Admittedly, I don’t know much about modern speedboats, but the full flip probably saved their lives. In the old days, flipping onto your head at damn near 200 mph was certain death.
Yea that flip and rotation definitely saved them, you can see in the video they slow down drastically in the air while the top of the boat was pointing mostly forward, although they likely also experienced some drastic gforce changes as it happened.
Yeah, I was gonna say, did the pilot live?
Good number of hydroplane/powerboat deaths/maimings over the years…
Both lived and were not seriously injured.
And that is what I would describe as the only kind of miracle I believe can actually happen.
Roughly on par with ‘bailed out of an airplane, crashed through some trees, landed in a snowbank, only suffered a few fractures and actually lived.’
Something like that happened a few times in WW2.
These guys wore safety gear and were strapped in. Read tha article
He described the relief of seeing both people on board the boat pop open the hatch. “Oh my gosh, it’s just a miracle,” Ticknor said.
Ticknor being the event organizer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=sSl2846EPl4
The pilots suffered multiple fractures, including a broken knee.
I’d call a broken knee alone a serious injury…
Had their injuries been more serious, they may have been unable to escape the sinking boat.
Had the boat landed in a different orientation, or done a different, completely undpredictable, uncontrolled aerial manuever, such that it impacted the water with more speed, the boat could have broken apart on landing or become structurally comprised much more seriously, and thus the pilots would be sinking much more rapidly, likely with more serious injuries.
Though this boat and its safety cage performed admirably in terms of structural stability… similar crashes to this have maimed and killed a good number of folks in the history of hydroplane/powerboat events.
200 mph (322kph)
Everything but metric.
Am I missing something here? KPH is metric.
“kph” is an americanization. the unit is km/h. i’m assuming the commenter did not know this since the first abbreviation is not used it most languages.
Fair enough. I Googled it just to double-check before posting, but Google isn’t going to tell you whether terminology is regionally correct or not.
Maybe this is an SI purist and want to see meters per second or nothing? That would be silly because KPH is well used across the metric world, of course
yeah, but the US is one of the only country in the world that writes it as kph. most countries write it as km/h. Which can be confusing.
Americans hate metric so much that they’d rather use metric!
kph is just a stupid way of saying km/h
And a ‘significant figures’ failure too.
k, it’s time to wind down the whole we’re-just-burning-fossil-fuels-for-fun stuff now.
i doubt the actual motorsports are the biggest carbon emissions of stuff like this
A lot of these racing applications are what drive innovations in power and efficiency in the rest of the automotive field since they’re constantly improving engines to squeeze as much power out of them as they can. Banning this stuff will have little to no impact on pollution and just needlessly piss a bunch of people off, driving allies away from the cause.
It’s like the whole plastic straw ban that achieved nothing and made a bunch of people look like fools. Meanwhile, giant corporations are packaging items in single-use plastic packaging and using 10,000x as much plastic with nary a peep from those politicians’ grandstanding over straws. Furthermore, every paper straw I’ve ever gotten has been wrapped in a plastic bag.
Running boats like this for 10 seconds costs nothing compared to a mega yacht.
I mean, i’m certainly ok with a fully electric motorboat
What do you do if you run out of electricity while out on the water? At least with an EV you can get out and walk but that’s a different story on a boat.
Same what you do when your boat runs out of gasoline? Doesn’t matter what powers your engine if you don’t watch your tank or battery level you will have a problem.
Apart from that: This is about racing boats. They’re never alone somewhere on the open sea.
Check out SailGP. It’s got some flaws, but they did actually manage to design a sailboat race that goes fast enough to actually be interesting to watch in real-time.
flaws
- I have my doubts that it’s as eco-friendly as they claim, since they still use fossil fuels for support boats, shipping the sailboats across the world between events, etc.
- It’s pretty new and seems a little underfunded, so the production values and commentating can be a bit rough around the edges.
- They try to make it accessible (e.g. by reporting speeds in kph instead of knots), but it’s still got a whiff of yacht-club elitism to it.
“STOP HAVING FUN!!”
That time was like 30 years ago. Now we can either stop using them altogether and have a bad time, or we can keep using them and have a slightly more bad time.
What’s a crash win?
Eh, anyone can do that mid-air. It takes skill to do it quarter-air.
/s
Reminds me of the flying Mercedes CLR:
There were two seoarate incidents. Mark Webber and another guy.
I guess these guys have never heard of ground effect or air compressing at high speed.
I’m guessing none of them want to admit to these effects if you want to keep a propeller in the water the whole time.
Those effects are key to the design of these boats. They’re essentially a wing.
Water has a lot more drag than air, so the more the boat is out of the water, the faster it can go.
Though it makes me wonder why they don’t use actual wings to maintain control over the boat when it goes too far out of the water. Why isn’t the ideal basically a plane that has a propeller sticking down into the water?
Is this the speedboat equivalent of doing a wheelie across the finish line on a bike?
Glad they’re ok.
In all seriousness, I think that there might be a good argument, in 2025, for converting races, be they car or boat or whatnot, to be remotely-driven.
We’ve got the technology today.
It’d permit for higher speeds and suchlike, and eliminate some requirements.
The audience doesn’t get the drama of the driver maybe being killed in an accident, but by-and-large, blood sport has faded into history.
There are clearly some people who watch racing for the crashes — but it’s possible to have the crashes and have vehicles potentially destroyed without the drivers being killed too.
That defeats the whole point.
Well, I suppose it depends on what people are out for. Like I said, if it’s death that they’re interested in, then, yeah, it would. But if they’re okay with the crashes without the death, then I’d think that it’d be okay.
Sport requires human drama.
No fans would watch robots race, unless they were rooting for a human to win.
Just gamblers.
Not gonna lie, a pure engineering contest without the restrictions feel like a very cool idea. See what the true limits car engineers can achieve in a race if they didn’t even need to consider driver safety. There exists a lot of restrictions on racing leagues for driver safety, as it should. But without drivers, you can pretty much throw all of it away.
These types of events exist already. There’s stuff like the DARPA races, “battle bots,” VEX and LEGO robotic, RC car races, drone races, etc.
Regarding your point about removing limitations without a driver, currently anything that would harm a driver in a race is going to destroy the car too, so I can’t imagine what would really change in this regard.
There a lot of numbers higher than the 9Gs that are safe-ish and reasonable-ish for human drivers/pilots to experience regularly. A big bag of water with bones inside that likes to breathe doesn’t take well to high levels of acceleration, eg. really fast turns.
Outside of planes, I don’t know that any land or water based vehicle could pull 9Gs as you’re limited by the traction of the tires and whatever physics effect boats on the water.
But without drivers, you can pretty much throw all of it away.
I’m not sure you could - since spectator safety is considered more important than driver safety. (both are important)
So unless it’s out in the middle of nowhere, with no spectators, no camerapeople, any pit crew would need to be in bunkers - just drones within a few kilometers of the track - it couldn’t happen either and such and event would probably be less exciting than watching someone else play the F1 PC/Console game…
If robots were racing, people would be rooting for the remote pilot, or the team that built it, or the designers of the engine, etc…
Does no one remember Robot Wars or any spinoffs thereof?
Did they get NASCAR ratings?
And those battles were a quite a bit more action than oval track racing.
Maybe you would get figure 8 courses or mario kart tracks, but i do not believe that will keep viewers interested long term.
I dunno, maybe that’s true. People like watching humans be in danger, that’s true.
Monster Truck shows probably don’t need humans though. We like watching stuff get crushed by big things even if humans aren’t involved!
These drivers understand the danger they’re getting into when entering these races.
Why do you want to take their bodily autonomy away from them by preventing them from doing something that they love? I’d much rather take a wall at 200MPH in a race car than go out from a heart attack while taking my morning shit or getting T-boned on my commute to the office.
Hahahah no. Humans haven’t changed. We still love to gawk at death and pain. We just don’t want to admit it directly.
Rubber-neckers slowing down the highway for a crash on the other side aren’t doing it to make sure they are safe. They are hoping to spot some gore.
Unless you like TOOL.
“I want to watch things die from a good safe distance. Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies.”
If theres no risk of complete assholes burning up or crumpling into a pancake during a car race then the race sucks ass.
Sadly, they didn’t win the Darwin award. There’s always next year.
Were these terrible people or are you just wishing death on random people for making a poor choice for their own safety?
Not terrible people. At least the owner / one of the operators is a pretty awesome man.
They were being reckless… to win the award, that’s all it takes. Evolution takes its course.
