Hydroplane Museum's News (126)

She's not a winner yet, but the new 'Smirnoff' did well enough in Alabama to indicate that unlimited hydroplanes can be both fast and nonlethal.

By Hugh Whall

Reprinted from Sports Illustrated, June 10, 1968

"Deadly" is a word that over the last three years has more and more frequently been used to describe the sport of hydroplane racing, and journalistic sensationalism has nothing to do with it. Over that period of time a rash of…

By Fred Farley - H1 Unlimited Historian

The first major race to be run on the Detroit River was the 1916 APBA Gold Cup. This was by virtue of the community-owned Miss Detroit winning the Cup in 1915 on Manhasset Bay in Upstate New York and earning the right to defend it on home waters.

Miss Detroit was a single-step hydroplane, equipped with a 250-horsepower Sterling engine. The designer was the distinguished Christopher Columbus Smith of Chriscraft fame. As things developed,…

In a racing boat Mira Slovak is as brash as he was when he fled the Reds in a stolen plane.

By Emmett Watson

Reprinted from Sports Illustrated, August 8, 1960

In the seven years since he stole a Czechoslovak airliner loaded with furiously reluctant passengers and treetopped his way to freedom, 30-year-old Miroslav Slovak has pursued such a variety of careers and diversions that he has sometimes seemed headed several ways at once. This week…

Bill Boeing's Miss Wahoo appeared in two races in 1956. She took fifth at the Seattle Seafair Trophy Race. Later in the year, she competed in the Sahara Cup in Las Vegas, where she took sixth out of eleven hulls. The Miss Wahoo was a beautiful mahogany-decked craft with deep red trim and white lettering. She had Allison power and was driven by Mira Slovak, who up to then had never even seen a race boat, much less driven one! But Slovak was a talented pilot who had fled the Iron Curtain in a…

By Fred Farley - H1 Unlimited Historian

Joe and Lee Schoenith raced Unlimited hydroplanes from 1950 to 1975. Most of their boats were named GALE, sponsored by W.D. Gale, Inc., a Detroit-based electrical contracting firm, which the Schoeniths owned.

Their most famous boat was the first GALE V, designed by Les Staudacher, which was National High Point Champion in 1954 and 1955 and won the APBA Gold Cup in 1955 on Seattle's Lake Washington with Lee…

By Vanessa McGrady

Reprinted from Sunset Magazine

David Williams, the executive director of the Hydroplane and Raceboat Museum in Kent, Washington, remembers watching his very first race at 5 years old.

"I just was amazed by the sound and color and excitement and huge rooster tails that the boats threw," he says. He filled his childhood by making model boats during the day and dreaming about them at night. At 20, Williams raced a…