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.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.