New Speed Marine LSB Powerboats Mod V Raceboat Dressed And Ready For Rigging
A little more than a year ago when Maryland-based offshore powerboat racer Brit Lilly of LSB Sportboats began building a 29-foot canopied raceboat for his friend and fellow competitor Kyle Miller of the Speed Marine team, the finished product was slated for Stock V competition. But thanks to a seismic shift in the offshore racing world, the new LSB Powerboats Extreme 299—Lily’s second Extreme 299 creation—will race in Mod V ranks.
A year in the making, the new Speed Marine Mod V-class raceboat will be picked up and hauled to New Jersey for rigging this weekend.
Miller, whose Speed Marine shop in Brick, N.J., specializes in custom parts fabrication from tailpipes and motor mounts to billet hardware—and builds its own racing engines in house—plans to pick up the boat this weekend from Lilly. The 29-footer will get a second round of Clear Coat tonight and will be buffed and sanded tomorrow.
“The reason we ordered the boat from Brit is because it is the best product on the market by far was we’re concerned,” explained Miller, who will share the cockpit of the 29-footer Jay Wohltman, Speed Marine’s lead rigger. “I fell in love with it the first time I saw, and I loved it even more after I tested it.”
More than a raceboat, the new Speed Marine creation will serve as a real-world marketing piece for the company, which currently fabricates a host of parts for offshore racers.
Said Miller, “I fell in love with it the first time I saw, and I loved it even more after I tested it.”
“Our shop isn’t a ‘normal’ performance shop,” said Miller. “We specialize in tailpipes, but we do a lot of custom fabrication work. If we don’t have a part that we need, we make it.
“The other reason we are building the new Speed Marine boat is to demonstrate what are shop can do with custom fabrication work,” he continued. “From our engine build to our shock-mitigating seats that let you adjust dampening on the fly to all the really cool billet pieces we’ve created, we want to let the boat speak for itself—and our work.”
Miller certainly doesn’t have to convince Lilly. He’s already a loyal Speed Marine customer.
“We do a lot of work together,” said Lilly, who also painted the boat for the team. “Speed Marine has been making all my tail pipes and fabricating many parts for me for years. Last year, they also built an engine for Travis Pastrana’s Twisted Tea raceboat.
The new Speed Marine raceboat will showcase the company’s parts-fabrication talents.
Speed Marine’s Scott Thurber is building the boat’s carbureted engine, which produce 650-plus hp. The race team includes crew chief Chris Carbone will lead crew members Mike Mironyk, Reese Hackett, Lenny Gerome and Bobby Kraemer.
Miller isn’t just eager to run the new Speed Marine team raceboat. He’s eager to run it in the Mod V class, which offers some off the stiffest competition in the single-engine V-bottom ranks.
“We do this kind of racing because we want to compete against the best,” he said. “We aren’t looking for a guaranteed win. We want to win, our course, but we want to do it against the best guys out there. If you beat guys like Brit Lilly and Brian Forehand, you’ve really accomplished something.”
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