1950 Gold Cup Remembered

By Fred Farley - Unlimited Hydroplane Historian

During the first half of the 20th Century, no boat representing a yacht club from west of the Mississippi River was ever victorious.

All of that changed in 1950 when SLO-MO-SHUN IV from Seattle finally turned the trick at Detroit. SLO-MO owner Stan Sayres, driver/designer Ted Jones, and builder Anchor Jensen thoroughly debunked the well-publicized impression that three-point suspension hulls become hopelessly uncontrollable at racing speeds--especially in the corners.

SLO-MO IV wasn't the first hydroplane to "prop-ride" on a semi-submerged propeller. (Jack Schafer's SUCH CRUST II and Morlan Visel's HURRICANE IV had both experimented along those lines.) But SLO-MO-SHUN IV was the first craft to reap championship results in the application of the concept. The days when a hydroplane could win with a fully submerged propeller were numbered.

For the next two decades, the boats had to pretty much use a SLO-MO-type design, or they simply weren't competitive. Overnight, competition speeds of over 100 miles per hour and straightaway speeds of over 150 were commonplace.

SLO-MO-SHUN IV won all three heats of the 1950 contest. But defending champion MY SWEETIE gave her everything she could handle in Heat Two. Lou Fageol, substituting for Bill Cantrell (who had been injured in a pre-race testing accident with DELPHINE X), pushed MY SWEETIE into the lead at the start and stayed there for 9-3/4 laps. Then, with a quarter lap to go, MY SWEETIE’s Allison engine failed due to low oil pressure, which sidelined the entry for the day.

When Sayres was presented with the Gold Cup, following his 1950 Motor City triumph, the cynics wagged that the Cup was "only being loaned" to him. The "loan" proved to be of long duration as Sayres went on to become the first five-time consecutive winning owner of power boating's Holy Grail. And he introduced Gold Cup racing to the Pacific Northwest. Not until 1956 would another Gold Cup contest be staged on the Detroit River.

NOTE: In the years since SLO-MO-SHUN IV revolutionized Gold Cup and Unlimited racing, a number of editorial writers have called into question whether Ted Jones or Anchor Jensen is responsible for SLO-MO’s design.

In the opinion of Fred Farley, this distinction belongs to Mr. Jones. Ted had a background in racing, while Anchor did not. The design elements of SLO-MO-SHUN IV evolved from the 225 Cubic Inch Class SLO-MO-SHUN III, which was Ted’s--not Anchor’s--design.

Jensen perhaps contributed some ideas during construction. But that does not make the design his.

Jones told Farley that when he (Jones), Jensen, and Stan Sayres attended the 1948 Gold Cup in Detroit, Stan asked Ted and Anchor for their input. Jensen suggested that SLO-MO-SHUN IV be a step hydroplane, along the lines of Hacker’s MY SWEETIE; Jones insisted that a three-point proprider was needed. Thankfully, Sayres saw the wisdom of Ted’s advice.

Anchor Jensen was a superb craftsman of pleasure boats. But prior to his work with Sayres, his only involvement with boat racing was as an outboard motor mechanic for a Seattle outboard racer in the 1920s. This is according to DeWitt Jensen, Anchor’s son.

SLO-MO-SHUN IV raised the world straightaway record from 141.740 (set in 1939 by Malcolm Campbell’s BLUEBIRD K-4) to 160.323 miles per hour in 1950.

It is difficult to imagine that someone with no racing background could be responsible for creating a boat capable of going almost 19 miles per hour faster than anything else in the history of the world.

The only common sense answer to the question of SLO-MO’s origin is to assign the designer’s role to Ted Jones--and Ted Jones alone.