MTI At 25—CMR Breaks Through In Super Stock

When you think about the success of MTI in offshore powerboat racing, Bob Bull’s 52- and 48-foot CMS team raceboats likely leap to mind. In 2015, Bull and MTI founder Randy Scism won all three races in Key West, Fla., in the 52-footer to earn a Super Boat International Unlimited-class World Championship.

Of course, there’s much more than that, including the 2014 SBI Superboat-class World Championship earned by then-owner/driver Chuck Broaddus with throttleman Grant Bruggemann of Broadco team fame in a 40-foot catamaran built by the Wentzville, Mo., company. One year later, Tomlinson and Gary Ballough piloted a 48-foot MTI catamaran—now the XINSURANCE/Good Boy Vodka Class 1 raceboat—to a Union Internationale Motonautique Class 1 World Championship,

More recently, Taylor Scism and Tomlinson earned the 2022 UIM/American Power Boat Association 450R Factory Stock World Championship.

The CMR Construction and Roofing team earned MTI’s first Super Stock-class checkered earlier this month in Sarasota, Fla. Photo by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

But until the Sarasota Powerboat Grand Prix earlier this Southwest Florida when the CMR Construction and Roofing cockpit duo of driver/owner Sean Connor and replacement throttleman Tomlinson—subbing for regular throttleman Shaun Torrente—took the checkered in a 32-footer, an MTI catamaran have never won a Super Stock-class race.

What took so long? First and foremost, MTI doesn’t offer a 32-foot cat as a “standard” model. The boat originally was built specially to compete in the XCAT series overseas. Conner purchased the 32-footer, and once it arrived stateside Torrente went to serious work on it. The three-time F1 H20 tunnel-boat racing series world champion literally cut the catamaran in half and narrowed its tunnel by two inches at Shaun Torrente Racing, his thriving high-performance marine parts design and fabrication business in Fort Myers, Fla.

Torrente dearly wanted to be in the cockpit in Sarasota, but he had a tunnel-boat racing commitment with the Abu Dhabi team in France, so Tomlinson got the nod. The veteran throttleman and Conner took the checkered flag ahead of 10 teams and earned MTI its first Super Stock-class win.

Said Torrente in a telephone message after the win, “I’m pacing the streets of France as we walk back from dinner. Sean was turning the boat incredibly and Johnny was getting used to the boat and kept getting quicker and quicker. I’m so thankful for him sitting in for me.”

Editor’s note: “MTI At 25” is a weekly series on speedonthewater.com celebrating the company’s 25th anniversary. A new installment will go live every Wednesday on speedonthewater.com through the end of the year.