High Ambition, Higher Speeds

The need to personally feel speed is not in my makeup. I’m not big on roller coasters, for example, and a yacht heeled over on a blustery tack will whiten my knuckles. I guess I am more of a sedan and air bag type.

With this in mind, you can probably understand what I would consider the most insane place to open a throttle and release something like 2,650 horsepower.

You guessed it.

On water.

Chip Hanauer, then, has to be about as crazy a guy as I have encountered.

He got out of a boat, of all places, Saturday with a long face because he had only managed to turn in a lap of 169.802 miles per hour on Mission Bay.

“Close,” he shrugged, “but no cigar.”

I almost wanted to ask if that red racing suit was convertible into a straitjacket. I wouldn’t go a third that speed on Fiesta Island if it had two-mile straightaways and banked turns, much less on Mission Bay itself. And Hanauer was disappointed that he had not nudged his boat, Miss Budweiser, that fraction of an m.p.h. to an even 170.

You have to realize that all he did was set a world record for unlimited hydroplanes in a qualifying run for today’s Budweiser Cup. In his mind, he had come up short of being the first to turn in a 170-m.p.h. lap. Never mind that he was the first to turn in a 169.802-m.p.h. lap.

I guess he felt a little bit like the first guy to pole vault 19-11 3/4. He had gone 170.9 during practice Friday, but that didn’t count. That was akin to kicking a 60-yard field goal in practice, and how many guys have claimed that distinction.

So there was Hanauer on the water Saturday morning. I stress . . . on the water.

This isn’t like running 170 m.p.h. on asphalt or concrete. Automobiles race on tracks that just lie there. They are not fickle like a course such as Mission Bay, which has currents and tides and waves and winds, which affect all of the aforementioned. Driving on Mission Bay had to be like trying to make a putt on a water bed.

Hanauer blazed down the straights, but that didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that he came around the corners like he was trying to outrun a Tomahawk missile. Miss Bud looked like the slightest gust of wind would turn her into a gymnast. After all, these hydroplanes are not on rails like something circling Tom Sawyer’s island at Disneyland.

After watching him make runs of 169.802, 169.231 and 167.973, I asked Hanauer what it felt like to travel at such speeds . . . on the water.

“It’s just fun,” he said, brightening into a smile. “It’s really fun. A day like today is my favorite part of the job. It’s the best day you can have, the most fun you can have.”

The guy probably gave up roller coasters when he found out they ran on rails.

And Hanauer took a year’s sabbatical from hydroplane racing in 1991 to race cars. It couldn’t be much fun driving something where the track wasn’t as wishy-washy as a politician.

For heaven’s sake, Chip, cars get to go around banked turns.

“Driving a race car around a corner is harder,” he said. “You have the skim fin on the boat. The safest place in a boat is on the corner. You’re in a car and you have to brake, downshift and turn and do it without upsetting the balance.”

It seems you have to do much of that in a boat too, except boats don’t have brakes to help with maintaining that balance. These things don’t stop on a dime. In truth, you couldn’t stop one of them on the national debt. The water itself, to use a hydroplane racing expression, “scrubs the speed” from the boats in the turns.

OK, then, if the corners are so safe in these boats, the straightaways must be like taking the family wagon to the grocery store.

“You have to worry about cars falling off the course horizontally,” Hanauer explained patiently. “Boats are the opposite. You have to worry about the vertical plane.”

Translated, the greatest danger in unlimited hydroplanes is when the front end lifts and they go airborne. You think they might be tough to control on water, but the driver of an airborne hydroplane has no more control than the guy in seat 24C of that flight you took to visit your sick uncle. It is when the boats are at top speed, on the straights, that they--and their drivers--are most vulnerable.

And Chip Hanauer drives these boats at higher speeds than anyone previously drove them. When he is in the field, the race seems to be for second place. He won driver championships in 1989 and 1990 and then turned it into an all-comers meet while he raced cars in 1991. He has already clinched the 1992 title, losing only when he crashed during a qualifying run.

Most importantly to him, all of this speed is such great fun . . . be it in a boat or in a car.

It’s just that on this Saturday a little boost to 170 m.p.h. would have been so much more enjoyable.