The photo below (apologies for the poor quality, as it was in turn snapped from an image in Kevin Desmond’s magnificent opus, “A Century of Outboard Racing”) has probably not been seen very much, but it is a significant, defining moment and tragically poignant.
The image is from Saturday, October 23rd, 1971, as the late, great Bill Shakespeare was in the middle of a practice run for the Windermere Grand Prix the next day. Literally seconds after this photo was snapped, the boat flew skyward, hung momentarily in the air, then plummeted down (“like a stone”, someone said) and disappeared below the surface with Shakespeare still in the cockpit. Observers and fellow drivers saw an angry, whipped-up spume of frenzied water as the outboard, a V4 Johnson Stinger GP, “corkscrewed” its way to the bottom of 100 ft of water, but both the boat and Shakespeare were gone – never to be seen again.
John Hill (a superb powerboat driver and multiple world champion, later tragically killed at Abu Dhabi in 1993) was first driver on the scene. He shucked off his lifejacket and jumped into the water – still frothing from the sinking boat – but found no trace of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was, like all the drivers of that era of compromised (i.e. little or no) safety precautions or systems, immensely brave, tremendously fast, and an extremely competitive artisan (he designed and built all his own boats), and there have been several questions over the passing decades as to what caused the crash.
I can only hypothesise, but looking at the photo, one can see a lot of air under the boat, which is slightly nose-up, with most of the sponsons out of the water. This is pretty much a normal attitude for a catamaran running upwind, but one can see how far “tucked under” the outboard is – it is on full “negative trim”, which should have kept the bow lower than this. Even with the motor fully trimmed in, I feel there is too much air gusting through the tunnel. This would tend to indicate that the boat had maybe already gone past the point of true controllability. It couldn’t be trimmed any lower because the motor was already at its lowest setting (to give an automotive analogy: like a racecar’s suspension being fully compressed on the bump stops).
Whether my hypothesis is valid will never be known, and indeed one fellow competitor that day (Steve Pinson, I think) remembers that Shakespeare was trying to get the boat dialled in with the aid of a large workshop tachometer, mounted on a wooden plinth, which sat between his legs on the cockpit floor. Checking the revs on this tacho would have required Shakespeare to duck his head so that he momentarily lost sight of the water – which could have been long enough for the boat to take off. Ironically, the tacho – left floating forlornly on the bubbling surface – was all that was left of the boat.
Bill Shakespeare: a pioneer and forgotten hero who sadly never lived to pass on memories or swap war stories.
Danny Casey is highly experienced, undoubtedly idiosyncratic, and immensely knowledgeable about things mechanical, new or old. His knowledge and passion are as a result of spending his whole life in or around anything power-driven – especially marine engines. His passion for boating is second to none, with his life a montage of fabulous memories from decades spent in or around water and boats, both here and in Europe. Danny has spent myriad years in the recreational marine industry in a varied career in which he has bamboozled colleagues and competitors alike with his well-honed insight.
His mellifluous Irish accent, however, has at times been known to become somewhat less intelligible in occasional attempts at deliberate vagueness or when trying to prevent others from proffering a counter-argument or even getting a word in. Frank and to-the-point, but with a heart of gold, it can be hard to convince Danny to put pen to paper to share his knowledge. Marine Business News is grateful that he took the time to share his thoughts and insight. Connect with Danny through LinkedIn.
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