MTI At 25—Taking The Class 1 Title With Team Abu Dhabi

Even most casual fans of the MTI brand know company founder Randy Scism gained extensive Union Internationale Motonautique Class 1 experience—as a driver and team manager—with the Dubai-backed Victory outfit in the 1980s and 1990s. But his own Wentzville, Mo.-built 48-foot catamaran model didn’t claim Class 1 world titles of its own until November 2015 with the Abu Dhabi team.

After six years of effort, the Abu Dhabi team broke through and earned 2015 Class 1 World Championships with a 48-foot MTI catamaran piloted by Americans John Tomlinson and Gary Ballough.

And now, as previously reported on speedonthewater.com, one of those 48-footers is the property of the current Class 1 XINSURANCE/Goodboy Vodka team, which is slated to debut the cat at the Sarasota Powerboat Grand Prix, November second event 2023 Class 1 World Championship Series, June 30 to July 2 in Southwest Florida.

The Abu Dhabi team fielded two MTI cats in the 2015 Class 1 world championships, which were held in Salerno, Italy, that year. The outfit’s own Majid Al-Mansoori and Rashid Al-Tayer from the United Arab Emirates ran one of the cats. But a couple of American imports in the form of offshore racers John Tomlinson and Gary Ballough of Florida piloted the team’s other 48-footer powered by twin 850-hp Mercury Racing engines, and they bested the famed Victory team, which had dominated Class 1 since the mid-2000s, for top honors.

With two boats in the mix, the Abu Dhabi team proved to be too much for the long-dominant Victory team.

For Tomlinson, it was his second UIM Class 1 title—the first came in 1997 when he raced with Laith Pharaon in Zero Defect. (The year before the team went undefeated and claimed an American Power Boat Association Open-Class World Championship.) What most impressed Tomlinson about claiming the 2015 Class 1 title—18 years to the day that he and Pharaon claimed it in 1997—was the closeness of the racing.

And for the Abu Dhabi group, it was the team’s first Class 1 title since entering the sport in 2009.

“You have an MTI with 1100 Mercury Racing engines detuned to 850 hp, two Victory cats with 850-hp Lamborghini engines and on two races in two days the difference between the top three boats is three seconds,” he said. “That’s incredible.

“Our world championship was a total team effort,” he added.

But no one was more thrilled than Scism.

“Man, I am about as happy as a guy can get,” he said. “This is kind of special for us. We have been gone from here for a lot of years, so to come back and do this for Abu Dhabi—it’s just so special. I was on the radio with Johnny and he told me one of the engines was ‘getting a little warm.’ We knew we had to get third place or better so he decided to keep it in second. He managed the whole race and it came to us.”