Is this the speedboat equivalent of doing a wheelie across the finish line on a bike?
Glad they’re ok.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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200 mph (322kph)
Everything but metric.
kph is just a stupid way of saying km/h
Am I missing something here? KPH is metric.
Americans hate metric so much that they'd rather use 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.
And a 'significant figures' failure too.
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.
k, it's time to wind down the whole we're-just-burning-fossil-fuels-for-fun stuff now.
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.
i doubt the actual motorsports are the biggest carbon emissions of stuff like this
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.
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.
"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?
Reminds me of the flying Mercedes CLR:
There were two seoarate incidents. Mark Webber and another guy.
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?
They were being reckless... to win the award, that's all it takes. Evolution takes its course.
Not terrible people. At least the owner / one of the operators is a pretty awesome man.
Eh, anyone can do that mid-air. It takes skill to do it quarter-air.
/s
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?
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