A Tribute to Miss Pepsi

By Fred Farley - Unlimited Hydroplane Historian

For more than four decades, I have had a wonderful love/hate relationship with the MISS PEPSI. Back when the Seattle-Detroit rivalry was at its peak, MISS PEPSI was the boat that I loved to hate.

A Seattle kid down to my toenails, I viewed with disdain any threat from the Detroit contingent to deprive Seattle of "our" Gold Cup. (This was in the days when the Gold Cup race location was determined by the yacht club of the winning boat and not by the city with the highest financial bid.)

But now, with the perspective of time, the twin-Allison-powered MISS PEPSI is one of my all-time favorite boats. God! What a competitor! With Chuck Thompson driving, no one could take the "mahogany cigar" for granted on the race course!

I now frankly admit that those halcyon days of the 1950s would have been mighty boring if the Dossin family's MISS PEPSI had not been the enormous competitive presence that she was.

To be perfectly honest, the Detroit product of the '50s--for the most part--did not impress me, although the MISS U.S. I of 1958 just about gave me cardiac arrest when she dominated the first two heats of the 1958 Coeur d'Alene Diamond Cup with Fred Alter driving.

But the MISS PEPSI, that was another story. She was always in there making us work for it--with Chuck Thompson's foot solidly on the floor.

When a Seattle boat beat the mahogany U-99, we knew that we had been in a boat race.

To this day, whenever I travel to the Motor City, my visit isn't complete without a visit to Belle Isle. For it is there, at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, that the greatest step hydroplane in the history of the world rests in glory.