protective canopy that dave is sitting under, ripping off his oxygen mask 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 type of crash that might deter another driver from racing all together. but dave 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 ms. budweiser, redesigning the driver s 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 that safer capsule.
in the blink of an eye, a piece of equipment fails or a 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. oh, we have an accident! you re traveling 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. in unlimited hydroplane, there is celebration of success. 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
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 and unanticipated and unpredictable sport. i think people watch because they know when something happens, it s going to be big. coming up wipeout. my god. oh, he s down. that guy s going to die. a surfer is trapped under water, pounded by giant waves. you could tell even if he gets a breath after this one, it s going to be horrible. when caught on camera: full throttle continues. play close. good and close. discover the new way to help keep teeth clean
actually beating the snot out of 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 how fast he can drive his legendary hydroplane, miss budweiser, and tries for the world straightaway 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
hydroplanes, they re the fastest boats in the water, flying across the surface at 200 miles per hour. at this speed, when something goes wrong, disaster. in the blink of an eye, a piece of equipment fails or a 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.