He Simply Can’t Take a Holiday : Hydroplane racing: Tom D’Eath twice has come back from retirement to win championships driving the world’s fastest boats.

Twice in the last four years, Tom D’Eath has retired from driving unlimited hydroplanes, the world’s fastest racing boats.

Twice, boat owner Bernie Little has brought him out of retirement to drive Miss Budweiser in the unlimited series. The first time, replacing an injured Jim Kropfeld after the first race of the 1988 season, D’Eath won his first national championship.

The second time, in mid-season last year, D’Eath’s driving led to Miss Budweiser’s winning the world high-point championship for the fifth time in six years, but he was edged out by four-time champion Chip Hanauer for the driver’s championship.

This year, driving Miss Budweiser for a full season for the first time, D’Eath is leading Hanauer by a relatively narrow 573 points going into Sunday’s Budweiser Cup on Mission Bay, the next to the last race of the season. Three heats and a championship final--all five laps around the 2 1/2-mile Bill Muncey Memorial Course--are worth 400 points each to the winner and 300 to the runner-up.

“Our plan is the same as it has been all year, to try and win races, and if we don’t, to be consistent,” D’Eath said. “We want to keep logging laps. We believe that we are fast enough to beat Circus Circus (Hanauer’s boat), but we must guard against dropping out of a race. Right now, I would say it’s more in the hands of the crew than mine.”

D’Eath had finished either first or second in 29 of 30 heats before the engine failed on his boat before the start of the third heat last week at Kansas City.

“That was a 400-point shift in the standings and left us virtually in a tie until Chip had his own problems in the final,” D’Eath said. “When we won and he didn’t place, we had our 400 points back. We don’t want to lose another 400 that way down here.”

A skid fan broke loose on Hanauer’s boat as it entered the first turn, and he was black-flagged by officials.

In nine races this season, D’Eath, of Fair Haven, Mich., has won five and Hanauer, of Seattle, has won four.

D’Eath has postponed thoughts of retiring again.

“I’m taking it one race at a time, which could grow into one year at a time,” he said. “But at 46, I know it’s not too far down the road that I’ll have to quit this nonsense. The age factor is always something to be considered.

“I have watched drivers like Richard Petty and A.J. Foyt and Johnny Rutherford go on beyond their time, and I hate to see someone with that ability slide down into a lower level, where all they’re doing is trying to drive within their comfort zone. It’s not enjoyable to see drivers of their stature in situations where they aren’t competitive.”

Why then did D’Eath come back to unlimited hydroplanes?

“First, I want to point out that I wasn’t retiring from racing, only from unlimiteds. I was planning on running my midget race car in (United States Auto Club) races and driving seven-liter and five-liter inboard hydroplanes.

“I had never anticipated coming back to unlimiteds after I left in 1986. I had two good offers to drive: from the Oberto boat, for a season, but I said no and recommended George Woods; then, when Steve Reynolds was hurt, I got a call about driving the 7-Eleven and I said no again. I had definitely made up my mind I wasn’t going to come back.

“When Bernie (Little) called, I changed my mind. As far as I was concerned, it was the golden ride. Every racer’s dream is to have the best equipment money can buy, and Bud has the budget to make that dream come true. An opportunity like that couldn’t be passed up.”

Kropfeld had won three national championships with Miss Budweiser before he spun and stalled in the opening race of 1988 at Miami. A boat driven by Scott Pierce was right behind Kropfeld, and when Pierce was unable to see through the huge roostertails, he drove right over the top of Miss Budweiser’s canopy. The impact crushed the canopy and it took 20 minutes to extricate Kropfeld, whose neck was broken. He was in traction and wore a cervical “halo” for six months.

D’Eath took over the boat and won four races, including the season finale at Las Vegas, for the championship.

In his second race, in the repaired boat in which Kropfeld had been injured, D’Eath’s boat blew over, doing a 360-degree turn in the air. The canopy saved D’Eath, but the boat needed 1,000 man-hours of labor before the next race.

“I would not have considered coming back, even for the Bud ride, if not for development of the closed cockpit by Kropfeld and Reynolds,” D’Eath said. “I was not brave enough to be a guinea pig for that concept. The canopies were really primitive before the F-16 fighter plane canopies became available in 1986.”

The canopy, built of five-eighths-inch plexiglass, can stand 6,500 pounds of pressure at 200 m.p.h., and has a supply of air to last one hour if the boat remains upside down in the water. Latches on the bubble and a trap door on the bottom of the boat can be used for getting the driver out.

“They have made all the difference in the world,” D’Eath said of the canopies. “The bottom line is that the F-16 and its modifications have saved a lot of lives--mine and Jim’s, for sure. Lots of guys were killed racing unlimiteds before the F-16, and there hasn’t been one since. The accident Jim had, where he was run right over, is the ultimate worst accident. Without the canopy, there is no chance he would be alive today.”

When the 1989 season started, Kropfeld was back in the cockpit of the Bud boat.

“I was very lucky,” Kropfeld said. “My top vertebra was fractured, but I loved racing so much that I didn’t want to give it up.”

National champion D’Eath, the substitute driver, retired again.

“I was just as sure as the first time that I was through with unlimiteds,” D’Eath says.

Kropfeld won the season opener at Houston and the Indiana Governor’s Cup on the Ohio river, but when he finished fifth in the fifth race, Little decided he wanted D’Eath back and gave Kropfeld the hook. This season, Kropfeld is back as driver of the Winston Eagle.

D’Eath responded by winning two of the final five races, enough to give Bud the team title but not enough to beat Hanauer for the driver’s championship.

One of his victories, however, was here, in the Gold Cup, where he snapped Hanauer’s string of seven victories in hydroplane racing’s most prestigious event. Hanauer, in Circus Circus, had set a world qualifying record of 158.870 m.p.h. and was favored to win his eighth Gold Cup, but his engine died at the start of the championship heat.

“I’ll never forget when I saw Chip’s boat dead in the water and figured we had it won,” D’Eath said. “But I never figured we’d run out of fuel. That last lap was as dramatic as I ever want to experience.”

D’Eath built up a big lead over Woods in the Oh Boy! Oberto boat when Miss Budweiser began to sputter in the corners.

“I throttled back to conserve fuel, but it felt like all we were running on was fumes,” D’Eath said. “When Oberto passed us, I thought the Gold Cup had slipped away when all of a sudden the engine caught again, and we managed to get back ahead before the finish line.

“You’ve heard of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat? That last lap was definitely both. Everything you can imagine went through my mind. It was all we could do to coast back to the dock after the race.”

When D’Eath won this year’s Gold Cup at Detroit, it made him one of only two drivers to win it in three decades. His first triumph was in 1976 in George Simon’s Miss U.S. The only other three-decade winner is the late Bill Muncey, who won eight times between 1956 and 1979.

“Bill Muncey,” D’Eath said, savoring the memory. “That’s not bad company to keep.”

Muncey, the most successful driver of all time, won seven unlimited championships and 62 races, including eight Gold Cups. A resident of La Mesa, a San Diego suburb, he was instrumental in forming Thunderboats Unlimited to preserve racing on the course named in his honor.

Muncey was killed in a blow-over while leading a world championship race in Acapulco, Mexico, on Oct. 18, 1981.