in the blink of an eye, a piece of equipment fails or driver makes a mistake and your boat could be 50 feet in the air, upside down and backwards. at first glance, conservatively dressed dave billwalk might look more like a banker than a daredevil. but this champion driver has been racing hydroplanes for years and has been in some pretty dramatic crashes. you re traveling at over a football field per second. so if you aren t anticipating what s going to happen, you re likely to crash. they flip through the air as if they weigh nothing, but these boats are 30 feet long, 7,000 pounds, with 4,000 horsepower engines. a hydroplane is a celebration of success. everything about it is bigger and badder and more extensive
to the water. exploding the protective canopy that dave is sitting under, ripping off his oxygen mask, and submerging him in the water. i was unconscious, underwater. the safety team got there right away, got me up on to the bottom of the boat, they cleared the airway, got the water out of the way. amazingly, dave survives. his hand is crushed by the flying metal of the canopy. he ends up losing two fingers on his right hand. it s the type of crash that might deter another driver from racing altogether, but dave is no quitter. i just felt i had something more to give for the sport and things to prove to myself. dave and the team rebuild miss budweiser, redesigning the driver s capsule to make it safer. and luckily, to date, since we ve done that, nobody s been killed or hurt significantly inside that capsule.
years later, dave will have good reason to be thankful for that safer capsule. in the summer of 2009, he enters thunder on the ohio, a race he s won ten times before. in his first heat, another driver looses control and hits dave s boat. dave flips over and smashes into the water. but dave s work redesigning the driver s capsule pays off. it stays in one piece and he waits in safety for help to arrive. the only injury i got was a finger injury, where it broken a knuckle in the finger. so as boat accidents go, i ll take that. that s a good one. after decades of speeding, crashing, and tumbling through the air, dave says driving a hydroplane is a thrill only few can experience, but many more can enjoy watching safely from the shore.
it s more than fast enough to break the world record. but the burst of speed also breaks the boat s rudder. okay, everybody, the race is on hold. the bud has got a hole in it and we need to get him off the course. luckily, dave isn t hurt in this record stunt. broke the rudder bracket, smacked the propeller, and then cleared the propeller and strut off the boat. but it s a very different story seven years earlier. dave was at the columbia cut championship in washington state, ready to claim the record for the most consecutive race wins. this would be his 20th win in a row. but as he bursts out of the gate, almost instantly, the boat has hit two waves in a raw. at top speed, the force is too much and the hydroplane blows over. the top of the boat crashes on
than you could possibly ever imagine. dave says, imagine driving your car at 200 miles an hour, over 2 and 3-foot speed bumps, without springs or shocks. that s what it feels like to ride this thing. the environment of looking from the outside of a hydroplane, this is this wonderful, graceful feek that flies over the water, the truth is, the boat is actually beating the snot out of the driver that s inside. dave fell in love with racing boats as a teenager. while most kids his age were out racing bicycles. i started out racing flat bottom boeksboats a long time a. it was a lot of fun and i progressed into bigger flat bottom boats, managed to set a lot of world records and win a lot of championships. from there, it was a natural step to racing hydroplanes. dave soon breaking almost every record in the book.