History repeats itself:
Does anyone remember when this happened to A-Class? You had tons of boats running A, then the canopy boats came in because it was “Safer”… Yes it was, but it relegated the entire fleet to pleasure boats or to be sitting in someone’s yard for decades. A-Class was then growing strong again with new breed of Phantoms, Extremes, and it seemed every builder was trying something. Remember Rick’s boat with the #5 with tilt, and trim? Remember Nemshoff’s Buzzi (One of my favorite boats of all time)??? Then the class had a chance to come back again as SVL with some interesting rules that would have allowed smaller teams to buy older engines from SV & SC teams or put together their own program with a local engine builder. Unfortunately (again IMO) the decision was made to go to a spec engine in this class. I believe the spec style engines limit as many people to entering a class as it helps as I’ve seen in many other forms of motorsports. That aside, SVL has since grown into one of the more popular classes under today’s racing, and economic environment so why would you want to ruin that? Opening up the class to new hull designs that would relegate the entire fleet into pleasure boats makes absolutely no sense to me or anyone else. Just as bad is having an individual, or manufacture devote time and money into design of a boat that will then be worthless if you rule them out of the class. As in other forms of motorsports course conditions, setup, and driver/throttle man skill will play a major role in the outcome there should hopefully be enough races with varying conditions, and hopefully varying conditions throughout the race weekend and even the race to allow each style to have a competitive shot at winning throughout the year. No better way to lose people than to have them spend lots of money and not have a chance to run competitively.
