The other America’s Cup
The America’s Cup wasn’t the only titanic contest between the USA and the UK: the Harmsworth Cup for power boats was another.
This is a story about the golden age of powerboat racing – and the pioneers who shaped it. A story that blends the quest for speed, world records and famous trophies with personal and national pride. Of the marriage between high horsepower engines and seat-of-your-pants nautical design – and two, larger-thanlife drivers who dominated the trans-atlantic rivalry.
Their battle culminated in the 1933 race for the illustrious Harmsworth Cup – at the time the ‘Blue Riband’ of powerboat racing – on Michigan’s St Clair River.
Established in 1903 by Britain’s Sir Alfred Harmsworth, the event was envisaged as an international competition. Open to boats of up to 40 feet in length, the rules stipulated that boat and engine had to have been built in the country they represented. The driver, too, had to be a native of that country.
In the British corner was Hubert Scott-paine, a wealthy flying-boat pioneer who lived for speed on the water and in the air. He combined his expertise in the two sectors to design the revolutionary Miss Britain III. Shaped like a bullet, her wooden-and-aluminium frames were covered in a polished aluminium skin. Her aerodynamic profile even extended to the slots in the countersunk screw-heads along her hull being oriented fore-and-aft to minimise drag.
In the opposite corner was Gar Wood – today still considered one of America’s most successful and influential powerboat racing drivers. A self-taught mechanical genius, he amassed scores of titles, records and trophies in a variety of sleek, highpowered boats. He was a prolific inventor – at one stage in his life he held more patents than any other living US citizen. He’d won the 1932 Cup in the all-timber Miss America X (mahogany over spruce frames and stringers), and he’d be using her again for the 1933 contest.
To appreciate the monumental stakes in the 1933 race, you have to consider the rivalry that preceded it. Though France won the Cup in 1904, it had largely been a British affair. But in 1907 the Americans took it across the Atlantic for the first time. WW1 interrupted things but the trophy later ping-ponged between the US and UK until 1920, when the Americans began a winning streak to 1932. Wood – in a series of Miss America boats he designed and built – was driver/owner in seven of the races and once the boat owner.
And as with numerous attempts to win back the Auld Mug, the UK had launched many frustrated attempts to wrest back the Harmsworth Cup – 1933 would be the do-or-die race. Scottpaine was up against a formidable foe – and to make the task
even more daunting, Wood and Miss America X held the world speed record (124mph).
In this heady period of US powerboat racing, such events regularly attracted more than a million spectators – but the 1933 race was considered so one-sided that only 100,000 turned up. And that sentiment was understandable given the differences between the boats.
The 25-foot Miss Britain III weighed 1.5 ton compared to the 7-ton, 38-foot Miss America X. The British boat was powered by a single, 12-cylinder, 1,350hp Napier Lion engine (three banks of four cylinders driving a single crankshaft). Miss America X was powered by four Packard V12s developing 7,600hp (two pairs of twin, in-line engines, each side driving a single prop via a complicated gearbox arrangement).
Where Scott-paine and his engineer sat in front of the