Tuesday, Aug. 01, 2006

Day late, but the Commentator speaks again

By Jody Moore, Hydro.commentator

Well, my first Atomic Cup since I was a toddler is in the record books. Granted, as far as I was concerned, it was the Atomic Cup in name alone. I for one wasn't sure that Columbia Cup was a flawed enough of a name to abandon. I'm a nostalgic guy, so I appreciated the nod to the race's history, but it just couldn't be the Atomic Cup to me with the whine of turbine engines, and all the drivers sitting in little bubbles up in front of their engines, and the like. But that's just me.

If you endured the weather and stuck it out this weekend, you got a real treat. What a wild ride this weekend has been. Flips, good racing, triumph and tragedy. This weekend had everything. And that was just in the E-Lam camp.

In all seriousness, congratulations to Dave Villwock and the E-Lam team for their unlikely Flip and Win II Cup. Villwock was lucky the boat landed as it did, and he certainly redeemed himself after the accident, or so it would seem.

I have heard some people joking around that Villwock might go the way of JW Myers, who was fired after flipping the E-Lam in Detroit last year, but it's hard to believe that could be the case. See, there's just something super-human about Super Dave. I mean, did you see the way he drove away from the competition from the outside lanes? He did it all freakin' weekend. Heck, he's been doing it his entire career.

Is there more to this story? I'm amazed by it, but I couldn't tell you. I will leave the rumors of cheating and all the rest of that BS to the self-proclaimed experts in the Internet forums where it belongs. Besides, the ABRA has its own technical staff and does its own inspections. Maybe he really is the uber-driver he seems to be.

What I can tell you from my years of observation is this: A certain charm seems to follow Mr. V around. Not only do his boats move much faster, but his teams seem to gel much better than they did without him. I think that may be at least a part of the puzzle.

Look at every team he has driven for in the past 10 years. Leland, Budweiser, and now E-Lam: all winning machines, and all functioning as a single unit. If that's all it is, that's something that hasn't really been a secret. Villwock himself told me team cohesion was important during his second or third year with Budweiser.

When Villwock was with the Budweiser camp, he was making his own propellers. Supposedly his propeller intelligence played a part as well. That's a problem that can be easily fixed with a spec propeller or some other requirement that is agreeable to everyone. Thing is, what the E-Lam team is doing right now is within the rules, so no whining from the peanut gallery.

From what I have been told, it just boils down to an outlay of cash. If money talks in this sport, I have a problem with it. Mind you, I've never been privy to the books of Villwock's propeller-production efforts, nor have I been involved directly in any of this myself. So I'm hardly an authority. All I can do is take the information I have been given from other teams and folks in the know, and apply some common-sense wisdom to it.

It goes a little something like this: At the same time that sponsorship dollars are few and far between, and owners are struggling just to get through each season, the propeller expense issue (if it's real) brings to light a vital flaw in the sport. If speed and victory are an equation that includes cash outlay as a direct factor, then the "haves" will mostly be victorious over the "have-nots".

This is intrinsically bad for the sport because it further reduces the opportunities for the "have-nots" to get a decent season-long sponsor that will finance not only the day-to-day race operations, but the R&D, testing and other little perks that win races and make them into "haves" as well. Our present model doesn't really allow owners to build their programs.

As I have said before, the sport is choking its owners to death right now by not providing the tools necessary to make the racing operation financially viable. The ABRA has made great strides by securing a season sponsor and putting together a television package. Thank goodness for that.

But if the sport is owned by, among others, the folks who own the boats, then they are really choking themselves to death, right? Awful hard to feel sorry for them. Is there a chance to change that? Let's see.

2006 started off looking like an E-Lam blowout, and if not for 10 very unfortunate seconds in Valleyfield, it might well have been. Now that the Big Orange One has recovered from its sudden parking job in Quebec, it's shaping up to be one again.

If it's a $20,000 investment per heat or two in hardware that is making the difference, then it's time to move to a smaller spec on the propellers and eliminate the advantage that dollars make. At least until such time that the sport has returned to the level of sponsorship and visibility that makes it practical.

A fortunate side-effect of that might be fewer torn-out bottoms on the boats in the fleet that seem to be coming much more frequently when the brittle larger propellers break. I'm sure that both U-10 owner Kim Gregory and U-5 / U-7 owner Ted Porter would agree with that wisdom.

I'd like to thank the owners, crew members and drivers who played along with us during our "investigative report" on the effects of the performance enhancement scandals in other sports on hydroplane racing. Everyone for the most part was really good natured out there, and we even got a few zingers that we weren't expecting, like Ed Cooper's admission of the team's "designated drinker." And of course, Steve David would have been good for a gag reel all his own if we would've had the time.

The best sport of all, though, had to be U-37 Beacon Plumbing owner Billy Schumacher, who took my question about flagrant gravy flow violations quite well considering that they had just lost 400 points and a first-place finish for a flagrant fuel flow violation in the previous heat. I was worried when I threw that one out there, but he didn't hit me. Yay for me, at least this time. All in jest, and it looked like everyone had fun with the segment.

I feel bad that I didn't have time to grab Mike Weber and accuse him and his team of using HGH (hydroplane growth hormone) on their boat because it seems to have a much more potent looking physique than the U-5 did last year. Something's up there.

What you didn't see were a few of my favorites, including Paul Becker explaining that his sponsor, Critical Logic, makes its living by basically proofreading and debugging software. I responded by asking if they were good enough to figure out why Windows keeps crashing. He went into engineer-speak for a moment, so I had to reel him back by offering an easier project: Fix Microsoft Word.

The real dud of the series of interviews what when I cornered Ronald McDonald near the U-5 truck and tried to get him to admit to pushing french fries on the drivers. He wouldn't budge. All he wanted to talk about was the quality of the show and how neat the jets were and stuff. All the while, I am thinking "HELLO! You're a CLOWN!! Say something funny!!"

Of course, that made me feel like the supporting characters in the movie Finding Nemo, where the main character is a clownfish, and all of the other fish are jumping to conclusions and trying to get him to tell them a joke. It's funny shtick, and it goes well in the movie. Is it any surprise that all of the movie comparisons I can come up with are children's movies?

Bottom line, though, is a sobering one. When you find yourself in the pits with a video camera, interviewing Ronald McDonald, it can only say one thing about your career: bottomed out. I mean, come on, when it sinks that low, your career is over, right? Do I ever expect to be taken seriously again?

The segment, though, gives me the segue I needed to get into another subject I have been dying to work in for weeks. Did anyone really give a crap about the Tour de France before what's his face the American Testosterone Bucket won it? You'd think once Lance Armstrong retired, nobody rode bikes anymore.

I was actually going to make mention of it when the first stages started, but it never really fit. If the big L had been going for Tour win No. 93 or whatever insurmountable number it was, the media might have cared. But nobody said anything. NOBODY! At least not until an American wore the yellow jersey through the last stage. Then all of a sudden, we had bike mania again. To me, at least, it seemed silly.

Even now, it's overplayed. Quick quiz: What is the Testosterone Bucket's name? Betcha most of you either don't know or have to look it up. Just like me. But I'm not pretending I care either.

But it would seem that the French are so pissed about us winning their race that they keep dropping the allegations of steroid abuse. Have they checked the size of his propeller? OK, after going back and re-reading this, I just realized how risque that sounds, but I swear I really didn't mean it as anything other than a joke. OK, commentator. Say something funny.

What wasn't funny was the points debut for the American Challenge Cup Series "G-boats" here in Tri-Cities. Their exhibition in 2005 was an unmitigated disaster, and 2006's event just didn't seem to gather much more steam.

The weekend started to fall to pieces the same way it did last year: with a flip by the G-17 Schuck's Auto Supply (the names and faces had changed, but the disaster remained the same) and mechanical problems for the G-329. The field was twice the size of last year's, and it looked like they might actually be able to put on a good show in the final.

The final shaped up into a three-way battle for the lead between Dick Lynch in the G-13 Tempo, Jerry Hopp in the G-16 Mike's Hard Lemonade and Mike Eacret in the G-24. That was until Eacret went dead at the start of lap three. Pretty soon a little smoke was rolling out from underneath the cowling, then open flames. Eacret's boat was torched, and the red flag was flying yet again.

Is this series ever going to catch a break?

The difficulties faced by the G class confuse me just a little bit. On paper, the boats seem to be a shoe-in. A boat a little larger than a Grand Prix, weighing a bit more, with a bit larger engine. Everything adds up. But on the water, the G boats seem to be more of a noise-maker than a high-speed sport.

The boats are loud, yes. As they should be. For the first time in a long time, I could hear boats on the far end of the course. But the noise department and the speed department don't seem to be working together in that class. The boats sounded like they should be going a whole lot faster than they appeared to be. About the only boat that didn't was the G-17, and we all know how that turned out.

I've heard an awful lot about teams using smaller than spec motors in the class, and that may be a part of the problem. I can't say for sure because I didn't actually go through and survey them one-by-one, but I don't think any of the six teams were using full-size motors in their boats.

Hopp's G-16 was an unlimited light from top to bottom, and wasn't running for points. In fact, they weren't even sure which of the two boats they brought would be racing in the G class, and which would be racing in the UL's. Ken Brodie's G-555 was a Grand Prix boat through and through, but happened to meet the minimum length and weight requirements for the G class. But the GP class used 511 motors.

The slow-motion effect was one of the complaints I had about the class last year, but I was hoping it would relieve itself. It hasn't. There seems to be a disparity not only between the G's and U boats, but between the G and UL boats as well. That's not saying much.

A lot of that was forgotten when they were putting up side-by-side racing, but the ACCS just can't seem to catch a break in that department. That last heat was a barn-burner while it lasted, but that made it all the more obvious when things fell apart. The distractions far outweighed the show yet again, and that's unfortunate.

Naturally, I had already penned further lengthy commentary, but yanked it out after re-reading the article, thus saving myself two full pages out of a long-running rant that is only halfway done. I have enough thoughts and feelings about the G class to occupy a completely new article, and that's exactly what I'll do over the next few days.

But because this commentary is already reaching epic proportions, I have decided to break it up into two segments. And so ends the first one. I hope you'll see fit to read the second one as well.

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