history tid bit

Bill Cooper's "Spooky" with Darrel Jenkins strapped in the back seat....
Long Beach to San Fran Race. And you thought Reggie invented the beak

What on earth!!? Could you tell us about that boat?

please yes -why is he on a perch sticking out over the drives...and where are the motors,??

Awesome thread Mike.. I too am a fan of late 70s / 80s racing. Aronow, Magluta and Falcon.... The good ole days... Even though my family and I were not involved in performance boating back then, I loved them. My dad has always had fishing boats and we would see these guys thunder through as we were fishing... I thought it was awesome... Great thread man...

Even though it was pretty much a wide open game, they did have minimum length requirements. This boat was a way around the rules. With the beak and the extension out the back they made the minimum length. The boat was actually one of those little Formulas....Donzi also had a small boat like this

A big block engine driving a single shaft with a spade rudder. It was a pretty hairy ride for the guy in the back. If youlook closely you can see a plexiglass greenhouse right in front of the guy in the boat, the engine was under that.

Cooper was a great boat racer....he did a lot of the original tunnel boats with the big block sterndrive set ups. He would fly them on the last 6 inches and just balance them there hour after hour. He used those boats in the old 9 hour marathons.

Sadly he died very early in life with cancer. He was a lumberman out of the west coast....one of the good guys.

When you think of the technology and how crude it was and these guys still ran in the open ocean....it was pretty amazing.

Brownie won a Miami Nassau race in a 28 foot Donzi with twin engines....one in front of the v-drive other in back of it, drivng through one v-drive and coming out on one shaft. He designed it, he engineered it, built it and raced it and....yes..... won with it. Can you think of anyone today that can claim something like that?

While everbodys on the old school theme i was wondering if any body could tell me where the original 26 monza design came from . It looks a lot like a 24 cigarette or a scaled down 36 cigarette hull to me.

Ron P,

Good job !

L.S.

back in the days!!

Do any of you remember any part of the informantion listed in the thread

"Turbines before their time"
Thanks