A Century of Outboard Racing

Rating:
Summary: Where are the V bottoms?!
Review: Good coverage and photos of tunnels (was recommended to me by a friend who drove tunnels for years) but the book is disappointing in it's OPC coverage: to a first approximation, V-bottoms never existed in the U.S. So please permit me to add something for the record.

I was an insatiable fan of outboard racing as a kid in the fifties. My heroes were names from outboard magazines like Randolph Hubbell, Bill Tenney, Billy Schumacher, Hugh Entrop, Billy Seebold, Carl Kiekhaefer, and then later, Paul Allison, who was a genius at making a boat run fast and still turn. In my early teens, the idea of heaven coincided with the magic names of faraway Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Beaver Dam, and Cedarburg that were written on the cartons that were delived to my parents' multi-faceted business in Kentucky. I finally got to race as a teenager in 1959-60, on many different lakes from Knoxville to Nashville, and then had to put racing out of my mind for 16 years in order to study and get an academic position. While in grad school in New Haven, I attended the NY Boat show once (the OMC Wankel was exhibited on one of Jimbo McConnel's tunnels) and couldn't recover from it for days. Then, finally, from 1977-85, I raced Allison-Craft boats in OPC EP, GP, JP, and ModVP classes in APBA, and also in the NOA 40-70V class. As Freud wrote, happiness is the fulfillment of childhood dreams. In my case, it was certainly true. I raced as if it were my profession and did academic research on the side.

'Pleasure Craft Racing' began with N.O.A. in and around Knoxville, Tenn., in the fifties. By 1958 Paul Allison had built flat bottomed glass-covered wooden boats with two strakes (for lift) that were real racing boats. They were too fast for mass production boats like Crosby, Crestliner, and Aristo-Craft, and in 1960 Paul's 'pleasure craft boats' broke all the N.O.A. straightaway records (I set 5 records with his boats, Paul set 1, he and my father and I were the first to break 60 mph in Unlimited Class) but were disqualified 'after the fact', so the records never appeared in the books (my Dad and I didn't go to the annual NOA meeting that year, so it was a shock for us to see the yearbook afterward!). Fighting instead of quiting, in 1961 Paul made a mold (starting with a Rose Boat, also made in Knoxville and an earlier unlimited record setter with a modified Scott 60) and built production boats that really caused OPC racing (the APBA phrase) to take off: he built fiberglass boats that rolled up on the side and turned like a dream, and ran 50 mph in closed course with a Mercury 50, the first production outboard with exhaust tuning. His next step was the development of the V-bottom with pad, a design that was only surpassed in OPC racing by the tunnel. In EP Class in 1981, using my stock 50 cu. in. 75 Evinrude made in 1975, I set the record with one of his son's boats at 70.560 mph and it was never broken (later model OMC 75's wouldn't perform on a V-bottom due to gear case drag and heavier pistons). V-bottom racing peaked with Mod-VP, and was set on a downhill course when, at Lake Havasu in Nov. 1981, nonstock water pickups were allowed. This permitted the previously nondominating Mod-V tunnels to run over 100 mph by getting the gearcase out of the water (I drove a Laser V-bottom that year, and clearly remember how one of the Mod-V tunnels repeatedly 'landed' on the water just before entering the south turn on the course!). The V-bottoms could not break 90 mph and still turn, although one of Darris Allison's V-bottoms still holds the NOA Unlimited V straightaway record at 124+ mph. Roark Summerford, previously unsuccessful in OPC, had taken V-bottom design to a new high with his new Laser hull in 1980 by building an more or less vertical 'strake' on the outer edge of the chine that tunneled water to get the boat out of the hole and out of a turn fast, and then tunneled enough air to lift the tail and make the boat faster on the straightaway. I borrowed Roark's trick and used it on my EP Class Allisons. Against common sense (often violated in hydrodynamics), the 13' Allison with slightly wider than stock pad also turned much tighter and more stably, and was capable of breaking my old straightaway record but I never again had the chance to run for it.

In the seventies, after he'd turned the business over to his son Darris, Paul would sit on the bank or in a boat whenever we needed him, watch how the water left the strakes, and then make a suggestion what to do to straighten it out when a boat performed wrong. He was a real seat of the pants engineer, and a very fine artist as well: no boat ever built was as pretty as an Allison, in my eyes. He was also sharp-tongued and had a fine sense of humor in those days. In 1979, when (with Darris, Louis Collins, and Jay Cox) we had to oscillate between a motel and a Big Boy restaurant in Oshkosh for three days waiting for the weather to break so that the time trials could take place, he exclaimed with a slight grin "When I die I hope I don't go north of the Ohio River!" the weather didn't break, we had to wait until 1981 to break the records, and Paul is still south of the Ohio river.

Here's an anecdote from Paul, who was a Scott-Atwater (and briefly Johnson) fan in the late fifties until Mercury produced the Merc 800 with sportsmaster gearcase (that was how we broke 60 mph with flat bottom boats). Sometime in Florida around 1957 or thereabout Paul was cupping a prop on the edge of a bumper (that's what steel bumpers were good for). Carl Kiekhaefer walked by and asked Paul what he was doing. In 1958, we learned from Mercury about cupping props. In the late seventies, thanks to Louis Baumann for letting me use his prop shop in Houston for two years (an old tractor gearcase made by his father was always resting against a wall), I accidentally learned something that aerodynamics engineers understand but that outboard prop designers apparently never did: the role of camber in improving thrust/drag. I later guessed that I had set the leading edge approximately to match the inflow, which itself is affected by the drag (induction effect). This allowed the for the reshaping of a cleaver that would come off the bank and out of a turn as if in 'low gear', yet still could set a straightaway record. I ran closed course races with the same prop that set the 70.560 mph EP record (with beneath the gearcase water pickup and with the gearcase completely out of the water as on a tunnel, a friend used a similar but lighter Allison XR 14 to set the NOA 40-70V record at over 80 mph the same year). All of my propellers were similar to that one. No one was able copy it because no one knew what I did (most boat racers usually haven't studied physics and don't experiment systematically as much as I did, keeping written records of everything tried). When the camber is right, very little cup is needed, and too much cup increases the prop drag anyway. For those with enough math, see 'Marine Hydrodynamics' by J. N. Newman for the explanation of lift and induced drag. The thrust on a prop blade is like the lift on an airfoil and is generated by the same physical effect: to a first approximation, a wing or hydrofoil (prop blade) is a vortex line (cupping a prop is like dropping the flap on an airplane wing). It's the circulation around the foil/blade that produces the thrust and also changes the angle of inflow to the leading edge.

The year 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the Allison-Craft Boat Co., begun in a garage in Alcoa, Tenn. by Paul with the help of his coworker Harold, and also Paul Allison's 80th birthday.

Rating:
Summary: Good History
Review: Kevin Desmond has done well to begin and end his history of outboards with electrics motors.
While Desmond focuses on exploding engines, as he must to be historically accurate, he begins with Gustave Trouve on the Seine River in Paris in 1880.
Trove's 11-pound motor was placed in a boat 18 feet long. He achieved a speed of 6.7 mph. This was the first outboard motor of any kind.
Toward the end of the book, Desmond writes "At the very beginning, "the world's first outboard was electric...With increasing concerns for the environment, a small and eccentric number of people have thought the impossible - that one future solution for the outboard sport would be to run again battery-electric motors."
Desmond's attractive book is a well-written and well-researched history. It would be a valuable addition to any nautical library

Rating:
Summary: Good History
Review: Kevin Desmond has done well to begin and end his history of outboards with electrics motors.
While Desmond focuses on exploding engines, as he must to be historically accurate, he begins with Gustave Trouve on the Seine River in Paris in 1880.
Trove's 11-pound motor was placed in a boat 18 feet long. He achieved a speed of 6.7 mph. This was the first outboard motor of any kind.
Toward the end of the book, Desmond writes "At the very beginning, "the world's first outboard was electric...With increasing concerns for the environment, a small and eccentric number of people have thought the impossible - that one future solution for the outboard sport would be to run again battery-electric motors."
Desmond's attractive book is a well-written and well-researched history. It would be a valuable addition to any nautical library

Rating:
Summary: One fo the few books on outboard racing!
Review: Positive: for the most part accurate and complete. Lots of European racing, nice pictures, heavy coverage of 80's OPC racing. All in all very few errors. Charlie Strang was one of the main references.

Negative: Some photo captions are switched, some are just plain wrong, some photos are poor quality scans, some are placed for book layout and are out of sequence to the text, some have been altered to suit the text. Book was originally written in French, the translation suffers at some points. No coverage of small boat racing after 1960...no Quincy Loopers, no Crescent CSSH, no modern König, Yamato, Arens, Rossi alky stuff. A few errors due to poor research. Some omissions of motors included in Desomnd's earlier books.