Admittedly, I don't know much about modern speedboats, but the full flip probably saved their lives. In the old days, flipping onto your head at damn near 200 mph was certain death.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Yea that flip and rotation definitely saved them, you can see in the video they slow down drastically in the air while the top of the boat was pointing mostly forward, although they likely also experienced some drastic gforce changes as it happened.
Yeah, I was gonna say, did the pilot live?
Good number of hydroplane/powerboat deaths/maimings over the years...
Both lived and were not seriously injured.
And that is what I would describe as the only kind of miracle I believe can actually happen.
Roughly on par with 'bailed out of an airplane, crashed through some trees, landed in a snowbank, only suffered a few fractures and actually lived.'
Something like that happened a few times in WW2.
k, it's time to wind down the whole we're-just-burning-fossil-fuels-for-fun stuff now.
i doubt the actual motorsports are the biggest carbon emissions of stuff like this
Check out SailGP. It's got some flaws, but they did actually manage to design a sailboat race that goes fast enough to actually be interesting to watch in real-time.
flaws
- I have my doubts that it's as eco-friendly as they claim, since they still use fossil fuels for support boats, shipping the sailboats across the world between events, etc.
- It's pretty new and seems a little underfunded, so the production values and commentating can be a bit rough around the edges.
- They try to make it accessible (e.g. by reporting speeds in kph instead of knots), but it's still got a whiff of yacht-club elitism to it.
I mean, i'm certainly ok with a fully electric motorboat
That time was like 30 years ago. Now we can either stop using them altogether and have a bad time, or we can keep using them and have a slightly more bad time.
I guess these guys have never heard of ground effect or air compressing at high speed.
I'm guessing none of them want to admit to these effects if you want to keep a propeller in the water the whole time.
Those effects are key to the design of these boats. They're essentially a wing.
Water has a lot more drag than air, so the more the boat is out of the water, the faster it can go.
Eh, anyone can do that mid-air. It takes skill to do it quarter-air.
/s
In all seriousness, I think that there might be a good argument, in 2025, for converting races, be they car or boat or whatnot, to be remotely-driven.
We've got the technology today.
It'd permit for higher speeds and suchlike, and eliminate some requirements.
The audience doesn't get the drama of the driver maybe being killed in an accident, but by-and-large, blood sport has faded into history.
There are clearly some people who watch racing for the crashes
but it's possible to have the crashes and have vehicles potentially destroyed without the drivers being killed too.
That defeats the whole point.
Well, I suppose it depends on what people are out for. Like I said, if it's death that they're interested in, then, yeah, it would. But if they're okay with the crashes without the death, then I'd think that it'd be okay.
Sport requires human drama.
No fans would watch robots race, unless they were rooting for a human to win.
Just gamblers.
If robots were racing, people would be rooting for the remote pilot, or the team that built it, or the designers of the engine, etc...
Does no one remember Robot Wars or any spinoffs thereof?
Did they get NASCAR ratings?
And those battles were a quite a bit more action than oval track racing.
Maybe you would get figure 8 courses or mario kart tracks, but i do not believe that will keep viewers interested long term.
I dunno, maybe that's true. People like watching humans be in danger, that's true.
Monster Truck shows probably don't need humans though. We like watching stuff get crushed by big things even if humans aren't involved!
Not gonna lie, a pure engineering contest without the restrictions feel like a very cool idea. See what the true limits car engineers can achieve in a race if they didn't even need to consider driver safety. There exists a lot of restrictions on racing leagues for driver safety, as it should. But without drivers, you can pretty much throw all of it away.
But without drivers, you can pretty much throw all of it away.
I'm not sure you could - since spectator safety is considered more important than driver safety. (both are important)
So unless it's out in the middle of nowhere, with no spectators, no camerapeople, any pit crew would need to be in bunkers - just drones within a few kilometers of the track - it couldn't happen either and such and event would probably be less exciting than watching someone else play the F1 PC/Console game...
Hahahah no. Humans haven't changed. We still love to gawk at death and pain. We just don't want to admit it directly.
Rubber-neckers slowing down the highway for a crash on the other side aren't doing it to make sure they are safe. They are hoping to spot some gore.
Unless you like TOOL.
If theres no risk of complete assholes burning up or crumpling into a pancake during a car race then the race sucks ass.