At the offshore powerboat racing world championships in Key West in 2010, Randy Scism and Bob Bull were campaigning Bull’s 48-foot MTI catamaran in the sport’s fastest class. They were having mechanical problems, and spent more time and money swapping out engines than racing. The team had a second boat powered by the then-new 1,350-hp Mercury Racing turbocharged engines, but didn’t have a chance to run it because of all time the crew spent keeping the other boat running.
“We got back home and tested the 1350s and hit the gas and said, ‘We raced the wrong motors,” says Scism, who founded the high-performance catamaran and center-console builder Marine Technology Inc. “They ran better and did it on pump gas. It put the pleasure back in high-performance boating.”
It’s a refrain that people have repeated about Mercury Racing products for the past 50 years. The high-performance division of Mercury Marine is revered for its powerful engines, but go-fast insiders offer just as much praise for product reliability through the decades.
“It’s not just a great engine. They always had the best mount, the best cooler and the best coating for the best bracket for the best ignition,” says Jeff Harris, chief operating officer of Iconic Marine Group, the builder of Fountain, Donzi and Baja boats. “They were always light years ahead of everybody else.”
PROVING GROUNDS
Reliability and durability have been priorities at all the iterations of Mercury Racing (aka Mercury Performance Products, Mercury Hi-Performance, Kiekhaefer
