Winning Against the Grain—The Bill Pyburn Profile
Most competitors in offshore powerboat racing’s Super Cat class would have been thrilled with finishing second in their first attempt at the sport’s grueling three-day world championships that take place every year in the first week of November in Key West, Fla.
But Bill Pyburn and team owner Beau Renfroe of the Dirty Money team aren’t most people.
When Bill Pyburn, throttleman for the Dirty Money Super Cat, assembled a team of motorsports veterans for an assault on the class, he didn’t think outside the box. He rebuilt it. Photo by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.
Not long after the team’s runner-up finish in Key West in 2023, Pyburn called Todd Goodwin at Goodwin Competition, who had built the engines for one of Pyburn’s high-performance pleasure boats when he was ruling the poker run world. Goodwin hadn’t built engines for offshore racing, but the Wisconsin company is among the most sought-after in the punishing world of off-road racing.
Dirty Money arrived at the 2024 offshore racing season opener in Marathon, Fla., with Goodwin Competition engines equipped with exhaust that exited straight through the top of the engine hatches in an installation known as “tractor pipes.” In a conventional installation, stainless-steel pipes connect to the engines and exit through the transom. Pyburn and Renfroe didn’t just switch the routing of the exhaust, they used titanium. The tractor pipes saved close to 100 pounds of weight. Offshore racing veterans and seasoned observers knew the team had gotten serious in the offseason.
When the green flag flew, the five entries in the Super Cat class started 2024 having to take evasive maneuvers when the 38-foot Skater, H.P. Mafia, dove from the outermost lane to the inside lane. Fortunately, the drivers in the other four boats used their skills to avoid disaster and all emerged from the spray unscathed.
Owner/throttleman Tyler Miller and driver Myrick Coil jumped to the front in M CON/Monster Energy. Pyburn and Lilly gave chase in Dirty Money, showing their newfound speed. By the third lap, Dirty Money took the lead and opened a gap on M CON/Monster Energy.
In just their second year in the Super Cat class, Bill Pyburn and Brit Lilly earned a world championship.
In the first of a series of weird incidents that would befall the team in 2024 took place on the last lap when Dirty Money ran out of fuel while leading. M CON/Monster Energy took the win. After the race, M CON/Monster Energy owner Miller admitted that Dirty Money had been faster.
To find that speed, Pyburn, who has taken a hands-on approach to every high-performance boat he has ever owned, contacted experts in high performance and racing, but not necessarily boats.
“It’s been a matter of reaching out to people who boat racers don’t normally reach out to,” Renfroe said. “The people I know in off-road trucks asked, ‘How did you get Todd Goodwin?’”
Through the rest of the 2024 season, Dirty Money led all but one race and finally took an unquestioned checkered flag at the Sarasota, Fla., race in September. With the final two races of the year canceled because of hurricanes, the team headed into the Race World Offshore world championships in Key West, Fla., with title intentions. Another storm canceled the races on Wednesday. That put more pressure on the teams to finish strong on Friday so they would have a chance for the championship on Sunday. Pyburn and Lilly battled with M CON/Monster Energy for the first few laps on Friday and then the latter pulled out with a blown engine. Dirty Money took the win on Friday.
When asked if they would race for the win on Sunday or let another team lead so Dirty Money could claim the championship, Pyburn didn’t hesitate. “We’re racing to win,” he said. Dirty Money needed five laps to move to the lead, but after they did, Pyburn and Lilly charged to the checkered flag, claiming the world championship in their first season of racing together.
“Because we were on a fast track, people looked at it as if we didn’t pay our dues,” Pyburn said. “I didn’t get into this just to ride around. We attacked it in a different way and nobody thought we would win that quickly.”
Two-Foot-Itis
Pyburn, 51, grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., where his father, Billy, was a fire fighter and put on the Jacksonville River Rally Poker Run for 15 years.
Before heading into the center-console realm, Bill Pyburn owned a cruiser from Formula Boats.
The younger Pyburn played football and wrestled while he was in high school. He also traveled the country, racing go-karts. As he worked his way up through karts and into racing cars, he found that he was better at setting them up and drivers were willing to pay big bucks for Pyburn to work his magic. After graduating high school, he volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps and he spent six years in the military before transitioning to the University of Florida.
“Joining the Marine Corps right out of high school was the best thing I ever did in life,” Pyburn said.
After college, Pyburn started working in construction and was more interested in the development side. His former wrestling coach, with whom he had stayed in touch with, gave him a job at his company, The Towers Group, including giving Pyburn an ownership stake. Pyburn grew the company, taking on big projects and making big money. He eventually took over and changed the name to The Alterra Group.
Going into construction was a tough decision because throughout college on the weekends, Pyburn was building a reputation as a wizard with late-model race cars and go-karts. He had offers to go work for NASCAR teams, but Pyburn knew he wasn’t cut out for that life.
Pyburn’s high-performance pleasure-boating passion eventually led him to buy a new MTI-V 42 center console.
“I know a lot of the guys who are crew chiefs in Cup and it’s a different calling in life,” Pyburn said. “When you go to Charlotte, you just never stop. I was offered really good money at a young age to go up there.”
Working in construction also left him with free weekends and Pyburn bought his first boat, a Baja Marine 232 with a MerCruiser 454 Mag engine. “I thought it was the greatest thing in the world, and then my dad told me there will always be a bigger, faster boat,” Pyburn laughed.
Getting infected with a serious case of two-foot-itis, Pyburn moved up to a Formula Boats 272 FAS3Tech with a Mercury Racing HP500 engines. After that came his first twin-engine boat, a Formula 292 with twin Mercury Racing Scorpion 377.
Then Pyburn stopped buying boats and started building them. He went to Washington, N.C., and met with Fountain Powerboats founder Reggie Fountain, II. Pyburn put together a Fountain 35 Lightning with twin Mercury Racing HP575SCis and Bravo One drives with Sportmaster lowers. The 35-footer ran in the triple digits.
“We went to Destin for a poker run,” Pyburn said. “We were coming across the bay and passed a catamaran and then we got caught in some cross chop and got passed by the cat. We headed back to Jacksonville and I told my buddies I’m buying one.”
He bought a 36-foot Nor-Tech cat powered by twin 1,100-hp Mercury Racing engines and named it Phat Cat. That boat was followed by another 36-foot Nor-Tech, Bodacious, powered by twin 1,200-hp Keith Eickert engines. Pyburn then purchased Keith Eickert’s engine building business in Palm Coast, Fla.
Pyburn ran Bodacious for a year and stepped up to a 47-foot Nor-Tech with a retractable canopy on the enclosed cockpit. It was powered by 1,800-hp Keith Eickert engines and as high-performance enthusiasts will tell you, sometimes a project doesn’t always go perfectly.
One year at the Key West poker run, Pyburn saw a new 47-foot Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats with an enclosed cockpit. “I thought it was one of the best-looking boats I had ever seen,” he said.
Pyburn introduced himself to the late Mike Fiore, founder of Outerlimits. Fiore brought the boat to a later poker run and he and Pyburn ran it together.
Pyburn bought the boat, which was a 47 GTX with twin Mercury Racing HP1075SCi engines. He and Fiore ran the boat in 23 or 24 events nationwide in 2006. Fiore would throttle, Pyburn would drive and Jason Ventura, then with Outerlimits, was on board to handle any mechanical issues.
Pyburn’s first Outerlimits was a 47-foot V-bottom.
“It opened the door for Mike to get in some other markets,” Pyburn said. “We went everywhere with the boat.”
During that year, Pyburn ordered one of the first cats from Outerlimits, a 50-footer named Golddigger that was powered by Keith Eickert 1800s. He also started building his first Skater Powerboats 388 catamaran dubbed Pure Platinum at the company’s Douglas, Mich., headquarters.
By the time his home poker run in Jacksonville rolled around, both boats had been delivered. Both also had teething pains. Golddigger lost a hatch during testing. Pure Platinum broke a rocker arm in one of its 1,200-hp Goodwin engines. Pyburn ended up running the Outerlimits in the event.
The 50-foot Golddigger Outerlimits catamaran debuted at the 2007 Miami International Boat Show. Photos by Jay Nichols copyright Naples Image.
Pure Platinum No. 1 was part of an unfortunate incident that occurred when a helicopter carrying the late Tom Newby, the cheif photographer for Powerboat magazine, crashed during an early morning photo shoot. The popular photographer was killed in the accident as was videographer Mark Copeland and the boat was tied up in litigation for years. Peter Hledin, the president of Douglas Marine, built Pyburn a replacement boat that he ran for many years.
That boat was followed by Pure Platinum No. 3, another Skater 388 powered by Goodwin Competition engines.
Fiore put Goodwin power in a V-bottom and said, “I’ve never felt anything like it,” Pyburn said. “I started talking to Todd and decided to go that route.”
The engines in the third Pure Platinum build made almost 2,000 hp each on pump gas, but there were some gremlins related to bolt-on parts. Pyburn, his finance, Fallon Thibodeaux, and his kids, Jack and Gracie, were getting weary of the issues that come with go-fast boating at the most extreme levels.
Pyburn’s original Pure Platinum Skater 388 catamaran was the first of a four-boat series. Photo by Jay Nichols copyright Naples Image.
“Everyone wanted me to get out of the high-speed, high-power stuff,” Pyburn said.
So he sold Pure Platinum No. 3 and was looking at a Formula 430 ASC, one of the boats credited with starting the outboard revolution in big performance boats. Rusty Williams, a salesperson at Performance Boat Center in Osage Beach, Mo., kept calling Pyburn and telling him he needed to check out a Marine Technology Inc. 42-foot center console.
“We ended up doing the Tickfaw 200 Poker Run on it and by the end of the weekend, I was like, this is pretty cool,” Pyburn said, adding that he bought his first MTI center console in 2019 and in 2023, moved up to an MTI-V 50.
An Unexpected Phone Call
Pyburn said that throughout his poker run career, he thought about offshore racing, especially during race week in Key West. “I got the fever every year after Key West,” he said. “I’d make a bunch of calls about it afterward and once you’re away from it, it fades again.”
That changed when Ventura and Beau Renfroe called him in the beginning of 2023. Beau and Tiffiney Renfroe had bought a Skater 388 that had originally run as a Super Cat Lite-class boat for the STIHL team.
Before Pyburn committed to the Dirty Money team, he ran the notion of offshore racing by Fallon Thibodeaux.
“Jason said, ‘What would you think about throttling,’” recalled Pyburn. “I said, ‘I have to think about it and I’d have to see what Fallon thought.’”
Added Beau Renfroe, “Our selling point was this is the slowest you’ve ever been, in an enclosed canopy with seat belts and oxygen.”
A couple days later, Ventura called and asked what Thibodeaux said.
“She didn’t say no,” Pyburn said, then laughed. “The next thing I knew I read a story on speedonthewater.com that I was throttling the boat.”
Initially, Pyburn throttled with Ventura driving. The two had a history with Ventura having taken care of Pyburn’s boats at Ventura’s Brand X shop in South Florida since 2006.
Ventura also took care of the Renfroes’ boats. The team started out at Brand X, but when Ventura had a drag-car racing conflict for the Michigan City, Ind., race in 2023, PBC’s Williams replaced him.
“People grow in different directions and with the direction we wanted the race team to go Beau felt like he needed to be in 100 percent control of it,” said Pyburn after the decision was made to move the Dirty Money team out of the Brand X shop. Added Renfroe, “When we went racing, it had to become a business.”
During the Great Lakes Grand Prix in Michigan, Ind., Pyburn and Williams were running third behind M CON/Monster Energy and throttleman Billy Moore and owner/driver Chris Grant in the 38-foot Skater, Graydel. Toward the end of the race, Pyburn decided to hold station in third, but then the team started gaining on Graydel.
Pyburn admits that he started pushing the boat and it hit a wave, tripped and stuffed in the shallow Lake Michigan waters. The cat broke in half, but Pyburn and Williams emerged unscathed. But the boat was a totaled.
“I crawled out of the cockpit, stood up and looked at the boat and said, where’s the front and back,’” Pyburn said. “I wasn’t even sore the next day.”
On top of the Dirty Money team’s now-worthless raceboat , the owners of Performance Boat Center didn’t love the idea of Williams continuing to race with the team, so they needed a driver. Beau Renfroe said that the manager at Dirty Money race shop mentioned Lilly, who was no longer racing in Class 1 after the Huski team shut down.
Pyburn said he didn’t know Lilly and he wanted to race with someone he knew. Beau Renfroe told Pyburn to get to know Lilly. They would be in the boat in Key West. While the team was at Douglas Marine, Renfroe flew Lilly in to get to know Pyburn and the two hit it off instantly.
Initially, Lilly and Pyburn couldn’t appear to be more different. Lilly sports a scruffy beard and a nonstop smile. Even when he doesn’t win, he stays positive. The clean-shaven Pyburn, on the other hand, always looks put together and he wears the face of someone plotting his next move. As soon as they strap into the cockpit of a raceboat, however, they are of the same mind.
The team bought the former KLOVAR Motorsports Super Cat that had been damaged while being towed to a race in 2023. With the team working nonstop, the boat made it to the 2023 world championships with barely time to spare. Pyburn’s and Lilly’s first time in the boat was on the first day of racing.
Leading up to that day, Pyburn and the Renfroes had some serious discussions.
The Dirty Money team’s Skater 388 catamaran came to an unfortunate end during the Great Lakes Grand Prix in Michigan City, Ind.
“Bill and I had a conversation after we broke the first boat and he said, ‘If you and Tiffiney are happy with a podium or third place, I’m not your guy,’” Beau Renfroe recalled. “We went all in the first year. I don’t think anyone’s done that.”
Added Pyburn, “We made a decision day one that we weren’t on a five- or 10-year program to go fast. We bought 20 sets of props. I got a race engine builder, not a boat engine builder. We attacked things from a different angle.”
Pyburn also took more of a leadership role with the team. After securing Goodwin Competition power, he enlisted the services of his childhood friend, Neal Lewis, a dynamics engineer who owns Race Day Engineers, and Shawn Fischer of Fischer Motorsports, who designs the boat’s internal systems and handles race support.
“That’s where Bill excels,” Lilly said. “I told him all we need to win is what everybody else has because we’re that good. He told me, ‘We’re not going to Sterling (Performance engines), we’re doing something better.’”
Giving credit where it’s due, Pyburn said that he and the Renfroes knew they had to make the investment in a full support program because that’s what the Millers had done with M CON.
“I’ll never take that away from Tyler,” said Pyburn. “(M CON) did so many things right and anybody that wants to be involved in offshore racing, all you have to do is look at them. They’ve written the recipe.”
Renfroe opened a new shop in Stuart, Fla., to house the team and hired Bobby Adams as crew chief. Adams had worked with some of the top teams in Class 1 and Super Cat and manages the whole Dirty Money program. The team also hired Andy Carracino, who had a long history in Super Cat. To become a world champion, Adams and his team work on something on the boat daily.
“You can’t shelve these boats and then two or three days before a race, jump on it,” Pyburn said. “It’s hard to explain how much work goes into being fast.”
A Tough 2024
After showing speed in Marathon, the team went to Cocoa Beach and finished second after Pyburn admitted he missed the setup. At Shootout Offshore on Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, Lilly and Pyburn appeared to take the win, but were penalized for missing a buoy. The team protested and at the end of 2024, the victory was granted to Dirty Money.
A week later, they were at Lilly’s home race in Ocean City, Md. After dominating the race, Lilly and Pyburn had to slow on the last lap when the escape hatch in the tunnel of their boat shockingly opened. They wound up second.
The team finally won a race at Sarasota, Fla., in September, putting the Dirty Money crew in place to challenge for the Super Cat national championship with two races remaining. Mother Nature had other plans when events in Clearwater and St. Petersburg, Fla., were canceled because of hurricanes.
After having the sudden success and showing undeniable speed in 2024, the Dirty Money team had a target on its back heading into Key West. Competitors questioned the legality of the boat and some of the technology being used. Some even made the assertion that the boat had a Seakeeper gyroscopic stabilizer in the boat. It has an instrument that measures yaw and pitch and reports it via MoTec telemetry to the team in the pits.
The Super Cat-class Dirty Money and M CON/Monster Energy teams became arch rivals during the 2024 season.
Other conspiracy theorists absurdly claimed that the Dirty Money team was running the boat from the pits, not with Pyburn and Lilly controlling it. The carbureted engines in the Super Cat class don’t have an electronic control unit, so that’s not possible.
But what the Dirty Money team does is check the meteorological data at every race and change the jets in the carburetors. “You need to look at the environment you’re running in,” Pyburn said.
Explaining the team’s performance surge, Pyburn said, “It’s the boat handling better and Brit and I saying we’ll run the boat harder.”
“It’s cool, calm and collected,” Lilly said of the in-boat partnership. “We can read each other’s minds. When you’re not waiting to hear what the other person wants, you get faster and faster and smoother and smoother.”
The weather issues that had plagued 2024 continued on what was supposed to be the first day of competition in Key West. Officials canceled the first day of racing on Wednesday. That left Friday and Sunday.
While other teams ran brief tests on Thursday, Pyburn and Lilly went out and concentrated on making their boat accelerate from turn two coming into Key West harbor. As the Super Cats roared out of the harbor to start the race, M CON/Monster Energy and Dirty Money quickly separated themselves from the rest of the boats in the class.
“On the first lap on Friday we came into the harbor and I turned that boat and Bill’s eyes were as big as could be,” laughed Lilly. “He said, I didn’t know you could turn a boat that hard.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry I’ve got your back.’”
Though they are still sticking with Super Cat, Pyburn and Lilly are entering the Pro Class 1 ranks this season with one of two XINSURANCE-backed teams competing in the category.
After claiming their first Super Cat world championship, Pyburn and Lilly are showing no signs of slowing down. During the off-season, Rick Lindsey, the owner of XINSURANCE, announced that he had bought a second boat for Pro Class 1 racing, a fast 45-foot Victory that ran as Spirit of Qatar. Pyburn and Lilly have been chosen to run that boat as XINSURANCE South.
They will continue to run the Super Cat and the Victory will be housed and maintained at the Dirty Money shop. “Tyler Miller has four (national) championships and I’m in for five,” said Pyburn. “I need two more Key Wests, too.”
“I feel like the Super Cat program is in a really good place and Pro Class 1 is the next challenge,” he added.
Captured here with MTI principal Randy Scism, Bill Pyburn was a well-known figure in the high-performance powerboating world long before he became an offshore racer.
Related stories
Live Now! Final Super Cat Series Video
Final Episode Of Super Cat Docu-Series To Air Wednesday, December 11
New Video! Super Cat – Race For US-1 Episode No. 3, ‘Let’s Get Political’
Hometown Throwdown: ‘Super Cat – Race For US-1’ Episode No. 2 Now Live
New Video! ‘Super Cat – Race For US-1’ Episode No. 1
Coverage From The 2024 Key West Poker Run And Offshore World Championships
The post Winning Against the Grain—The Bill Pyburn Profile appeared first on Speed on the Water.
Source: https://www.speedonthewater.com/winning-against-the-grain-the-bill-pyburn-profile/
