The Desperados of Drag Boat Racing

This weekend the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Racing Series took over Lake Nasworthy, bringing in competitive drag boat teams from all over the country. A team comprised of locals, fellow Texans and a few guys from Missouri were among those competitors. LIVE! caught up with the Desperado racing team last Thursday before the competition started;. Combined the crew has well over 100 years of experience and mechanical savvy.  

 “Everybody here has raced something of some sort; I tell people I’ve raced everything from airplanes to armadillos,” said H.A., crew chief for the drag boat racing team. “It is an all out of pocket deal, but we all love to do it, and we come out here to win, we don’t just come out here and show up.”

The Desperado is a 1988 model Pro Outlaw boat with an $80,000 monstrous 2500 horsepower engine that propels driver and boat across the water at speeds of 170 mph. The engine drinks methanol alcohol.

“I’ve been doing this for probably over 30 years,” said Mike Murray, one of the guys from Missouri, and the mechanical tuner for the Desperado. “I’ve been with several race teams and partners before. We won several championships with the other teams. It takes time to get everyone to gel; with our combination it’s different than anybody else.”

H.A. and Mike Murray have raced three boats together as crew members. The Desperado is the first time they have actually owned the drag boat they are racing.

“We got tired of people not wanting to do [things] the way we wanted to do it so we got our own boat,” H.A. said. “This is a 1988 model boat. Drag boats don’t get to be old if they’re not a good boat, if they don’t handle well they’re in the bottom of the lake. I think we’ve got the best driver and tuner in the pits.”

The team won the last two races where they competed. They were runners-up at the world finals last year and with good luck and the help of their sponsors, the team is feeling optimistic this season.  
One of the things that make the Desperado unique is that it has no transmission, which means it’s a lot harder to tune, and requires a team of skilled mechanics.

“There are two boats in the United States without a transmission, this is one of them,” Murray said. “It’s a lot harder to tune, it takes a tuning person to make it work. The props are a lot more critical to make work, but it’s more enjoyable for me.”

 Murray is not only a drag boat crew member, but has years of experience in the driver’s seat as well.  He has been racing drag boats for a good majority of his life, although not the Desperado.

 “I’ve never driven this particular boat, because of the price and cost of everything we have a driver to come in and do that,” Murray said smiling. “It makes it to where I’m freer to do my engine tuning.”

Whenever the Desperado crew is working together on its engine or many other important parts for functioning, Murray says the team is so much so on the same wavelength he rarely has to say anything at all. The other crew members already know what to do with little discussion or sometimes just a gesture.  “Unless I just say to heck with this we are completely changing everything, and that’s when they look at me like where are you coming from with that, but it works.”

Safety is always first and foremost is any drag racing situation. The safety of the drivers is the number one concern. Both H.A. and Murray say they come from old school ways, before safety capsules and safety concerns, when it was even more of a daredevil sport.

“Back in my day, [drag boating] used to kill one or two people a weekend, it wasn’t unusual; I’ve seen three killed in one weekend; that was before the capsules,” Murray said.

The capsule design of the Desperado has never seen a racing fatality. Although if it were to happen when the lid comes off the driver is open to hitting the water at 170 mph. Murray said it’s comparable to crashing on a jet ski at 70 mph times 10, and chances of escaping injury are slim.

“I can live with myself with somebody climbing into it; it makes it safe to where I can send my driver home every weekend,” Murray said.  “Safety is very critical.”

The driver controls the drag boat from inside the safety capsule portion. If the boat wrecks, the top of that capsule comes off.  There’s an oxygen tank in the capsule which the driver is hooked up to through a regulator on his helmet, like a scuba regulator. His helmet is sealed and in the event the capsule should come off, he’s got about 20 minutes worth of oxygen.

The inside of the capsule is small, yet slightly roomy as long as you are not a large person. The Desperado driver is about 6 feet tall, when he is fully geared out with helmet and all, he fits like a glove perfectly into the driver’s seat, surrounded by protective padding.

 “When you ride in this thing, you are trying to control this animal that’s trying to eat you and it does it tries to eat you up,” said Murray. “If you can imagine running 170 mph with a hand grenade with the pin pulled and then you get to the other end and it’s still trying to go and your still trying to stick the pin back in, if you let it go it’s going to explode.”

There are also parachutes on board to help in slowing the boat to a stop after a race, an initial deployment chute as well as an emergency chute in case the primary one should fail. Lucas Oil has safety inspectors that check for precautions like those on every boat before it hits the water.

“These guys with Lucas Oil are so good that if the boat wrecks, it hasn’t even stopped moving and they are there to help the driver out of the water,” H.A. said.

Murray joked about giving an IQ test to the crew to see who the driver will be.

“If you were really smart, you would never get into one of these,” he said.  “You always give people an IQ test and the one that fails, he gets to drive. I managed to move up in the world, I can count all 10 toes now, used to be I only had six.”

The whole team has moved up in the world when it comes to the technology. They have a computer system in the Desperado’s trailer that reports several different critical indicators important while racing on water at such high speeds. The trailer Desperado rides in is by no means shabby; the inside bay where she is stored is spotless. Cabinets and drawers filled with essential tools to tune a monster drag boat engine line the walls.  

“We download information from the boat on every pass,” H.A. explained. “We get drive shaft speed, RPM, fuel pressures, blower pressures, etc. You can take that information and overlay it and look at your passes and if you slowed down you can look and see where and why it slowed down, if you’re on, they will lay over each other good. It’s kind of a new tuning tool for us. Mike’s been old school tuning for a long time and we are having a hard time learning the new technology, we still do a little bit of old school tuning, but it’s been working. We are getting more help with our information we can see things that we were never able to see before as far as information on the boat.”

Having a good crew and having top-of-the-line technology to help out are two things essential in drag boat racing, but according to the crew so is luck and superstition. In the Desperado, the driver had attached two Queen of Hearts playing cards to the capsule lid.

“It’s the way it’s always been. Racing people are superstitious,” H.A. said. “It’s changed a lot in the last several years. It used to be that you had to have a dime in your shoe; you couldn’t eat peanuts in the pits, and this and that. It’s lightened up some though.”

The Desperado is housed in Missouri with Murray, and even though he used to be, and still could be, a driver, he has still never sat in the driver’s seat of this drag boat.

“I’ve owned this all these years and as part of superstition I don’t get in it because it’s not my office, so I don’t sit in the office seat unless I’m driving, I’m just an ex-driver or replacement driver,” Murray explained. “But other people, like newspaper reporters are allowed to get in it, but anybody else, like a professional, we don’t allow to get it. We put kids in it all of the time.”

“I guarantee that our team, when this boat goes to the water, they stand in the same place every time,” H.A. added. “You try to repeat everything you can, once you have a success you don’t want to jinx yourself.”

The results from this weekend’s drag boat racing series had not been posted at the time this article was written, but you can check the results to see how the Desperados made out here (scroll to the bottom for the "Pro Outlaw" class results).  Going into the Showdown in San Angelo, Desparado was leading the Pro Outlaw class. There are four more races and a finals left in the 2015 season, according to the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Racing website.