Meet Andrew Tate and make yourself at home in his office. That office happens to be the cockpit of the U-9 Delta Gear/Realtrac hydroplane which uses turbine power to haul the mail across the water and (hopefully) beat out all of the rest of the competition! This particular video comes from the 2016 San Diego Bayfair event and it was taken during the final heat race of the weekend.
One of the things that’s cool to us about this video is that we have never featured an in-cockpit video from one of these boats. We have gone into the cockpit of drag boats and off shore V-hull jobs but we have never seen one of these babies in action from the perspective of the driver. The first impression? It sure looks rough in there! Obviously the racing surface is constantly variable as the waves and chop rise and fall but we had no idea that the drivers got beat around as bad as they do. We should have suspected that, probably.
It is cool listening to the turbine fire up and make it familiar “winding up” noises before Tate is able to bring it out and then a couple minutes in he drops the hammer and the racing action is on. The cockpit looks simply laid out and has the appearance to us of something that’s right out of a Star Wars movie.
The last thing that we thought was cool was the full-on fighter pilot style mask that Tate is wearing that’s obviously feeding him from a contained air supply on the boat. These things are serious business. We couldn’t read any of the gauges from the video but maybe one of you that has eaten more carrots than us can handle that.
