Sequence Of The Week: CMR Tests The Limits In Key West
A month after earning the 2021 Super Stock-class national championship with the winner-take-all victory at the Roar Offshore Fort Myers Beach contest in Southwest Florida, CMR teammates Eric Belisle and Shaun Torrente were back in their 32-foot Doug Wright catamaran—with its new S-1 number on the side—for Tuesday’s testing session ahead of today’s opening race of the American Power Boat Association/Union Internationale Motonautique Offshore World Championships produced by Race World Offshore.
CMR teammates Eric Belisle and Shaun Torrente pushed their national-championship-winning 32-foot Doug Wright to the limits on Tuesday in Key West. Photos by Pete Boden/copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix
While the conditions were relatively calm by Key West standards, the national champions managed to get the 32-footer fairly out of shape during one of their test laps, and speedonthewater.com chief photographer Pete Boden just so happened to capture the outboard-powered cat as it launched into the air, landed hard on its port-side transom and nearly rolled over on its left side before settling back down and getting right back up to speed.
“Just testing the limits,” Torrente said in a text message after I asked him what happened out there.
His comment immediately took me back to 2018 when he and I were testing boats on Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks for the Speed On The Water Mercury Racing 400R Sport Catamaran Roundup. As we were heading out to run our first boat, he turned to me and said, “Time to push these boats to the limits—let’s see what these boats do well and let’s find out if they do anything that could get someone in trouble.”
Check out this six-shot sequence of CMR in the slideshow above.
That’s not to say we got nearly as out of shape as the CMR boat while we were testing cats from DCB Performance Boats, Fountain Powerboats, MTI, Mystic Powerboats, Skater Powerboats and Wright Performance on the lake. We did not come anywhere close to that actually, but Torrente definitely had me holding on tight a couple of times.
It was clear that the throttleman, who also happens to be the two-time-defending F1 H2O world champion driver for Team Abu Dhabi, likes to test the limits, and I’d expect him to continue to do so all week in Key West.
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