Inside SOTW Mag: The Real Reason We Race

With some of the recent “debates” going on within the offshore racing community, I have a rather rhetorical question to ask—does anyone know why we really race?

Introduced in 2015, Mercury Racing’s ROS supercharged outboard engine was a replacement for the existing fleet of Mercury Racing 2-stroke 2.5L EFI race outboards used by teams in the XCAT World Series. Photo copyright Raffaello Bastiani/XCAT World Series

Of course you do. We race to be on the cutting edge, we race to push the envelope, we race to improve products and put said products to the ultimate test so that they can be improved upon.

Makes sense, right? Then it also makes sense that if we refuse to evolve and make changes, then we’re doing ourselves a disservice and doing racing a disservice because we’re in essence eliminating what we love to do by not continuing to move forward.

At the moment, I can cite two examples, one of which I know way more about than the other. The first debate is the Super Stock class going with the four-stroke Mercury Racing 300R V8 platform and the second one is whether the Supercat class should consider running Mercury Racing’s naturally aspirated, quad-cam four-valve, fuel-injected 860 engines.

To enjoy the complete feature on Michael Janssen and his incredible group of high-performance boating friends, subscribe to Speed On The Water digital magazine.