell has lifted Gar Wood's 124.9 record with an 1937 run in Switzerland aboard the first Bluebird at 129.5 mph.
Incredible speeds
Ten years after Stan Sayres's first record, Bill Muncey flashed over the same Seattle course at 192.001 mph in his Gold cup winner, Miss Thriftway, in 1962. Previously he had won two Gold Cups in earlier models of Thriftway and even survived a lost rudder. Heading into the first turn at a Seattle Seafair, Thriftway continued on a straight course for the spectator fleet and rocketed into an anchored Coast Guard boat. Both sank, but fortunately there were no fatalities. It was the first time a Coast Guard craft had ever been sunk by ramming.
Better boat balance and both aero and hydrodynamic improvements, plus advances in construction materials and safety gear, have cut down the number of accidents. Smaller courses also help. "We used to run on three-and-three-quarter-mile courses," Bill Muncey recalls, "and more bad things happen when you wind up for such a long time. I honestly think that today's Pay 'n Pak, constructed from honeycomb aluminum, could have turned in 130-mph laps on the bigger courses."
Most races today are staged on two-and-a-half mile ovals with a few runs on threes. One race last year at Phoenix, Ariz., was fought over a tiny mile-and-a-half course. And last year was one of the most accident free, with no major mishaps other than Bernie Little's Miss Budweiser holing out sinking in the Gold Cup race at Tri-Cities, Wash. Little, whose boats tied a record winning three straight national championships in 1960-71, once again made good his boast of never missing a race in 13 years of competition when he showed up at the Seattle Seafair event just a week after sinking.
Dangers are different
Because of the small number of thunderboat races each year and correspondingly fewer accidents, many spectators are unaware of special dangers which auto competitors don't have to face. The biggest enemy of the hydro driver is the sudden unexpected flip. A hydro can kite and go over just when it seems to be riding the smoothest - which probably means it has left the water and is sailing through the air! The best drivers can usually sense the change and immediately ease off to bring the bow down.
And there are other hazards. A broken prop blade can suddenly slash through the hull, a stack fire can spread or an engine explode. Collision from a boat out of control, hosing down from a fifty-foot-high roostertail of prop spray from a boat ahead, or holing out from hitting floating debris are major problems.
Yet there is something about riding one of these huge machines down the straightaway and into turns at 170 mph, or watching other battling boats do it, that seems to infect people for a lifetime. Every year competitors pour thousands of dollars into his unlimited hydro racing with no hope of ever getting it back in prizes, although firms who know how to use publicity often get back more than their money's worth in millions of words of print copy and numerous televisions shows. And the so-called "little guy" competitor, without tractor-trailers filled with engines and spare parts or motorhome loads of mechanics and pretty girls, keeps coming back every year as well, waiting for a chance that one of the well-healed may break down and give him a win.
Thousands watch
The fans are equally devoted. One of the biggest crowds to ever watch a sports event was the audience of 500,000 lining the banks of Seattle's Lake Washington several years ago to witness a Gold Cup race. Last year the thunderboats played before a combined total of 1,200,000 fans, with an estimated 420,000 attending the Detroit contest.
The unlimited frenzy reaches it peak at Seattle each year where the entire town goes wild with banners on street lights, speeches at civic clubs, parades, banquets and almost non-stop TV coverage of it all. Here enthusiasm runs so high that collectors of the various arm patches and boat badges have their own fenced-in where they barter from custom-made displays, with a favored boat badge going for up to $100 each. Little old ladies can discuss quill shafts and turbochargers, kiting hulls and blipping engines, and kids know which year band leader Guy Lombardo won the Gold Cup and how Lou Fageol, using half the lake for a full-throttle flying start, cartwheeled his boat in mid-air.
Fastest, noisiest, and most expensive and exciting - the unlimiteds are getting up power for another year of competition in a class by themselves.
Joy Riding at 150 mph
There is no safety belt to hold you in the crowded one-man cockpit of an unlimited. As speeds approach 200 and make each ripple ahead turn into rock while 3000 sit snarling in your lap and the wind buffets with gust that can kite and cartwheel your craft into toothpicks, you do not want to be strapped in if something goes wrong.
Jim Lucero, called the best crew chiefs, unbolted winning driver George Henley's special padded bucket seat and clamped in a board support so we both could fit in side Pay 'n Pak, winningest of all unlimited. "Hit me on the back," Henley said, "if it gets too rough for you." With the wind and engine roar, there'd be no way to communicate.
Firing away as we eased away from the dock and out onto San Diego's Mission Bay, the unmuffled Rolls-Royce Merlin sounded like those I'd flown in combat in a Mustang P-51. But we had used 55 inches of manifold pressure for take off; this one was souped to more than double that and had a full life expectancy, I knew, of less than one hour of racing.
George gunned the monster and over his shoulder I watched the speedometer flicker pass 100 and 130. We slammed into the flat, skidding, jolting turn as centrifugal tried to lift-flip and fling us off the course. Turns are taken on the ragged edge of controlled speed. Then we aimed out down the straightaway chute again, eased added rpm to build boost without blowing the engine, and accelerated past the roostertail of another hydro on the course. Pay 'n Pak topped 150 when our seat plank started vibrating loose and we slowed back down to reality. -- Bill McKeown