Dicing on Water: the Fast and the Dead : Can Drag Boat Racers--and Their Sport--Survive These Crazy Speeds?

The liquid quarter-mile.

That’s how drag boat enthusiasts like to refer to the stretch of water where they race boats side by side at speeds up to 225 m.p.h., but two years ago the liquid quarter-mile came close to drying up.

Drag boat racing seemed on the verge of self destruction.

--Six drivers, including national champion Billy Todd, were killed in high speed accidents in a single season.

--The sport was still reeling from the death of a 9-year-old spectator a year earlier at Irvine Lake in Orange County, an accident that caused drag boats to be banned from the lake.

--Eddie Hill, the fastest of all drag boat racers and the most charismatic figure in the sport’s 32-year history, quit racing top fuel boats and switched to top fuel cars, claiming boats had become too dangerous.

--The American Power Boat Assn., governing body of water racing, put its sanction of drag boat racing in moratorium after a series of fatalities caused its insurance carrier to cancel its coverage.

Astonishingly, although speeds had escalated from 150 m.p.h., to more than 200 m.p.h. until they reached Hill’s world record 229 m.p.h. at Chowchilla, Calif., in 1982, there had not been a major safety innovation in the sport for 20 years.

Even more astonishingly, as the sport grew in popularity and crowds that came to watch the hair-raising races grew larger and larger, there were precious few safety measures taken for spectators. At some races on hot, sunny days, fans would bring beach chairs and actually set them in the water along the shore as the boats churned past a short distance away.

Things were so bad that a headline in a drag boat yearbook cried out: Safety, Will Drag Boat Racing Survive Another Season?

The sports’ rule book carried this disclaimer: “These rules and regulations . . . are intended as a guide for the conduct of the sport and are in no way a guarantee against injury or death to spectator or participant.”

Charlie Allen, founder-chairman of the International Hot Boat Assn., remembers the first time he went to Irvine Lake to watch drag boats. A veteran of 20 years in drag racing, first as a record-setting competitor and later as operator of the Orange County International Raceway, Allen had acquired the lease to Firebird Lake, near Phoenix, and the concession lease at Puddingstone Lake in Bonelli County Park, near San Dimas.

“I had two bodies of water fit for drag boats, so I thought I’d check around and see how they were run,” Allen said. “I went twice, and both times I left early because I couldn’t bear to watch how disorganized things were. I was appalled at the lack of professionalism.

“Instead of running the races like a business, it looked more like a social club. There weren’t any guard fences, people were milling around everywhere and they were sitting right along the water’s edge.”

It was just such a scenario that existed April 21, 1985 when a speedboat veered off course, careened into a shoreline crowd and killed Brandy Branchflower of Burbank, who was sitting on the beach.

“There should have been a barrier to keep the crowd back, but they need someone to get killed before they realize they have to do something about safety,” driver Ted Faggart of Porterville said at the time.

No more races were held at Irvine Lake, but racing continued elsewhere and so did the fatalities, although none were spectators.

Allen, who left a custom home-building business in the San Gabriel Valley to run a sports complex at Firebird International Park, was dissatisfied with what he saw in the existing National Drag Boat Assn., so he founded his own organization, the IHBA. This season, its third, it will conduct 10 races on the West Coast. The next will be the Springnationals, today and Sunday, at Puddingstone Lake.

Spectators will find a 2,000-foot fence installed at Puddingstone, anchored by a strand of 5/8-inch cable, to protect them from out-of-control boats.

“It’s a tremendous expense, no two ways about it, to install the fence, take it down between races, and then put it back up for another race, but if we don’t protect the spectators, we won’t have any racing,” Allen said. At Firebird Lake, where there is no recreational boating, as there is at Puddingstone, Allen put a permanent fence completely around the 117 acres of water.

It was not until Todd, 48, one of drag boat racing’s most popular figures, was killed Sept. 20, 1986, at Castaic Lake that racing officials took note of the direction their sport was headed. Todd was running 205 m.p.h. when his top fuel hydro boat, Billy the Kid, catapulted an estimated 30 feet in the air and came crashing down on him.

Before the 1987 season, the IHBA required that all top fuel hydro boats--drag boat racing’s top of the line class--be equipped with a driver protection device.

“We hadn’t had a major safety innovation since the drag chute was introduced nearly 20 years ago,” said Jack Podesto, IHBA President. “We can’t eliminate all accidents, but we do want to see that drivers walk away from them.”

It wasn’t easy to get the drivers to make changes. For one thing, safety features increase weight and thus reduce speeds. Secondly, a capsule or cage upsets the balance of the boat and changes its driving characteristics. But perhaps most significant is the fact that boat racing, like drag racing and sprint car racing, started out as a macho sport where safety features were for sissies.

Drivers sat up front in their boats where you could see their muscles bulge as they wrestled the wheel while bouncing across choppy water. Hiding in a capsule took away some of the mystique.

The IBHA made it mandatory, however, and one by one the 220 m.p.h. boats began to take on a new look. The drivers and boat designers were left to their own ingeniuity.

Star Wars, a blown gas hydro owned by Ron Hensley of Dallas, was outfitted with the canopy from a F-16 jet fighter plane.

“It’s not only water proof, it’s also bullet proof,” driver Michael Brady noted after running 185.18 m.p.h. to win his class last week in the Sprite Winternationals on Firebird Lake.

Bob Burroughs took a roll cage from a top fuel dragster and modified it for protection on his boat, Plum Crazy.

Fred Bray, owner of the top fuel hydro Spirit of America, designed his own fully enclosed capsule so that if it became submerged his driver would have seven minutes of oxygen to survive while being rescued.

The results of one full season of racing under the new regulations was encouraging. After six fatalities in 1986, there were none in 1987, and observers credit the protective measures with saving the life of top fuel hydro driver Jerry Fulgham when his top fuel hydro, Hillbilly, disintegrated during a race last September at Puddingstone Lake.

Fulgham, the 1986 IHBA champion, lost an arm in the accident when a cable whipped through the cockpit after his boat came apart. He also had a broken neck, but recovered sufficiently to accept his driver of the year award at the awards banquet at the end of the season.

“Fulgham’s flip was so severe that had he not had a capsule on his boat, I am sure he would have been killed,” Allen said.

Hill’s last crash, the one that convinced him to quit drag boats, came at the end of a 217 m.p.h. run at Firebird Lake. It broke seven bones, gave him a concussion and it was a year before he felt normal again. Hill, who won his first National Hot Rod Assn. top fuel event last week in Gainesville, Fla., after a record qualifying run of 288.73 m.p.h., recalls the accident:

“I had just cleared the last marker on an absolutely perfect run. The rooster tail was smooth, there was no bouncing, no sponson walk, no steering problem. When I backed out of the throttle, the boat rose gently out of the water, turned 270 degrees (about three-quarters around) and rolled 90 degrees left so that I was parallel with the water.

“The boat came down on the left sponson and slammed me into the water at about 200 m.p.h. It nearly popped the eye balls out of my head. Fortunately, I don’t remember anything about hitting, but when they pulled me out I looked like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie. I had two black eyes and what had been the whites of my eyes were blood red, no white showing at all.

“The whole accident was unbelievable, it was so mysterious why the boat took off the way it did. It was such a perfect run that Ercie (his wife) saw me clear the finish line and turned away to walk to the truck. When she heard the crowd gasp, she thought something had happened to Billy Todd in the other lane. His boat had been bouncing around, but when she looked back, she couldn’t find my boat.”

That win over Todd gave Hill his second straight World Series of Drag Racing championship.

“I figured that was a good time to get out,” Hill said. “When I first got into top fuel, no one was running 200 and toward the end of my involvement, a lot of guys were regularly over 200 and some, like myself, ran regularly around 220, but they were beginning to crash pretty regularly, too. The sport was a lot safer early on.

“It got to where boats were getting freed up and taking off in the blown alcohol, and even the blown gas classes. It was getting awful dangerous.”

Presently, protective devices are mandatory only on top fuel hydros, but as their safety factor becomes more apparent, similar features are expected to crop up on boats in other classes.

Speeds of 200 m.p.h. are not necessary to send a boat flying through the air. Peter Horak once jumped a powerboat 120 feet through the air from a takeoff speed of only 55 m.p.h.

Jackie Cunningham, a racing grandmother from Simi Valley, was not going much above 100 m.p.h. when her boat, Midnite Oil, became airborne and pitched her out during a pro gas jet qualifying run recently at Firebird. She suffered only a sprained ankle, although she took a good shaking up when she hit the water.

“I don’t ever like it to see a boat upside down and a driver in the water,” Allen said. “But Jackie’s accident gave our rescue team a chance to show just how quick and efficient it is.”

Before the spray had settled from the boat’s plunge into the lake, a small boat was alongside Cunningham with a diver who went in the water to help stabalize her. Then a larger boat moved in to pick her up and transport her to shore where an ambulance was waiting.

“The second boat has the capability of lifting the boat out of the water if the situation warrants it,” Allen said.

On several other occasions, the rescue boats anticipated potential trouble and were moving toward the scene before anything happened.

The two IHBA rescue boats and crews travel to all of the organization’s sites, which include Castaic Lake, Berenda Reservoir at Chowchilla and the Sacramento River diversion dam at Red Bluff, in addition to Firebird and Puddingstone lakes.

As long as boats have been built, there has been racing between owners, but the sport of drag boat racing traces its roots back to November 26, 1956, when the Kern County Boat and Ski Club held race on a lake in Hart Park, just east of Bakersfield. Forty-two boats showed up and Darrell Jenkins, in a flatbottom called Vapor Trail, set the fast time of 77.58 m.p.h.

At first glance, the sport appears to be a waterized copy of asphalt drag racing, in which the object is to be the first to cover 440 yards in a side by side race. Drag boat racing, like its earthbound counterpart, has a confusing number of classes, 16 in all, determined by hull design (hydro, flatbottom and tunnel), engine size (565 cubic inches on down) and method of propulsion (propeller and jet).

They range from the 565 cubic inch top fuel hydros which skitter across the water at 220 m.p.h. with only the tiniest portion of the hull touching the water, to the 100 m.p.h eliminators that are like the street stocks of drag racing.

“The most thrilling thing I’ve seen in racing is when those top fuel hydros race,” Allen said. “It’s wild, the way they throw those roostertails of water and exert so much power that the ground shakes, just like it does when the cars run.”

A day at the races usually means dawn to dusk, with officials often struggling to get the final runs finished before darkness.

Drag races on asphalt are slowed by oil downs, a car’s engine letting go and dropping oil all over the strip that has to wiped up and dried. There are no oil downs on the water, but the delays can be as bad. A boat that blows its engine can sit dead in the water until a patrol boat can tow it back to shore.

When a boat sinks, as several boats did during the Winternationals, it must either be removed or inspectors must assure that it won’t slowly float back to the surface--or just below the surface where it might be hit.

“You can’t be too careful,” Allen said. “We not only don’t want anyone hurt, we don’t want a boat damaged, either. Even the eliminators cost $25,000, which is an awful lot when you consider that there’s not much money to be made in drag boats.”

Drag boat racing is about where drag racing was 20 years ago, struggling along through the dedication of a handful of hardy drivers, owners and promoters who love the sport so much they won’t quit.

The sports is still out of the mainstream, neglected by the media, undiscovered by television and not yet interesting to major sponsors.

Jim Dale, IHBA national technical director, believes that the new safety rules may enable his sport to make the turn toward bigger things.

“Once the new rule takes hold it may allow drag boat racing to surge ahead as a major spectator sport,” Dale said.

Although the IHBA is a regional organization at the time, one of several scattered around the country, Allen envisions a day when there will be one overall sanctioning body and a series of 8 to 10 nationally televised events leading to a true national championship.

“Which do you need first, TV or the sponsors?” he asked. “If we get TV, we’ll get the sponsors, just the way the funny cars and the top fuelers did. On the other hand, if we could get enough commercial sponsors, we could buy time on TV.”

The drag boats still have the old-fashioned names painted on their sides: Madness, Bad Blood, My Boat Too, Alabama Express, Fandango, Sunday Showdown, et al.

“The ink and the fame just isn’t there for basically the same amount of dedication it takes to race cars,” Hill said. “It has a more relaxed, less formal atmosphere than car racing, but if you want to make a living doing it, it’s intolerable.

“I don’t want to make it sound all negative. I loved it while I was doing it and I wouldn’t have got involved as far as I did if I hadn’t enjoyed it. There’s nothing more exhilarating than a good run in a drag boat, but it pays a whole lot better in a car.”

Allen, who set the world funny car record at 222.22 m.p.h. in 1971 in Vancouver, was asked if he ever felt an urge to drive a top fuel drag boat.

“Never,” he said incredulously. “What do you take me for? I can barely watch them, they make me so nervous.”