Commentary—Enter The World Powerboat Racing Association
For the record, I am not a huge fan of the American Power Boat Association or the Union Internationale Motonautique. Both over-value their importance when it comes to offshore powerboat racing. Both are longstanding organizations afflicted with the same kind of “We know better” hubris and “We’ve always done it this way” rigidity that too often comes with age.
When this week began, event producers Race World Offshore and Professional Racing Offshore were APBA member-organizations. On Thursday, the two outfits announced they were dumping APBA. They also released a new schedule for Pro Class 1, the category at the center of what is—for all intents and purposes—a proprietary naming kerfluffle.
All races on the Race World Offshore and Professional Racing Offshore organization schedule are on the World Powerboat Racing Association roster. Photo from the 2023 Lake Race by Jeff Helmkamp copyright Helmkamp Photos.
Last night in a press release, the two groups announced they are launching the World Powerboat Racing Association, “an all-new sanctioning body dedicated to advancing the sport of powerboat racing through a transparent, racer-focused and professionally governed structure.”
All current races on the Race World Offshore and Professional Racing Offshore rosters will be sanctioned by the new organization. Races produced by Powerboat P1, which still operates under the American Power Boat Association sanction, are not included.
That all of this happened less than three weeks before Thunder On Cocoa Beach, the ostensible season-opener just a few days ago, is crappy. Strike that. It’s inexcusable.
Regardless of how urgent this change may have been—for the record, the first XINSURANCE-driven call to boycott Cocoa Beach based on its conflicts with the Powerboat P1 group came on Thanksgiving day— it puts local organizers such as Kerry Bartlett and Kevin Pruett and racers including J.J. Turk and his fine son, Cameron, in a horrible position.
Anyone pointing fingers and looking for the real culprit can find him or her in the mirror. Because this is systemic failure. If your gut response at this moment is “Yeah, but what about?” you’re part of the problem.
But a bigger question looms. Is offshore racing large enough to be divided—again?
A quick stroll through the sport’s expansive rocky graveyard for failed upstart organizations, the most recent being the Offshore Super Series that emerged in the mid-2000s, provides one answer. And it’s not a happy one.
The Offshore Super Series was very polished and next-level professional. It also hemorrhaged money, and that led to its extinction a few years later.
Super Boat International picked up the pieces and ran and sometimes stumbled with them for the next 10-plus years. Having lost the successful APBA Offshore LLC organization to a boycott in the early 2000s that led to the start of the Offshore Super Series—anyone noticing a cyclical trend here?—the American Power Boat Association was nowhere to be found.
That does not mean the World Powerboat Association is destined to fail. Everything is unprecedented until it happens, and knee-jerk negativity to anything new is intellectually lazy. There are some big brains and lofty ambitions among the group’s leaders. They’re all far too smart to be slaves to history.
But if they want to make some shiny new mistakes instead of the same silly old ones—mistakes are inevitable but repeating them is not—they damn well better know it.
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