Are Boat Tests Dead?
In the 15-plus years I worked for Powerboat magazine, I wrote roughly 70 percent of the Performance Reports, which was Powerboat-speak for boat tests. So if you loved them or hated them—and there was plenty of both to go around—you most likely loved or hated what I spent many hours writing.
And the writing was the end-product of logging many hours on the water with test drivers Bob Teague and John Tomlinson, then poring over rating booklets and numbers from top speed to time to plane, reading and re-reading hours of tape transcriptions—something like two hours of taped talk per boat—and page after page of manufacturer-supplied specifications. My mission with up to ten boats per issue? Take all of that information and find a way to distill it into 900 compelling words in a format that was anything but compelling.
and then