Skater At 50—The Rice-ROS Experiment

Mercury Racing introduced the 400-hp Race Offshore outboard engine—awkwardly dubbed ROS—for XCAT series use in 2015. Upon the release of the potent race-bred outboard, the Fond du Lac, Wis., company announced it would not be available to pleasure-boat owners. The ROS outboard was for racing only.

Matt Rice is among the very few performance boat enthusiasts who tried Mercury Racing ROS outboard engines to power a pleasure boat. Photos by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

Of course, that didn’t stop a few pleasure-boat owners from getting their hands on a pair of them and giving it a try. Among the first was Pennsylvania’s Matt Rice, a former offshore racer and longtime go-fast boat fan who has a second home in Southwest Florida. In 2017, Rice tasked his friend Grant Bruggemann of Grant’s Signature Racing to install a pair of new ROS outboards he acquired on his then-new 36-foot Skater Powerboats catamaran.

By the end of the year, Rice was ready to make a power move to then-available, six-cylinder 400R outboards. The 36-footer struggled to be user friendly with its exotic, ROS power package from the moment it hit the water.. At idle around the docks, the engines tended to cut out. Bruggemann attempted to resolve the issues at his rigging shop in Bradenton, Fla., but they persisted.

Grant Bruggemann (driving) installed and later replaced the ROS outboards for Rice.

“The ROS motors worked great—they made plenty of power—but they just weren’t quite consumer friendly in the way people have become accustomed to today’s outboards,” Bruggemann explained. “After a lot of discussions with Matt and Mercury Racing, we decided to pull those motors and replace them with a pair of Carbon Edition 400Rs.”

None of that was enough to scare off Erik Breckenfelder, who as reported earlier in the Skater At 50 series installed a pair of ROS outboards on his 28-foot Skater cat. Though Breckenfelder acknowledges the ROS application is “not for everybody,” he’s been mostly delighted with the package so far.

Regardless of the outcome of the power experiment, the 36-foot catamaran Skater built for Rice was a beauty.

Breckenfelder’s ROS outboards originally powered three-time Formula One tunnel-boat world champion Shaun Torrente’s raceboat. From there they went to former offshore racer Bob Bull, who installed them on his MTI 340X catamaran. Bull eventually pulled them from the cat.

“They sat at MTI for years until I purchased them,” Breckenfelder said. “There were three sets of ROS outboard used on pleasure-boats that I know of.” Breckenfelder paused, then laughed. “I love the way they sound when you fire them up.”

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