Toyota did a marine engine for a couple years. It was in ski boats I think. It sucked, over complicated and broke a lot.

And if you had a $500mm/year budget nothing would ever break....that's about what the top F1 teams spend.

Most boats are pretty reliable....high performance boats, just by the sheer nature of what they do (go fast) is a recipe for broken parts. Especially when they are run in big water. The physics of pushing something that big and heavy, at 80+ mph through the water is enormous and requires constant attention to the mechanicals and frequent service intervals. Kind of like how top fuel dragsters basically rebuild the motor after every 1/4 mie pass.
You gotta pay to play.

"You gotta pay to play" - a mechanic once said that to me after I was shocked at how much it took to replace something simple.

Anyways, think about it this way, if you were in the water most your life, I'm sure you would break much faster than being on dry-land all the time.


Totally unrelated but watch the movie waterworld to get a grasp of global warming to the max and being on a boat ALL day.

Take any of them cars, run up about 4000 rpm and drive it over three foot speed bumps and see how long it lasts.

Just tryed it, stuff broke... alot of stuff

F1 engines make almost NO torque. High hp for their size but they don't need torque. Boats run on torque.

Torque and shock loading kills stern drives. Put an F1 car tranny in a boat and be lucky to get on plane first try but I doubt it.

There are drives that don't break (Arneson, Twin Disc, etc). A boat is one GIANT compromise. It operates in an abusive environment right out of the gate. However...

There is nothing I hate or love more.

OK, so I just ordered 2 GM marine 502 longblocks (factory) from Derebery performance. They are new,factory GM built units. Do I need to do a teardown and tech inspection (verify proper clearances) Although these are supposedly marine standard engines, they dont have inconel ex valves. I thought that was one of the standards on marine engines. Any advice?

They did, the boat were called Epic and they were inboard tournament ski boats. The boats were actually very nice and at the time were competing with industry leaders like MasterCraft, Nautiques, and Malibu. One downfall was that no one was real keen on the Lexus overhead cam V8. The demise of the line was the fact that Toyota is a very smart company, and they soon realized that selling niche boats in the high-end ski boat market wasn't the most prudent business decision.

The Epic name has been ressurected under a new company out of CA.

Anyhting that goes fast and gets beat breaks, nature of the beast...

Isn't he from Kenya, too?