the water, exploding the protective canopy that dave is sitting under, ripping off his oxygen general and submerging him in the water. i was unconscious under water. the safety team got there right away, got me onto the bottom of the boat. they cleared the airway and got the water out. amazingly, dave survives. his hand is crushed by the flying metal. he ends up losing two fingers on his right hand. it s the kind of trash that may deter a driver. but dae is no quitter. i just felt i had things to prove to myself and give to the sport. dave and the team rebuild miss budweiser redesigning the capsule to make it safer. luckily to date since we ve done that, nobody has been killed or hurt significantly inside that capsule. years later, dave will have good reason to be thankful for
how fast he can drive his legendary hydroplane, miss budweiser and tries for the world straightaway speed record. we ll be racing against time and mother nature. we ll see what we re made of. dave doesn t let his nerves show. one of the problems in setting records is you know you re going to experience things that other people have not. everyone pay attention, the course is live. the speed record is calculated by averaging the time over two one-kilometer runs. 9.83. the speed to beat is 198 miles per hour. dave is buckled in to the cockpit and hits the gas. here he comes. 213.437 miles an hour. he s on record pace over the first leg. for the second leg, he gives it everything he s got. 225. 225. 30 he s out of it.
driver makes a mistake, they could be 50 feet up in the air. upside down and backwards. at first glance, dave might look more like a banker than a daredevil, but he s been racing hydroplanes for years and been in some pretty dramatic crashes. you re travels at over a football field per second. so if you aren t anticipating what what s going to happen, you re likely to crash. they flip through the air as if they weigh nothing, but these boats are 30 feet long, 7,000 pounds with 4,000 horsepower engine. it s a celebration of excess. everything about it is bigger and badder and more extensive than you could possibly imagine.
dave says imagine driving your car at 200 miles an hour without springs or shocks. that s what it feels like to ride this thing. the environment of looking from the outside of a hydroplane, it likes wonderful, graceful vehicle that flying over the water. the truth is, the boat is actually beating the snot out of the driver that s inside. david fell in love with racing boats as a teenager. while most kids his age were out riding bicycles i started out racing flat-bottom boats, because that s what my uncle had done. dave, good-bye. and it was a lot of fun, and it progressed into bigger flat-bottom boats, managed to set a lot of world records and win a lot of championships. from there, of course, it was a step to racing hydroplanes. dave soon breaking almost every record in the book. in 2004, he decides to see just
that safer capsule. in the summer of 2009, he enters thunder on the ohio, a race he s won ten times before. in his first heat another driver loses control and hits dave s boat. dave flips over and smashes into the water. but dave s work redesigning the driver s capsule pays off. it stays in one piece, and he waits in safety for help to arrive. the only injury i got was a finger injury, where it broke a knuckle in the finger. as boat accidents go, i ll take that. that s a good one. after decades of speeding, crashing and tumbling through the air, dave says driving a hydroplane is a thrill few can experience. but many more can enjoy watching safely from the shore. there s such an unexpected