Farewell to Put-Puts

Except for a few small details, the scene could have been "The Brickyard" at Indianapolis or Florida's famed Daytona Speedway. In the stands, thousands of fans cheered their favorites as big-league factory teams fought for that extra profit a racing victory always brings. Around and around the four-mile course, the world's best drivers gunned their big machines, each one perfectly tuned and tended by pit crews capable of performing mechanical marvels with spectacular ease. The speeds were startling, the promise of disaster ever present.

The difference was that this contest was on water--at Lake Havasu, Ariz. --not on racetrack asphalt. The competing manufacturers were Outboard Marine Corp. and the Kiekhaefer Mercury Division of Brunswick Corp., not Detroit's major automakers. And the machines were outboard motorboats, not racing cars.

Outboard racing has come a long way since the days when a handful of happy-go-lucky amateurs tooled around in one-cylinder put-puts. Today's engines are V-4s and straight 6s, pounding out 155 h.p. And there are as many as three of the monsters on each craft. Outboard Marine readily admits to spending 1 % of its gross outboard sales on its racing team, and rumors are that Kiekhaefer, maker of Mercury engines, invests as much as $3,000,000 a year pn dozens of races at California's Tahoe, Elsinore and Parker Dam.

Of all the races, last week's Outboard World Championship was the biggest, richest and roughest in history. The eight-hour marathon had 111 drivers fighting for $50,000 in prize money, much of it put up by Havasu's developer, Oilman Robert McCulloch. Between them, Outboard Marine and Kiekhaefer Mercury had no fewer than 40 boats in the field. By the end of the race, most of the craft were fit only for beach-party kindling. Within the first two hours, gusty 20-m.p.h. winds caused at least a dozen boats to flip into spray-spewing somersaults; others slammed sickeningly into the treacherous shoals bordering the course. Bill Petty of Wapakoneta, Ohio, driving a deep-vee hull powered by triple Mercury engines, jumped into the lead, held it for 1 1/2 hours, then shrieked into a turn at 70 m.p.h., cut the corner too close and grazed the bottom. The mistake cost him two propellers and part of one engine. Incredibly, Mercury's six-man pit crew repaired the damage in barely 20 minutes. But by then it was too late. Outboard Marine's Cesare Scotti, a tough little Italian marina operator, had taken the lead.

Free of the Chop. For power, Scotti had two 115-h.p. engines stacked on his stern; for a hull, he had one of the new "tunnel" designs developed by his countryman Angello Molinari. The hull consists of an airfoil-like center flanked by two pontoons. Their effect is to lift the boat out of the water and allow it to ride free of the chop on a cushion of air. In the straightaways, Scotti's black-and-yellow striped boat blasted over the waves at more than 100 m.p.h. By the 3 p.m. gun, he had averaged an incredible 73 m.p.h. for 584 miles, more than enough to take the $15,000 first prize.

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