Cultural Differences and the Wimps

Hi Folks,

First off, to the thousands of loyal readers of my blog (lol) I apologize. I have been lax in posting and your calls for updates will be answered. I hope all of you had a fantastic Holiday season be it late in coming.

There's been something that's bothered me for a very long time. It's a "us vs them" type of thing. Across the globe racing and running fast electric boats has been a niche in model boating. The Nitro powered boats really taking the lions share of participants, followed in recent years by gas powered models. Things are changing though and FE powered rigs are now some of the fastest powered boats there are. As a matter of fact a FE powered Hydro holds the world record for speed at over 140 miles per hour.

The gentleman that built and developed the boat was from Germany, he and his team came to the U.S. last year and set the record in LA. The Germans have brought some huge technical advances to FE racing, mainly speed controls and motors. They are among the best in the world when it comes to speed and that is what this post is about. Being on the top of the heap in any sport puts a bullseye on your back and by human nature someone's going to be gunnin' for ya.

Don't think for a minute that we here in the States have been sitting on our ass, oh no, we have some big guns coming that in some ways are better than anything that has come from overseas. The Germans have seen it first hand and I believe they're very concerned because their reign at the top is quickly closing. We do things differently and quite frankly they don't care for our direction. I say too friggin' bad! I'm really sick and tired of hearing about how we should put limits on what we do. You hear stuff like "someone will get hurt", "it will raise the cost" and my favorite "you won't get my respect".

To put it in an analogy it's like Republicans vs Democrats, or Top Fuel vs F1, Nascar vs Rally so on so forth. In America we like horsepower and heads up racing; overseas they like finesse racing on equal footing. It's the same in FE boat racing and we do it here way way different than they do overseas and they just don't get it.

Stay tuned, much more to come.

See ya,

Paul.