Raceboat


Building the Champ Boat

A Champ racing boat appears so high-tech you’d guess that it just has to be built of space-age materials with computerized tools. But it’s not.

Underneath the shiny skin of most of those race boats is an old-fashioned wooden hull shaped and laid up the old-fashioned way, by hand and one piece at a time. Bebe Crum has been building Seebold racing boats for nearly 30 years at the team´s shop in Fenton, Mo. He was a carpenter and a friend of Bill Seebold when the Seebold Racing Team decided to start building its own racing craft. The shop builds one-third to one-half of the Champ and SST-120 boats built in the U.S. each year.

The center sections of Seebold racing boats, including the cockpit and fuselage, are made of hand-laid carbon fiber and fiberglass to promote safety. The rest of the hull and sponsons (or sides) are hand-made of hundreds of pieces of rare wood imported from Europe and Africa. “All the cross ribs and stringers are made of obeeche from South Africa. The plywood skin we use is occume from Holland,” Crum said. “The occume is a better grade of plywood than we can get domestically and the obeeche is light- weight and strong.”


The carbon fiber and fiberglass sections of the boats are made in molds fabricated in the Seebold shop. Crum needs 18 days to cut all of a boat’s wooden pieces, following patterns hanging on his shop wall, to assemble a completed shell on the center section.


“Everything is glued together with screws or nails. We use aircraft aluminum screws and stainless steel ringshank nails,” Crum said. “There are at least a thousand screws and at least that many nails.” Increasing numbers of tunnel boats are made completely of composite materials due to their greater strength and durability in the “heat” of close competition.


Many drivers believe that the wood boats still seem to handle a little better than the composite boats, Crum said. "The wood boats flex more. Bill tells me the wood boat just rides so much smoother on the water. "Because of the close action and frequent contact in Champ boat racing, however, composite boats are becoming more common. These boats, built largely of fiberglass, carbon fiber and Kevlar, can survive much more of the beating and banging that occurs during races.


Tim Seebold is developing a composite boat that he drove through most of the 2000 season and used as his primary boat in 2001. A new copy of the design was introduced in the middle of the 2002 season.

This boat, carrying the stars-and-stripes colors, helped Tim win races in Windsor, Colo., and Kankakee, Ill., and earn the ChampBoat Series championship. Today`s Seebold tunnel hulls took as if they sprang from an engineer’s computer, but in reality they represent 20 years of evolution and feedback from the seat of Bill Seebold`s pants.


A guy like Mr Bill knows what he wants and had 46 years of experience driving these things. We change things all the time, " Crum said. Seebold composite hulls take about as long to assemble as the wooden boats, although the construction process is entirely different. The composite boats are laid up in two large molds for the boat`s tunnel-shaped bottom and upper body. Smaller molds produce the body cowling and cockpit canopy. Cloth materials are hand-cut and placed in the molds, then covered with special marine resins. The mold is wrapped and sealed in plastic and an industrial-strength vacuum is attached to remove air from the bag and produce a smooth, tight piece.


The sponsons, tunnel and decks of the boats are made of special fiberglass cloth reinforced with balsa and foam coring. The driver safety cell, like the cockpit of an Indianapolis or Formula One car, is made of Kevlar and carbon fiber laid over a strong foam coring. After the hulls are assembled, they are moved to the finishing area of custom painter Bob Airoldi, who has turned out many of the best looking race boats in the country for many years.

Doug Hubert has been finishing and rigging Seebold boats for nearly 25 years. He needs 10 to 13 days to install the canopy, instruments, safety belts, fuel system, steering gear, hydraulics and radios. About a quarter of the metal pieces needed to complete a boat are fabricated in the Seebold shop. Many others are manufactured outside the shop to the company’s specifications.


Hubert helped build the molds for the boat canopies, which were modeled after the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle fighter that also is built in St. Louis. “When we built our first canopy we figured they had done a lot of wind tunnel test time, so we took the lines off a picture of the plane,” he said.


The power for Champ boats comes from high-performance, 2.5-liter, electronically-fuel-injected Mercury V-6 engines. Power from those engines is put to the water through narrow-profile lower units built especially for high-speed racing. The lower units transfer power coming down from the boat`s engine and turn it 90 degrees to the prop shaft. Very small shafts and gears are used to keep the lower units as thin and sleek as possible. That also makes them finicky.

The engines put out more than 350 horsepower and the propeller shaft is turning about 8,800 r.p.m.`s. The oil in the lower units is changed constantly. The units undergo a 10-hour rebuild every two to three races. Engines are rebuilt after each race, a process that takes about two days. Most Champ-class boats are 17 feet long. Some drivers keep a 16-foot as a backup and use it as their primary hull in certain water conditions. Because the SST-120 engines have less horsepower, the 16-foot boat usually is preferred for use in that class.

Most teams also keep a variety of propellers on hand. Like gear ratios on a racing car, propellers on a racing boat are changed to dial in the boat for specific courses and water conditions.