
Anyway, Suzuki will be providing the motorised boats for the London Olympics, and no they’re not going to race them. Apparently officials and security folks will use them as there is an awfy lot of water around the Olympic Park in east London and at other more obvious venues such as the rowing course. A useless fact I know, but interesting all the same.

Now I don’t care if they have umpteen F1 engines strapped inside a 14 mtr composite twin hull affair, as far as I’m concerned offshore power boat racing, or any other boat for that matter, still doesn’t cut it alongside a MkII with a BDA on full song and a stretch of forest road snaking ahead into the distance.
But on the basis that I’m open minded and always up for persuasion, I climbed stiffly aboard. The ‘stiffly’ was due to the thick two-piece rubber suit that I had to pull on. It was like trying to push a Highland coo into a bed of velcro.
The Ribcraft itself looked a bit suspicious. It was fitted with a roll cage. Honest, it was a chrome tubed roll-cage - although some sailing types tried to tell me it was a ‘flying bridge’. Crikey, I know a roll cage when I see one, but this one was fitted to a boat!

They were well muffled as the skipper fired them up and we tootled out to deep water where he floored it (depthed it?), the nose rose six feet in the air, the arse end dug into the water and off we went like a starving Nessie looking for lunch.
For sure, it was impressive, it could accelerate pretty smartly and could pull some impressively high Gs going into turns, but that was it. And I got wet. And here’s the thing, it has no suspension. Someone had been out on the Loch ahead of us concreting the bleedin’ waves. It was like going for a ride in a washing machine down a hill.
After the demo I stepped out looking as though I’d just come from Boris Johnson’s barber. Then came the big shock, fuel consumption. Each engine consumes 1 litre of fuel per minute, although on a good day 40 litres per hour is possible! Each engine costs £19,500 and there wasn’t much change out of 90 grand for the boat. And they reckon rallying is expensive.
Nope, I’ll stick to cars and bikes, they make much more sense.
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