Power Trip: Mercury Racing’s History and Legacy

Power Trip

For the past 50 years, Mercury Racing has given its customers everything they need to go fast reliably on the water.

At the offshore powerboat racing world championships in Key West in 2010, Randy Scism and Bob Bull were campaigning Bull’s 48-foot MTI catamaran in the sport’s fastest class. They were having mechanical problems, and spent more time and money swapping out engines than racing. The team had a second boat powered by the then-new 1,350-hp Mercury Racing turbocharged engines, but didn’t have a chance to run it because of all the time the crew spent keeping the other boat running.

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“We got back home and tested the 1350s and hit the gas and said, ‘We raced the wrong motors,” says Scism, who founded the high-performance catamaran and center-console builder Marine Technology Inc. “They ran better and did it on pump gas. It put the pleasure back in high-performance boating.”

It’s a refrain that people have repeated about Mercury Racing products for the past 50 years. The high-performance division of Mercury Marine is revered for its powerful engines, but go-fast insiders offer just as much praise for product reliability through the decades.

“It’s not just a great engine. They always had the best mount, the best cooler and the best coating for the best bracket for the best ignition,” says Jeff Harris, chief operating officer of Iconic Marine Group, the builder of Fountain, Donzi and Baja boats. “They were always light years ahead of everybody else.”

Proving grounds

Reliability and durability have been priorities at all the iterations of Mercury Racing (aka Mercury Performance Products, Mercury Hi-Performance, Kiekhaefer Corporation, Kiekhaefer Mercury and others). Founder Carl Kiekhaefer was borderline obsessed with dominating the competition and proving that his products were better.

Kiekhaefer Corporation began in 1939 — first, refurbishing rejected Thor outboards. When World War II put an end to “nonessential users of aluminum,” Kiekhaefer Aeromarine was created to supply engines for the military. After the war, Aeromarine atrophied, according to Carl’s son Fred Kiekhaefer, retired president at Mercury Racing. He says Carl took advantage of the postwar pent-up desire for recreation and rapidly expanded Kiekhaefer Corporation (Mercury).

In 1947, a boat powered by a Mercury Lightning outboard won its class in a 130-mile Albany-to-New York powerboat marathon. Carl realized the marketing potential of winning races, and, the following year, encouraged the American Power Boat Association to sanction stock utility classes so he could showcase his engines’ superiority.

He was also known for wanting to keep new product development as secret as possible. One day in 1957, while flying in his private plane across Florida, he found Lake Conklin near St. Cloud. It was only accessible via a private dirt road and was basically cut off from civilization. He bought the 1,400-acre lake, which became his company’s private test facility. He named it Lake X.

In 1958 on that lake, Kiekhaefer Mercury employees attempted Operation Atlas, a 34-day endurance trial with two boats powered by 70-hp Mercury Mark 75 outboards running nonstop for 25,000 miles, equivalent to circumnavigating the world. The intent was to prove the reliability of Mercury engines. Through the decades, performance-boat enthusiasts considered getting a “Dialed in at Lake X” sticker a badge of honor.

“The great thing about Lake X was that you could be in and out of the boathouse in just a few minutes,” Fred says. “We had all the tools and technicians, all the props and gear ratios, spacers to adjust drive height. We did a lot of different testing for our OEM boatbuilders at Lake X. The first V-6 outboards were tested there, the first MerCruiser stern drives and all our racing engines. Every Mercury outboard was tested at Lake X.”

To ensure that secrecy remained, Carl purchased a military surplus half-track and Jeeps that patrolled the lake’s perimeter. Fred, then a teenager, spent many an hour on those patrols.

In 1960, Brunswick Corporation bought Kiekhaefer Mercury. Carl stayed on for about 10 years, but didn’t blend well with the corporate environment. He left and restarted Kiekhaefer Aeromarine Motors (KAM) in 1970.

Some of the most successful, non-engine products that KAM developed were K-plane trim tabs and racing throttle/shift controls. “Years later [in 1983], I looked at those and said, ‘There’s an opportunity to design it smarter and to offer Zero Effort Controls to the public for recreational boating’ at a lower price point,” Fred says.

In 1971, KAM developed the K-plane, a trim tab for racing applications. “Mercury had its own tab when my dad was still there,” Fred continues. “It was a giant aluminum hinge with bad hydraulics. My dad designed a bigger one with a nitrogen accumulator for shock absorption. When I acquired Aeromarine, we put on sacrificial anodes and bonding strips, and improved the paint finish. That K-plane was so good that Mercury Performance Products got out of the [trim tab] business.”

Fred grew up working at his father’s companies during summers through high school and college. After engineering and business graduate schools, he left the marine industry for a time. However, when Carl died in 1983, Fred left his consulting career and took over Aeromarine. As he recalls: “I pulled everyone together and asked, ‘What are we doing that we know is stupid? My dad had deep pockets, and I don’t. We have to make money, now. Let’s stop doing stupid things.’ We put together two immediate action lists: What must we stop doing? And what can we improve and do more of?”

The Game Changer

Every person interviewed for this article called the development of the Kiekhaefer sterndrive one of the most impactful products in the history of high-performance boating. Carl had developed Speedmaster drives in the early 1960s, and the Speedmaster 5 drive was the heaviest-duty drive that Mercury Hi-Performance had.

The “Sterndrives by Kiekhaefer” took things to the next level. It had stronger, dual downward-facing shafts and beefier gears to help the unit handle much more horsepower and torque than the SSM 5. It also had a sleek, hydrodynamic profile and integral hydraulic steering.

“The real advantage of the drive was that it had the dual down shafts sharing the load, so you had twice as much gear contact,” says Bob Teague, owner of Teague Custom Marine.

The Kiekhaefer drive made its racing debut at the 1988 offshore racing world championships, powering driver Don Johnson, throttleman Bill Sirois and navigator Gus Anastasi to the championships in the 43-foot Scarab Gentry Turbo Eagle. The following year, the 47-foot Apache Little Caesar’s Pizza won with the same drives.

In 1990, Brunswick acquired Kiekhaefer Aeromarine, and Fred was named president of Mercury Hi-Performance. The Sterndrives by Kiekhaefer were renamed the Number Six and became legendary for the ability to withstand the most powerful engines at that time.

Harris and other members of the offshore go-fast fraternity credit Fred with bringing Mercury Racing back to prominence. Harris was part of Reggie Fountain Jr.’s extended factory racing team for offshore powerboats, and he said Fountain was one of the biggest proponents of Brunswick acquiring Kiekhaefer Aeromarine, primarily for the Kiekhaefer sterndrive.

“It allowed builders like Reggie to build boats by the thousands,” Harris says. “You can glass a good boat and make the seats good, but if the engines don’t give good service… It’s the machine that allowed boatbuilders to make so many of them so fast.”

The Number Six would eventually be equipped with a dry-sump system that had been pioneered by the Weismann family at Traction Products in Costa Mesa, Calif. It would become the drive behind the Mercury Racing HP 900SC poker run engine and the HP 1000SC racing engine in the Superboat class. When Mercury Racing introduced the next evolution of its high-output engines — fuel-injected models at 850, 1,025, 1075 and 1,200 horsepower with Lysholm superchargers — the Dry Sump Six was the drive behind them.

“It’s all about their engineering,” says Craig Barrie, now at the helm of Donzi Marine and formerly president of Cigarette Racing Team. “We could run this drive and it was never going to break. [Mercury Racing] eliminated one of the negative elements of owning a performance boat.”

Mercury Racing usually plans its new engines as far as five years out, and, many times, Fred would be frustrated by mainline Mercury products not being designed with the eventual high-performance version in mind. For the racing version of the two-stroke Optimax outboard series, Mercury Racing made a modification that improved the reliability and overall performance of the stock versions as well. “At Racing, we upped the pressure and improved the compressor,” he says. “What we were doing at Mercury Racing ended up saving the Optimax.”

While the 900- and 1,000-horsepower engines were noteworthy for their sheer power, many people wanted to go performance boating who couldn’t play in those leagues. A less-powerful sterndrive that made its debut in 1996 brought high-performance boating to the masses. The HP500 was a carbureted engine based on a 502-cid big block paired with a Bravo One drive.

The HP500 became the power for two new classes of offshore racing: Factory 1 and Factory 2. The former were single-engine boats, and the latter were twins. The engine had a significant impact in high-performance boating because it got the well-known manufacturers involved in racing. Fountain was competing against Donzi, Hustler, Cigarette Racing Team, Velocity and more. Because the boats looked like pleasure boats, they were marketed as “race on Saturday, head to the sandbar on Sunday” models, and the language worked. The teams logged hundreds of hours on the engines, which held up under the pressure.

“The 500, you felt like you could run it forever,” Harris says. Barrie adds: “When you get the reliability and the symbol of racing, and you can enjoy your friends and family, that’s what it’s all about.”

The 500 evolved into the HP500 EFI, which was soon replaced by one of the most successful products in Mercury Racing history, the HP525EFI. “It was one of the best motors ever with a closed cooling system and an awesome race motor,” Teague says.

Harris estimated that when he raced in the Super Cat Lite class in a boat powered by twin HP525EFIs, the team ran as many as 25 races on the same set of engines. “We raced that boat the whole year,” he says, “and the only thing we did other than change the oil was change the valve springs before the world championships.”

Modern Day

Until the mid-2000s, Mercury Racing built its stern drive engines on a General Motors truck block, but in 2010, the high-performance boating community saw a major evolution with Racing’s Quad-Cam Four Valve 1350, a 9.0-liter turbocharged V-8 designed from scratch for go-fast boat applications. An upgraded version of the Six drive, the M8 was paired with the engine and features of an electro-hydraulic transmission.

The combination of the smoother operating quad camshafts, twin turbochargers and electro-hydraulic shifting ushered in a new era in high-performance boating. MTI’s Scism called the QC4v’s a game changer. John Tomlinson, multi-time world champion throttleman and co-owner of TNT Custom Marine in North Miami, agreed: “They were quiet, they idled like your car, they made power on pump gas, and they shifted. You get more life out of those than any other 1,000-horsepower-plus engines.”

Another bonus of the reliability is the warranty that Mercury Racing puts behind its products. “They’re not paying us to pull the heads off and rebuild the engine,” Tomlinson says. “They replace it.”

When the horsepower wars in the outboard market went next level, Mercury Racing had to push the envelope to get 350 ponies out of the old L6 Verado platform. But then the Verado 400R was introduced in 2015, and the engine manufacturer sparked a power war for outboards.

“That’s what really catapulted this brand into the consumer outboard performance world,” says Mercury Racing’s director of customer experience Steve Miller. “That 400R was a key contributor to what exploded the world of high-performance stepped-bottom consumer center consoles. You can go 80 mph now in a center console and take 10 to 15 of your closest friends.”

Because of the Verado 400R’s advantage in power-to-weight ratio, the motor took over the performance-catamaran and center-console markets. Manufacturers that previously built cats for big, loud stern drives could now bolt on a pair of quiet, efficient outboards.

“That established Mercury Racing as a legitimate brand in the world of outboard power performance boating,” Miller says.

The company could have sat on its laurels, but the demand was clearly there for more. Fred retired in 2012 after 22 years as Racing’s president, but his crew had already been working on the upgrade from the inline-six Verado 400R to the supercharged V-8 450R that made its power on pump gas and was introduced in 2019. As soon as it was introduced, virtually every owner of a boat powered by 400Rs wanted to upgrade to 450Rs.

“The L6 was a great engine, and they got everything out of that engine, but the V-8 is a whole different level,” Harris says.

Mercury unveiled a 400-hp V-10 engine and a V-8 500R that will replace the 450R this year and has basically taken over the high-horsepower outboard market.

Pitch Perfect

For decades, performance boaters have heard about “lab-finished” propellers from Mercury Hi-Performance and then Mercury Racing. A boat owner or race team could send in props to be tuned to a specific request. Originally, it was a service only for competitors, but then boat owners who wanted to be faster than everyone else started requesting the service.

“The racing tune on mainstream propellers was a big change,” Fred says. For a boat owner, being able to say he had a lab-finished prop was akin to putting a “Dialed In at Lake X” sticker on his boat or outboard cowling.

Through the years, Mercury was making custom cleavers, and its pleasure-boat props included names like Mirage and Revolution 4. An argument could be made that the Bravo One four-blade propeller was the company’s most successful because it’s been used on everything from stern drive offshore go-fast hulls to center consoles to bass boats.

But it was a big step up in technology that helped Mercury Racing basically take over the high-performance boat propeller world. “When we finally got the blessing to spend the money on Racing’s CNC propeller shop, it changed the throughput dramatically,” Fred says.

For Tomlinson, being able to purchase the CNC propellers as a racer was a big confidence booster. “Before CNC on the raceboats, you could get a couple sets of propellers,” he says. “Now the consistency is much better and you know they’ll run right out of the box.”

That’s been the goal for Mercury Racing for the past 50 years: to instill confidence that when customers want to go boating, they can go and go fast—without worrying about breaking down.

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This article originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/boats/power-trip-mercury-racings-history-and-legacy