Robert Wallace has been hauling Tom Abrams’ race boats for 25 years.
Scarecrow likes to keep ’em guessing.
“When you haul some of the biggest racing powerboats in the world, drivers all over America just have to talk to you,” says Kevin Kahl, whose handle is Scarecrow. “But ever since we turned the boat around on the trailer we’ve been fooling a lot of truckers.”
Recently the No. 12 Flowmaster team repositioned its big Super Cat race boat on its 53-foot trailer so that the bow is at the rear of the trailer and the big engines are at the front, putting them much closer to the workshop built onto the chassis behind the sleeper of the 1994 Kenworth T600 with a Detroit 470. Work on the engines is now extremely efficient, says Kahl.
“When I’m out there driving down the highway, the question I get most from guys out there in the big rigs is ‘Hey, how’d you back that thing on the trailer?’ We have a lot of fun with that.”
American Power Boat Association offshore racing Super Cat boats, as a group the biggest, most powerful racing boats in the world, don’t go into the water like your bass boat when it’s behind a pickup truck. They’re so big that cranes are needed at race venues to get them in and out of the water using special linkages built into the hull. And that might happen three, four or five times in the days leading up to the race, meaning a lot of tight maneuvering and pinpoint backing for the drivers of the big tractors that haul some of the premier boats in this sport.
Once the boats are in the water, spectators can watch some of the most spine-tingling excitement in the world of racing. The current trend in offshore races, such as the recent APBA Offshore event in Marathon, in the heart of the Florida Keys, is to race closer to shore in hopes of attracting racing fans like those that flock to NASCAR events.
