Wacky Races meets Cannonball Run in event on uncharted waters
Tighten your belts for the P1 Scottish Grand Prix of the Sea – the first contest of its type off our coast
ALOOK is exchanged between them, Gordon Wicklow raising an eyebrow while a malevolent grin spreads across Dino Zavaroni’s face. “You were told we had a glitch?” navigator Wicklow asks rhetorically.
“Well, you could call it that. We snapped the engine off... broke it clean off the back of the boat.”
There is something a bit Wacky Races meets the Cannonball Run about this Largs-based partnership which represents home hopes at this month’s P1 Scottish Grand Prix of the Sea, the first ever race of its type in these waters, not least their explanation of how much preparation they have managed after finding themselves involved almost by accident.
Wicklow explains that they had been planning a completely different project in their own boat, a 700 mile roundIreland bid to set a new record time, when the official who was to be involved in timing that effort contacted them just before Christmas advising them that Inverclyde were looking for a racing team with some experience and asking if they “fancied giving it a go”.
Since it is a wholly different discipline, with 12 identical American-made 28-foot, 250-horsepower Panther models, all engines and propellers prepared identically with no involvement of the teams themselves in a bid to ensure pure racing, the expectation would be that considerable preparation would be required. Not a bit of it, apparently...
“We were thrown in at the deep with only two hours on the boat in total in advance of the race,” said Zavaroni.
“We did get the boat up here to practise with, but Gordon and I are both pretty busy with our businesses, so we did a couple of hours training and practising and we blew the gearbox up. So we had to wait two to three weeks for the replacement then, when we put it on, we literally took it out, went round the buoy once and then we were off to Scarborough.”
As to their competitive prospects in the course of a series to which they are now committed and will take them all round the British mainland before they head across the Irish Sea for that separate long-distance run, he selfmockingly suggests that they are up against it.
“We’re slightly disadvantaged with weight,” he observed, wryly. “Some of them are quite lightweight people in them, but let’s just say we’re looking for heavy weather.”
In more serious vein, he reckons they are well qualified to carry the Scottish banner. “We’ve done a lot of fast boat stuff on the Clyde and further up the west coast,” Zavaroni pointed out.
“We don’t know who else applied. It might have been down to experience of what we’ve already done together because it’s quite a hard-going operation being in that machine, especially in a bit of a swell.”
Which takes us back to last month’s series opener in the wild North Sea which was also meant to be a weekend’s worth of action but ended up with the programme heavily curtailed.
“We didn’t get out on the Saturday because the weather was not suitable at all and to be honest, they probably shouldn’t have had us out on the Sunday either, but because it was a big event and everybody had turned up, they put us out for some short races,” said Zavaroni.
“It was only going to be two 15-minute races and then a 25-minute race in the afternoon. We managed all of eight minutes before the engine snapped off.”
They are anticipating much more benign conditions on Scotland’s west coast in mid-summer.
“We’re hoping the Clyde will be a wee bit more sheltered than Scarborough was,” he went on.
“It was a big swell blowing in Scarborough and we had 20 knots of breeze as well, so there white caps on the top. If we get 20 knots in Greenock we’d still have a bit of a job on our hands, but it won’t be the big, big swell and the boats being 28 feet long will be able to handle that.”
Of course much of the humour is of the gallows variety too. As with all motorsport this is, in reality, a very serious business, not least with a dozen of these machines jockeying for position and only four years ago Englishman Mike Lovell was killed while his navigator Dan Whapples was seriously injured after they were thrown from their boat during a P1 Superstock race in Weymouth.
Since they had no warning that there was a problem with their vessel until the engine broke away, throwing them into a spin which could easily have seen them thrown out of it, then for all the satisfaction that they had acquired third place and were homing in on second when that happened, there is awareness that there is more reason to be relieved that the outcome was not worse rather than dismayed at not achieving the sort of finish that was in sight in that first outing.
If they were to spend too much time considering such things of course they would not do it, whereas their enthusiasm to get back into the boat is undimmed with Zavaroni outlining their priorities: “If we can get numbers on the board and in particular if we can get a win at Greenock, it would be absolutely fantastic, but we’re doing it for the fun.”