Hey Ron,
I think the picture of "Top Banana" #666 was after Charlie sold the boat to Dirk Patricia(sp?)....who had to raced "Hells Banana" M-666.This thread is bringing back some great memories.Charlie can you confirm this?

S-89 Mary-K is now "Wazzup".

Oops, didn't realized you posted that "Mary-K "is now "Wazzup" Ron.

Those were the good ole days for many reasons, big boat counts, longer offshore courses, cruder technology, flashier (drug & chicken money) teams, real larger than life stuff. However, I feel the reason the sport had more glamor in those days was because only racers had race boats. A fast pleasure boat back then was a Donzi or a Sea Ray with a 188 v8. NOBODY had a 100mph Cigarette as a pleasure boat. In fact, none of the race boats ever saw 100 - other than a few cats.

Now, the WOW factor of the boats is no where near what it was then. That's something that can never be brought back. It was just a special moment in time that can't be duplicated.

Don't Stop I Have A Chubby Good Stuff

Please remember that whenever you see a picture of my old boat with the number 666, know that I was not involved.

The guy that bought the boat company from me, the 24 foot molds that is, not the larger sizes, came back a year later and bought the 38 foot race boat too.

He was supposed to change the name, color scheme and number.....as you can see he did change the number and he painted over the yellow boot stripe with a green color. Same thing happened to Sandy Satullo when he sold Copper Kettle.

My sales agreement with him limited me to a one year time period where I could not use the name banana again. By the time he bought the race boat that time period had already passed and I was going to use the name on a new race boat.

.......and then what happened????

Great Thread!
Thanks!

The year before I had competed with the Government of Puerto Rico sponsoring my boat as Rums of Puerto Rico.....the arrangement was about 25K per race and it was still short of what was really needed.

Betty had just signed up with Bernie Little to run her boat under the Budweiser sponsorship and the era of the cats was really coming of age...meaning, you now had to have two boats at each race.

So, some of the guys started auto racing. Preston Henn had left a couple of years before and I visited with him and Sandy Satullo at the Miami IMSA race. It looked like fun and my oldest son was getting at the age where he was looking for a sport to get into.

IMSA endurance racing was something that as a father and son we could share. I had become good friends with Jochen Mass the Formula 1 driver who now drove for Porsche. My son and I visited with him at Sebring that year and before I knew it, we were in. We did that for a few years and by then, the 4 engine superboats were the rage.

I remember a conversation that I had with Betty on the dock after the Bacardi race in Miami in 1979. She had won the race and I came in third and that left us tied for first place points.

This was the first race that she brought both boats to, the cat and the deep v. I said that I understood why she was doing that, and if I could have afforded to do it I might also. However, I felt that if the sport continued on that path, it would end up with just a different version of Unlimited Hydroplane racing. The owners would be so concerned about the fragile construction of their very fast boats, they would not want to go really offshore anymore.

My son talked me into attending the races this year in Key West after an abscence of many years. Standing on the pier and watching the whole race from that one vantage point, my own words came back to me, that what I thought might happen actually did. This point was reinforced when I began to see boats coming back to the ramp with damage to them from these rather calm waters.

This is not a criticism of the racers.....I feel racers will race in any conditions, anywhere, racers are not the ones who set the venues, sponsors, manufacturers and politics are.

This is just my own personal observations of where the sport that I used to know so well has evolved to. I don't mean to offend anyone, it is just a different sport from what I was used to.

No doubt times have changed. What was the top speed for an open class boat back then?