Through no special effort of my own, I was just very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time, as all of this new sport of offshore racing was unfolding.
I came from a boat racing background of racing outboards in the northeast and when I ended up in Miami in the early 60's this was like unbelievable. Everywhere you looked there was some kind of really neat kind of boat racing going on and this new stuff called offshore was really wild.....they were doing things you could harldy get your head around.
Brownie...one of my heros, took a 28 foot Donzi (I know I told this story before, but just stop and compare this with today's racers) and installed two engines in it....not side by side, but one engine in front of the other. Now he wanted to have as little drag as possible unde the boat, so he used just one shaft and one prop. That's right two engines driving one shaft and one prop. He did it by using one V-drive...one engine in front and the other engine behind it.
Just try to calculate how you would have to get that to work right. He designed it...he built it...he raced it....and he won the Miami to Nassau race that year. That's why many years later, when guys like Tom Gentry wanted to break the Trans Atlantic record, they turned to guys like Brownie and had him work on the engineering of the boat.
When we Americans, traveled to other countries to race, you could see the look of admiration of the other people as we unveiled the latest in American technology for all to see. When Richie Powers brought the American Eagle to Mar del Plata, in Argentina, it was the like the coolest boat in the world at the time....everything was super neat and clean. Same race and Bobby Saccenti brought the first ever boat, that was later to be known as ....the Top Gun. We Americans were on the top of our game and proud of it and our country too.
www.historicraceboats.com
