Mercury Racing, a purveyor of high-performance boat engines and drives, has a new, shorter 15-inch midsection for its 200R and 300R outboards, designed to lower the center of gravity for fast boats.
Travis Pastrana has teamed up with Mercury Racing and will participate in the inboard Mod V class this fall.
He's also got some outboard-based hijinks in mind for his YouTube channel.
Travis Pastrana is synonymous with land-based derring-do—rally racing, freestyle dirt bike stunts, gymkhana—but the guy who once jumped out of a plane without a parachute is also an accomplished boat racer. In 2022, Pastrana and Steve Curtis won the P1 offshore world championship driving Miss Geico (a 47-foot catamaran powered by twin 1100-hp Mercury Racing turbo V-8s) and this fall he'll be racing in the Mod V class in the Race World Offshore World Championships in Key West. So it seems natural, if not inevitable, that Pastrana hooked up with Mercury Racing—purveyors of V-12 outboards and a 9.0-liter V-8 you can put in a car—as a sponsor.
Mercury has a new go-fast product that Pastrana will soon be playing with on his YouTube channel, and it's not an engine but a stubby drive. While conventional outboards use either a 25-inch or 20-inch midsection (the part of the outboard connecting the power head to the lower gearcase), Mercury has developed a 15-inch model that's available on its 200R and 300R outboards. And what's the point of that? Keeping the center of gravity low. In boats, as in cars, a low COG means better handling. "A low center of gravity helps you not flip the boat, which is nice," Pastrana says.
Race boats often have one person to steer and another to work the throttles, and Pastrana's learned both jobs. Driving a catamaran in calm water, he says, was a lot like driving a race car, and his vast experience there was a big advantage given that boat racers don't get a lot of practice time behind the wheel. "When it's calm, I felt like all my experience with the car stuff was extremely helpful," he says. When it's rough, there was more of a learning curve. "One race, there were six-foot waves, and Steve Curtis was on the throttles and landing us on the back of every wave—slam, slam, slam!" Pastrana says. "I asked him why we weren't landing on the fronts of the waves and he said, 'You know what they call a boat that lands on the front of a wave? A submarine.'"
Boat racing is a little more mysterious than motorsports just because of the ever-changing nature of the ocean. "In a car, it's easy to see where you're gaining time or losing it," Pastrana says. "In a boat, as the waves change you're not exactly sure about that." One day, he hit 155 mph [his personal best on the water] and his friend Brit Lilly did 156 mph. "I don't know where he got the extra speed," Pastrana says.
Since V-bottom boats handle much differently than catamarans, Pastrana has had to cultivate some new skills. He says his first outings with a V-bottom were absolutely horrifying. "I was doing all the wrong things because you're basically doing the opposite of what you'd do in a catamaran. There's a lot of countersteering."
As for Pastrana's plans for Mercury Racing outboard antics, it sounds like it's not too complicated. "I love boats and I love going fast," he says. And the new stubby midsection just might figure in some of his Channel 199 YouTube antics. Pastrana doesn't specify exactly what those antics might entail, but does say, "We've been trying to wheelie a boat."
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