Team Jackhammer To Run Two Boats At OPA Worlds

Back in May when hope for the 2020 offshore racing season still ran high, Reese Langheim, the owner of the Illinois-based Jackhammer team, planned to campaign two boats in the Super Stock ranks. Langheim would drive his 32-foot Victory catamaran with throttleman Ricky Maldonado, whose son, Julian, would run the team’s original 32-foot Australia-built Blade cat with a then-unnamed teammate.

Team Jackhammer will have representation in the Super Stock and Class 7 ranks during next weekend’s OPA Crystal Coast World Championships.

Though Langheim and company scrapped that plan when most of the season didn’t materialize, he had also purchased a 22-foot, outboard engine-powered Velocity with the goal of having his wife, Sara Elizabeth, campaign the boat with Julian Maldonado in the Class 7 ranks of Offshore Powerboat Association competition.

Both will run in the upcoming OPA Crystal Coast World Championships October 22-25 in Morehead City, N.C. The younger Maldonado will be joined in the cockpit of the Class 7 V-bottom by Jackhammer team mechanic Wency Soto, while his father will share the cockpit of the Super Stock-class Victory catamaran—as usual—with Langheim.

“Wency and Julian have worked so hard this year that I thought they deserved to run the Class 7 boat and have some fun,” he said. “Sara hasn’t had any time in the boat yet, so we’ll wait till next season to get here in there.”

A roll-over at the first race of season—also in Morehead City—last month left Soto, both Maldonados and the entire Jackhammer crew with plenty of work to do. But the team was buoyed by a second-place finish in the second race of Offshore At The Ozarks-Cat Edition in Central Missouri earlier this month.

“That roll was a tough start for us—first race, first turn, just really tough” said Langheim, who also rolled with Maldonado during the 2019 Race World Offshore Key West Championships. “We needed something to build our confidence. Offshore At The Ozarks was exactly what we needed.”

The Jackhammer team will depart for North Carolina this coming Wednesday.

Said Langheim, “We can’t wait to get there. We’re ready to race.”

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