Something’s Amiss in World of Hydros : Boat racing: Some say it’s good that usual winner isn’t winning, but don’t include owner Bernie Little.

Too much of a good thing is wonderful!

-MAE WEST

For years, Bernie Little was on the same wave length as Mae West. As long as his red and gold Miss Budweiser hydroplanes were winning everything in sight, the Florida beer baron was the happiest man on the docks.

Few teams in sports history have succeeded like Little’s. His boats have won the last five consecutive--and nine of the last 10--American Power Boat Assn. unlimited hydroplane championships; nine APBA Gold Cups, the Super Bowl of powerboat racing, in the last 16 years, and so many races that when Miss Budweiser didn’t win, the story was often not who won, but what happened to Little’s boat.

That was great for Bernie Little’s ego. It fit right in with the gold chains, the open shirt, the booming voice and a bigger-than-life presence in the pits and board rooms.

But it got so monotonous to others that it began to erode the sport. Sponsors with limited budgets unable to match Little’s Budweiser largess, drifted away from unlimited hydros. So did race sponsors, unwilling to pony up for what were becoming one-team runaways.

However, when race sites were in financial jeopardy, it had been Little who stepped in and saved them. Three years ago, six of 10 races, including the Gold Cup, were sponsored by Budweiser.

“Bernie Little has been both the best thing and the worst thing in unlimiteds,” Commissioner Bill Doner said when he took charge of the floundering sport in April 1994. “It probably wouldn’t have survived without him, but in a way he’s destroying it with his overkill.

Things have changed.

For the first time since 1979- through 15 consecutive seasons- Little’s Miss Budweisers have failed to win a race.

Only two chances remain, Sept. 15 at San Diego’s Mission Bay in the Bayfair Muncey Cup, and Oct. 13 in Honolulu.

“Having fresh names, like Dave Villwock and Fred Leland and his PICO American Dream and Mark Tate and Steve Woomer’s Smokin’ Joe’s, to talk about and write about, has been a boon for us this year,” Doner said. “All the reporters and TV guys who were getting tired of the same old story when Bernie was winning are now all over him, asking him what’s wrong.”

After eight of 10 events, Villwock has an almost insurmountable lead in quest of Leland’s first championship. PICO American Dream has won six races and accumulated 11,296 points to 9,233 for Smokin’ Joe’s, with two wins, and 9,104 for the winless Miss Budweiser.

“The new look is reflected in our crowds, too,” Doner continued. “There was a tremendous momentum in Seattle when the boats hit Lake Washington. And we had the biggest Saturday crowd Detroit had ever seen for the Gold Cup. Even when the wind blew all day Sunday and we didn’t get started until we’d waited six hours, it surprised me to see the pits still full of people and fans still lined up on both sides of the river.”

Little’s problems started in Detroit, in the second heat of the Gold Cup. Hanauer and Tate, racing side by side into the first turn of the first lap at 150 mph, came together in a grinding collision of three-ton boats. The accident knocked Tate’s Smokin’ Joe’s out of the event and ended up sidelining Hanauer, a 10-time Gold Cup winner, for the season.

Mark Evans, Little’s backup driver, filled in for the Gold Cup and finished second. When Hanauer, who suffered a concussion, decided not to resume driving, Evans remained in the Miss Budweiser seat.

“Things just didn’t feel right,” Hanauer said. “I am not retiring, please don’t say that, but it concerned me that I had four serious accidents in four years with the Bud boat after having only two minor spills in my entire career before.” Hanauer said he was leery of the boat’s design and unhappy with a Doner-backed rule that reduced the fuel flow--and thus the power--in the nearly 3,000 horsepower turbine engines, similar to restricter plates used in Winston Cup stock cars at certain tracks.

“We changed the rules to save engines and repair bills, not to reduce speeds,” Doner said. “I think we proved our point. We didn’t want to see only a couple of boats running late in the day, the way it had been happening. At Kansas City this year, we had every boat finish every one of the eight heats. That wouldn’t have happened with the old fuel rules.”

Little and Hanauer claim the rule was designed to tighten up the fields, to bring the slower boats back to Miss Budweiser.

“Hell, they aren’t trying to slow the other boats down, they’re trying to slow my boat down,” the 70-year-old Little said earlier in the season. “When they put in the fuel restrictions, some of these guys ran faster than they had ever run before. You explain that to me.

“Racing is about going fast and being the fastest. How fast is too fast? I can tell you what not fast enough is-that’s when we aren’t the fastest.”

Doner’s reaction:

“I’ve heard all their talk, but the truth is that their boat is three-four miles slower than PICO and Smokin’ Joe’s. Mark [Evans] is doing a good job with the boat, but Bernie’s got to find some more speed.

“I know it’ll happen, sooner or later, because Bernie is such a fierce competitor he can’t stand running second or third all the time.

“You know, it was good for us when he started getting beat, but right now I’d kind of like for the old man to win one again. There is something to be said about seeing that red boat out in front.”

Hanauer, recuperating at home in Seattle while pondering his future at 42, recently took a potshot at Doner in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“The sport continues to suffer from what it’s always suffered-a lack of leadership. In my 21 years, it has never had the leadership it deserves. I’ve never seen people of the intellect and integrity it needs.”

Doner, whose acerbic comments first attracted attention when he was sports editor of the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot 35 years ago, shot back:

“He’s yesterday’s news. The guy needs more fiber in his diet and maybe he’d feel better about himself.”

Looking back on his nearly three years of stewardship is not Doner’s style. He prefers looking ahead, even beyond the April 1 date when his contract as commissioner comes up for review.

“All I’ll say about the past is that things were in a hell of a lot worse shape than I imagined when I came in,” he said. “Maybe if I’d known just how bad they were, I might not have tackled it. I was really down in the dumps that first year, but now I’m full of enthusiasm.

“We have more boats, we had 15 on the Columbia River, the most since the 1958 Gold Cup. We expect a dozen in San Diego. We have more races, 11 this year, up from eight in ‘94, and we’ll have at least 12 next year when we add Dallas and Las Vegas and drop Phoenix. Things didn’t work out at Firebird Lake [in Phoenix]. It was just too small for our boats.

“I’m not saying we’re at the level we wanted to be, but we’re making progress. We’d still like to get into the New York and Los Angeles markets, but we’ve got to have a bigger and better show before we get into markets as tough to sell as those two.

“And we have more sponsors. We got the Las Vegas Convention Bureau as our series sponsor and we changed our name so people could understand what we were about. I don’t know what they had in mind when they named us the Unlimited Racing Commission. What the hell did that mean? Now we’re the Unlimited Hydroplane Racing Assn., and that should be perfectly clear.”

Reaction to Doner’s tenure has been on the plus side, Hanauer not withstanding.

“I think Doner’s done a fantastic job,” said Wayne T. Robertson, president of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco’s Sports Marketing Enterprises, which sponsors Woomer’s Smokin’ Joe’s boat. “Look around in the pits, there are a lot of new names here, companies that Doner has brought in.

“We need more races to justify the expense of putting a boat into the series, but he’s working on that. The unlimiteds are a good tool for us. Demographics show that racing fans have a high interest in smoking. We go where the smokers are, we want the people who have lust for life.”

Steve David, president of the American Power Boat Assn. and driver of Jim Harvey’s boat-one that has competed under a different name at every stop this season-believes the new competitiveness will attract more boats and more sponsors.

“A few years ago, it was just Bernie’s boat, then Smokin’ Joe’s came along and Mark [Tate] made it a two-boat race and this year [Dave] Villwock and PICO American Dream have come along,” David said. “They’ve shown that with added resources and a talented driver, the Bud boat is not invincible. We used to think it was.”

Even Little, frustrated and fuming at the failure of his team to get back out in front, conceded that Doner is “doing a hell of job getting new people interested in us.”

Maybe San Diego will be where Miss Bud makes it 16 years in a row with at least one win. Little’s boats have won nine times on Mission Bay, but not since 1991. Curiously, the almost unbeatable Little-Hanauer combination that accounted for 22 wins in 33 starts in four seasons, never won at San Diego.