Speedboat that flipped midair in 200 mph crash wins race on Arizona lake
Speedboat that flipped midair in 200 mph crash wins race on Arizona lake
A speedboat went airborne and did a complete backward flip while racing at about 200 mph before crashing into Lake Havasu.
Admittedly, I don't know much about modern speedboats, but the full flip probably saved their lives. In the old days, flipping onto your head at damn near 200 mph was certain death.
Yea that flip and rotation definitely saved them, you can see in the video they slow down drastically in the air while the top of the boat was pointing mostly forward, although they likely also experienced some drastic gforce changes as it happened.
k, it's time to wind down the whole we're-just-burning-fossil-fuels-for-fun stuff now.
i doubt the actual motorsports are the biggest carbon emissions of stuff like this
A lot of these racing applications are what drive innovations in power and efficiency in the rest of the automotive field since they're constantly improving engines to squeeze as much power out of them as they can. Banning this stuff will have little to no impact on pollution and just needlessly piss a bunch of people off, driving allies away from the cause.
It's like the whole plastic straw ban that achieved nothing and made a bunch of people look like fools. Meanwhile, giant corporations are packaging items in single-use plastic packaging and using 10,000x as much plastic with nary a peep from those politicians' grandstanding over straws. Furthermore, every paper straw I've ever gotten has been wrapped in a plastic bag.
Running boats like this for 10 seconds costs nothing compared to a mega yacht.
Check out SailGP. It's got some flaws, but they did actually manage to design a sailboat race that goes fast enough to actually be interesting to watch in real-time.
flaws
- I have my doubts that it's as eco-friendly as they claim, since they still use fossil fuels for support boats, shipping the sailboats across the world between events, etc.
- It's pretty new and seems a little underfunded, so the production values and commentating can be a bit rough around the edges.
- They try to make it accessible (e.g. by reporting speeds in kph instead of knots), but it's still got a whiff of yacht-club elitism to it.
That time was like 30 years ago. Now we can either stop using them altogether and have a bad time, or we can keep using them and have a slightly more bad time.
"STOP HAVING FUN!!"
200 mph (322kph)
Everything but metric.
Am I missing something here? KPH is metric.
Americans hate metric so much that they'd rather use metric!
kph is just a stupid way of saying km/h
And a 'significant figures' failure too.
In all seriousness, I think that there might be a good argument, in 2025, for converting races, be they car or boat or whatnot, to be remotely-driven.
We've got the technology today.
It'd permit for higher speeds and suchlike, and eliminate some requirements.
The audience doesn't get the drama of the driver maybe being killed in an accident, but by-and-large, blood sport has faded into history.
There are clearly some people who watch racing for the crashes --- but it's possible to have the crashes and have vehicles potentially destroyed without the drivers being killed too.
Hahahah no. Humans haven't changed. We still love to gawk at death and pain. We just don't want to admit it directly.
Rubber-neckers slowing down the highway for a crash on the other side aren't doing it to make sure they are safe. They are hoping to spot some gore.
Unless you like TOOL.
"I want to watch things die from a good safe distance. Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies."
If theres no risk of complete assholes burning up or crumpling into a pancake during a car race then the race sucks ass.
I guess these guys have never heard of ground effect or air compressing at high speed.
I'm guessing none of them want to admit to these effects if you want to keep a propeller in the water the whole time.
Those effects are key to the design of these boats. They're essentially a wing.
Water has a lot more drag than air, so the more the boat is out of the water, the faster it can go.
Though it makes me wonder why they don't use actual wings to maintain control over the boat when it goes too far out of the water. Why isn't the ideal basically a plane that has a propeller sticking down into the water?
Sadly, they didn't win the Darwin award. There's always next year.
Were these terrible people or are you just wishing death on random people for making a poor choice for their own safety?
They were being reckless... to win the award, that's all it takes. Evolution takes its course.
Reminds me of the flying Mercedes CLR:
There were two seoarate incidents. Mark Webber and another guy.
Eh, anyone can do that mid-air. It takes skill to do it quarter-air.
/s
What's a crash win?