Curious gear-heads and sun worshippers mingled among the crews and their knowledgeable friends, soaking up rays and sopping up Milwaukee's first taste of national championship powerboat racing.
The GMC Offshore Grand Prix of Milwaukee is part motorsports competition, part party in the park.
On Saturday, a couple thousand spectators gathered in Veterans Park - and a few hundred more on the water of Lake Michigan - to get a sense of the speed, take an up-close look at expensive toys, drink $4 beers and check out the tanned and toned.
On the water, 750-horsepower engines screamed at the back of 5-ton boats as they bounced and slapped across the wake, while helicopters hovered overhead with rescue divers at the ready.
It's different. That's for sure.
Competition continues on the 41/2-mile course with races at 1 and 2:30 p.m. today. Admission is free, courtesy of GMC, the second-year sponsor of the American Power Boat Association's Offshore Racing Pro Grade Series, and local dealers.
"This is the ultimate," said Charlie Haimes, a top competitor in the Super Cat class. "You can see most of the course. You're going to see boats coming at you at 130 mph coming into this turn, and it's going to be amazing.
"Some of the spectators that have come by today, they haven't seen anything like this."
The boats, themselves, range in size from 26 feet to more than 40 feet in length, reach top speeds of 80 mph to more than 160 and cost from tens of thousands well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To field a top team in an elite class, an owner could face another million dollars in start-up expense on equipment and spend another half-million or more to race the full, eight-race national schedule. The best teams are sponsored, but an owner has to be in the sport for the love of it because he isn't likely to make any money.
In nearly every instance, two people share the controls of a boat, with a driver steering around the buoys that mark the course, and a throttle-man manipulating the power and other controls to optimize performance and control.
The throttle-man must back off when the boat leaps to keep the propellers from spinning wildly and then get back on full power when the props hit the water again. He can also "trim" the boat, controlling such factors as the angle it sits in the water and the precise direction the props break the water's surface.
"To foot-throttle it and drive it, in a bumpy-water race it would be too difficult to do with your leg bouncing around," said John Tomlinson, throttle-man for driver Hugh Fuller aboard Bacardi Silver for three years.
"And to throttle it with one hand and drive it with the other hand, sometimes in these turns, Hugh's on top of that wheel with both hands and all his might to get us where we need to go."
A demonstration ride in a pace boat Thursday clued a writer and two television photographers into the sensation. Even at 40 mph and about one-tenth the intensity of racing conditions, the ride felt a lot like repeated whacks to the tailbone with a baseball bat.
The racing Saturday consisted of the factory classes, in which boats are raced essentially as they come from a dealer, and Outlaw Performance classes, in which boats are matched based on their speed capabilities.
Competition today includes the premier classes of Super Cat - for catamarans, which ride on twin hulls - and Super Vee - for the fastest racing boats with traditional V-shaped hulls.
Off-shore racing has changed considerably in recent years. Shorter courses, such as Milwaukee's, have replaced 30- and 50-mile laps to make the races more spectator-friendly, and cost controls instituted by series organizers have helped keep competitors interested in the premier classes.
The APBA has tried to follow the NASCAR pattern of evenly matched competition. Even in the top classes, rules are tight and there's little difference among boats.
"Today, you make a mistake and you lose two or three positions, and it's very hard to make that back," Haimes said.
There's also been a push for safety.
Boats in many classes include canopies over their occupants that keep them from being pitched into the water, and some have an escape hatch on the bottom in case the boat lands upside down. Each time a race is on, helicopters glide overhead with medical personnel ready to react.
Owner-driver Danny DeSantis escaped injury the only time his boat capsized, and as reassuring as the safety crew is, he'd prefer not to use its services.
"The boats now are pretty water-tight," he said. "We don't really want to find out, but if this goes over, I don't think we should get wet at all. I'd rather get out, wave to everybody and tell them we're all right."
From the Aug. 10, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel