The Rolls Royce Merlin: WWII Fighter Plane Engines Modified For Hydroplane Racing!

You're looking at 4,000 horsepower. When we were racing, the guys used to say, well, why are you running this old junk? Well, back at that time, this old junk was what they were calling speed equipment. I mean, I could get into it if you really want to know. This is out of Huey Helicopters of the Vietnam era. Why don't I go get one of the engine guys that really knows, that rebuilds these? Oh yeah, that'd be awesome. Let me go get one. So this is one of the Allison's. A quick way to tell between the Allison and the Rolls Royces, is the Allison's got this real funky-looking intake manifold. It almost kind of looks like a modern diesel truck manifold or something up there. This is Dan Hyde. He is the biggest authority we have in a long time. Hi, how about that? And he has been a crewman and a crew chief on the Unlimited since the early 80s. So he knows these engines very, very well. Well, I know Merlins better than I know Griffins and Allison, but I'll answer what I can. What are the technical specifications of a Merlin? Of a Merlin? Yes. 1,650 cubic inches. I believe in the airplane it turns somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,800 RPM, but in a race boat we would try and turn them over 4,000 RPM. In the airplane, I believe they pulled somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 inches of manifold pressure. Racing trim, we tried to pull 120-plus inches, so that's about 45 pounds of boost. That's pretty stout. Yeah, it is. And race trim with nitrous oxide, which all the race boats ran, we estimated that you made around 3,000 horsepower with them. And that's all happening with the original 1940s Pistons? Well, it is, but speaking to the Rolls Merlin, pretty much every part in a Rolls Merlin that was being used for racing had to be modified. The case, the banks, the valves, the valve springs, the cams, the blowers. I mean, every part, the wheelhouse, the blower, which is a blower drive, everything was modified. I mean, you can make plenty of horsepower, it's just making it live. Interesting. Allisons are a little different. There's one boat that continues to run an Allison today. I don't know exactly what they pull for manifold pressure. Allison's just a little bit bigger engine, 1,710 cubic inches, whereas the Merlin is aluminum. Many of the parts on an Allison are magnesium. Is that the same Allison that makes transmissions today? I believe so. Yeah, it was Allison GM. The interesting part about some of these engines, at least on the Merlin, back during the war, there were a lot of U.S. manufacturers building parts for the engines. So you might see an intake manifold that had cast in it general or Maytag or stuff like that. It's pretty interesting. Maytag. How often did you have to rebuild after a race? Was it after every race? When we were racing the Merlins, the blower drive assembly, and you probably heard, maybe heard the term quill shaft. It was common to break a quill shaft, which was a blower drive shaft. It was pretty common. By the time I was involved in racing, they had pretty well beefed that particular piece up, but the blower drive assembly was still the weak link, especially on the earlier model engines, which down the road we were forced to use as the years went by. After every time that we ran a boat, it didn't matter if it was one lap, three laps, five laps, every time we ran an engine, I should say, we took the blower off and checked the blower drives, checked the gears and whatnot to make sure all that stuff was good. Don't you have some parts in there? The engine shop here at the museum is working on a Merlin engine right now. We've got some polished valve covers. We're real close. We're real close. We've got to put the harnesses on. There's some plating we have left to do. Obviously put the valve covers in, then we have to plumb it. Anyway, this is the blower. This is the thing that really differentiates the horsepower output between an Allison and a Merlin. There's two stages. There's one impeller here and one impeller here. The air comes in and it blows out and comes back down the middle and blows out, and then it gets thrown out. This is centrifugal. It looks like a turbocharger. This tube actually replaces on the airplane was an aftercooler to cool the intake charge to keep it from detonating. Are you spraying nitrous? Nitrous used to go in the bottom of the blower right here with extra fuel. You can't just put nitrous in because that's just air. You have to have fuel with it, so we put nitrous and then fuel in here. Aftercooler, actually intercooler, was removed and replaced by this chrome tube when they started running a water alcohol injection for what we call ADI or anti-detonation injection. Race cars do that too. You can get rid of the intercooler if you have something else too. What's the difference between a Merlin and a Griffin? The Griffin is pretty much a big Merlin. Whereas the Rolls Merlin is 1,650 cubic inches, the Griffin is 2,239 cubic inches, I believe. This particular model has a single-stage blower on it, which means it has one impeller. Whereas the Merlin, Rolls Merlin, and this is the thing that made it so much faster, has a two-stage blower. It has a 12-inch impeller, I believe it is, followed by a 10-inch, so it's like having two blowers in one. The version that ran in the Budweiser during racing also had a two-stage blower, so it could put out, looking at 4,000 horsepower, close to it. So they were taking the larger Griffin and putting the Merlin's two-stage blower on it? No, I'm sorry. The model of Griffin that the Budweiser guys would run when they were racing, that particular model came with a two-stage blower on it. This is a different version, different model, and it happens to have a single-stage on it. Hard to come by, the two-stage are hard to come by. I believe they were even hard to come by when Budweiser was racing them. That makes sense why the Budweiser guys had them, because they were the ones with the resources and the backing to... Well, they actually, Bernie acquired some of his, at least some of his engine parts when he acquired another team. That somebody is Bernie Little, eighth-grade dropout, self-made billionaire, a man with a very winning personality. Harris Club team were the first ones I know of, there may have been others, but the first ones I know of in 1968 that were running Griffins. And Bernie ended up buying that equipment, and I believe the boat ran as Michelob draft or something like that. I believe that's how Bernie got at least some of his Griffin engines. They're not going to say to me, well, you wouldn't buy this, or you wouldn't buy that. I'll buy whatever they have to have to win. Is the Harris team the Tahoe Miss? Yes. We saw that one, that was one of the ones... Yesterday? Yeah. That boat that you saw actually ran a Griffin in 1968 after the Allison. In its current form, is it an Allison? The current form, what they were running there yesterday was an Allison, a stock, what would be considered a stock Allison. They also are working on, the boat when it raced, ran what they called an ox-stage Allison, where there was actually an additional blower that was gear-driven that sat in front of the engine, so you basically ended up with a two-stage blower system. They currently are working on configuring that, but they wanted to run the boat first in a stock form with a stock Allison. The two-stage blower is kind of like a compound turbo in a diesel truck or something. The more wind you can make, the more horsepower you can make. In a lot of ways, just looking at them, the Allison and the Merman are pretty similar. 12-cylinders, overhead cam, shaft drive up to the cam. Oh, yeah. These rocker arm setups in here, that's really neat. Yeah, this is actually not as nice a setup as an Allison because basically you have the cam rubbing on top of the fingers. The fingers are the rocker arms, if you will. Yeah. The Allison actually has a roller on the rocker arms. A little different setup. You have one roller runs two valves, whatever. But both engines have four valves per cylinder. The Allison has a pent-roof design, whereas on the Merman, the valves are vertical. But really similar in that way. They're gear-driven. Both. Is that driven off of a planetary gear or off the crank? It's driven off of the crank through a set of gears. The planetaries actually drive the blower, but the set of gears drives the mags and the cam. These are the magnetos. On a Merlin, the magneto and distributor are integral. One of these runs the exhaust plugs and one of them runs the intake side. So there's two plugs per cylinder on both the Allison and the Merlin and the Griffin. Those are some thick valve stems. The Allisons are quite a bit bigger. And sodium-filled exhaust valves. When we were racing, the guys used to say, why are you running this old junk? Well, back at that time, this old junk was what they were calling speed equipment. Four valves per cylinder, pent-roof design, overhead cam. Sodium-filled valves still do that. And that gives you more appreciation. It's kind of hard to see here, but if you looked at the machine work for the time, the quality of the machine work, which is absolutely fantastic for the time and the machinery that was being used and the rate at which they were trying to build these things. There's no way you could reproduce this engine today. There's no way. It would be unbelievably expensive. This stuff really is the pinnacle of innovation relative to resources. The output versus what they had. It's just unbelievable. It really is. This looks like some really precise, well-made stuff. There's little clips on everything. All of the casting, the machining, going any deeper, all the aircraft parts. There was a later version of this engine that was put in a bridge tank because they were looking for something with more horsepower. It didn't have a blower on it, so they made a carbureted version of it. They didn't have to spend the time and energy or the money, frankly, on a tank engine that they wanted for an aircraft engine. It's like all this safety wire on here because if one of these bolts pops off, it gets in there, it gets screwed up, pilot dies or ends up in enemy territory. You have two mags, and that, I believe, is pretty common on aircraft. If one mag fails, you've got the other one. You can still get to the ground, right? Do you have any blower parts taken apart? I can't think of any off the top of my head. Here's what the rods in a Merlin look like. Oh, wow. Well, guys, Logan is out of town this week. She's visiting her family. That means I've got to make my own food. Reminds me of the olden days when you used to have to do that. I wasn't very good at it because I didn't know where to get it. I didn't know how to shop for meat before, Logan. I certainly didn't know how to cook it. If you have those same two problems, I'm going to help you solve both of them right now. The most important one is good chop. We've got our chicken breast here from the good chop package, and we're going to cook it. Put some butter and water in the pan. Put some seasoning on there. This is really the only thing I know how to do. And just like that, we got good chicken. Good chop has something for everyone, whether it's chicken, beef, ribeye, sirloin, fillet, wild-caught salmon. This chicken breast is free-range and organic. I eat a lot of chicken, and I have for the last eight years that I've been going to the gym five days a week. This is some top-shelf stuff. All products are sourced from the USA. Good chop especially prides itself on sourcing beef that comes with no antibiotics or added hormones ever. Your body is a lot like a race car. If you race car and you put regular 87 octane in it when it needs some leaded 110, it's going to run like crap. You're not going to get anything out of it. And you work the same way. You eat good food, you will feel good, you will be more productive, you'll be happier. I'm the living testament to all of those things. Go to goodchop.com and use code stapleton120. Or click the link in the caption below to get $120 off your first four boxes today. It would help us out if you just click on it and browse around, see what's on there. Go to goodchop.com and use code stapleton120. Or click the link in the caption below to get your $120 off your first four boxes today. Right to your doorstep, no grocery store hassle. So you can see here that the rod that goes off to the A-bank is a blade. They call it a blade rod. And it sits in between on the fork rod. And the fork rod sits actually on the crank journal. That's common to the Allison and the Merlin, that setup. The Allison is a little different. But in general, it's similar. Is that so they don't have to have the banks offset? I believe that's part of it. It looks a little bit offset but not very much. No, it's not offset. No. I believe that part of it. They didn't have to make the engine longer. I don't know if it gained weight or saved weight so far as the whole rod assembly. I'm sure there was other advantages I don't know of. But, I mean, here again, look at the quality of that crank. You know, the rods. I mean, it's beautiful. This looks like a modern, high-performance crank shaft. Like, you know, taking an old cup engine apart, this is kind of what the crank looks like. You know, for the time. Nothing's new. It's like the whole hot rod industry is like born from the military. I'll show you one other thing. Now, I think I mentioned to you earlier that everything we pretty much did was to keep the engine together. And this is some of the stuff that you do to a Merlin when you're going to boat race. This is a plate that's been being added to this wheelhouse because this is the planetary setup that you were talking about. There's a center gear that runs off the crank. That gear there drives the mags and the two shafts that go up to the camshaft. And then there's three gears here. Those little gears right there sit in here and are driven by this center gear. And then they, in turn, drive that planetary system that you're talking about, which those are parts for down there. So now you've got a center gear that's pushing on these three gears. Well, they want to go out that way, right? And this is a Dash 7 wheelhouse or blower drive, if you will. And so it's lighter duty than the later series. So to beef it up for racing, we started adding these plates. And these plates hold these three bearings. And there's also a matching plate for this side. And it keeps those three gears from wanting to go out radially. Is that due to the higher RPM? You would turn these things over what the airplane was doing? Higher RPM and more of a load on the blower drive. Like I said, we were pulling 45 pounds of boost. That's a lot. Yeah. How many engines do you know pull 45 pounds of boost? That's a lot of manifold pressure. And so now you're working that blower really hard. Well, it takes horsepower to do that. And it's all going through those three little gears. And so they're wanting to go out, you know, go leave. Yeah, they don't want to stay in there. That's the kind of stuff that we did and still do to make things. This is actually the stock drive gear that goes into the crank. And that thing they call the quill shaft slid down in the middle. And it kind of like took some of the shock, but it would snap. This is an aftermarket. Here's the matching plate for those three bearings. The gears sit right in here. That sits inside that. And you can see the difference between this aftermarket blower drive gear. Can you change the boost level, the ratio inside this box? We never changed them there. There are two different sets of blower gears. Blower gears, these end up finally driving the blower. And the early ones are a lower gear ratio than the later ones. But you also have in aircraft use, you could switch the blower from a low blower ratio to a high blower ratio based on this ratchet gear assembly. Is that easy to access? Or did you have to take the whole front drive apart to do that? Yeah, the pilot had a button. He could go from high blower to low blower. So there was like a transmission inside there, almost? It's hard to describe, but it was a hydraulically activated clutch assembly that would change the ratio. That's probably the easiest way to say it. Sort of like an automatic transmission? Different, but similar, I guess. I could get into it if you really want to know. Like a manual transmission in a car has got synchronizers and forks. So these three little gears are driving this blower, right? Yeah. Okay, so now in low blower, inside there's an assembly here that this sits in. There was a clutch pack, and it either grabbed onto the shaft, if you will, via a clutch pack with splines on it, or it didn't grab onto the shaft. If it doesn't grab onto the shaft, now this blower gear is driving at the same rate that this gear is driving, right? When you would activate the button, open a valve, the oil pressure would close the clutch pack, and now it would grab this shaft, and now you can see that that gear is turning at a faster ratio than this drive gear. Yeah. That's high blower. That's freaking cool. Pretty smart guys, huh? Yeah. Historically, at least in my experience, most everybody would run, in racing, would run a higher blower ratio gear, but in low blower. Hmm. In the low blower setting. So it would be like direct drive? Because the higher blower drive system was, it could be not necessarily robust. Kind of like when you're racing a car, your strongest gear is your one-to-one, so you don't have the multiplication. So in this case, when you go into high blower, you're overdriving all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, you don't race a drag car in overdrive. So. I have learned that. Anyway, so that's just a little tidbit. That's the way most everybody that I knew. Now, I guarantee you, there were guys, including us a few times, would try different setups, including high blower and whatnot. But we were just trying stuff, you know. Anyway. That's fascinating. So would you mess with stuff like changing the boost level? Like you're going out of the turn, you turn it up, and then you pull it back or something like that? We did different things. There's other guys that did more than we did. I mean, guys played with blower ratio. If you had the money and whatnot, you might even speed that blower up even further. And there were guys that tried that. Yeah, there was some pretty interesting stuff. Guys tried different cam grinds, just like any other racing. You're just trying to do something different, make more horsepower. That's fascinating. Were there any other things like that plate that you would have to go in and do to beef these up for racing use? Yeah, because of the RPM you were running and the boost levels, you increased the valve spring pressures. And then you played with the cams to try and keep those to live at the higher RPM. The case and the crankshaft, you modified for the higher RPM. Of course, you take the nose case off that drives the propeller in the airplane and you put a gearbox on. Is that what this is? That's one version of the gearbox. It's not complete. So if this wasn't from an airplane, where did it come from? No, this was custom built for hydroplane racing. Who used to make them back then? The company that's now called The Gearworks started out as Mantel Gearworks. And Western Gear, they started building the Western Gearbox. This is a Western Gearbox. And then there was a company back east in the Detroit area called Fairlane Tool. And the guys that ran Fairlane Tool also raced a boat, whatever. And they developed a heavier duty version that was based on the Western Gearbox. But they made what they felt were improvements to it. Made it a little bit beefier and whatnot. So the Western and Fairlanes were pretty common to the Merlins. For the Allisons, Western also made a gearbox. There was a gearbox called a Volker, an arena box. The first guy to put one of these plane engines in a boat, did they make something like this? Or did they just hook the propeller right to the crankshaft? I believe they would have had to have a gearbox, but I don't know who was the very first person to put this. That's something you don't just build in your garage. Back in the day, the class was called Unlimited. And I believe that was really coined from post-World War II when there was a number of engines floating around. And you were allowed to run anything in an Unlimited. It didn't mean that anything goes on anything. But I believe it was like Unlimited cubic inches. You could put whatever you wanted into a boat. What teams were you doing this for back then? I started working on Allisons for Oberto. I worked on Allisons for one year. I wasn't really an engine guy, but I was exposed to it. And then I worked on Merlins with the Circus Circus and the Executone and the first Pringles up until through 1986. And then we moved to Turbans in 1987. And I ran a team until 1995 and worked on teams. I think the last year we raced was 2017 with the Elstrom Racing. Yeah, this stuff is cool. I think this is probably cooler than Turbans because there's just something about it. Turbans, the nice thing about Turbans, I mean, we used to probably spend 90 to 95% of our time doing engine work when we were racing Merlins. You didn't have to do that with Turbans. Even when we ran the hardest, that we ran Turbans, you didn't spend that kind of time. And what that allowed us to do and in some ways forced us to learn more about the race boat. And so, especially when fuel restrictions came on and everybody was on more of a level playing field, then you have to find speed somewhere. And so you start to learn and play with your race boat more than you did with the engine stuff. When did these hydroplanes go from the World War II V-12s to the turbine engines? Okay, well, it's a story that kind of was a matter of necessity. And this is the Lycoming T-51 gas turbine that is utilized in the boats today. Now, in the early 80s, it was apparent that we were going to start to run out of old World War II fighter plane engines. They just weren't going to last forever. So there was an effort to try to find a replacement engine. And the turbine engine seemed the most likely next step because of the way that it performs. Most of the engines that are in Unlimited Racing are repurposed. Of course, the World War II fighter plane engines were the first big motors in these Unlimiteds. And then this is out of the Huey helicopters of the Vietnam era. So it's about repurposing and utilizing equipment that maybe wasn't necessarily designed for that purpose. And these engines were the big engines, the big block engines. We ran through a three-to-one step-up gearbox. So if the engine was turning 4,000 RPMs, the propeller would be turning 12,000. These actually ran through a geared-down gearbox. The one problem that these have is these engines were in helicopters. So they were designed to be at full power 100% of the time. So in racing world, being at full power 100% of the time is not necessarily what you want. So what the guys are doing now is they have an adjustable canard wings in the front of the boat. And they fly the boat with the canard wings. And then they try to their best ability not to move their left foot because turbine engines need to spool up and they spool down. So in that, if you go to a race today and you hear a boat going into the turn and you hear this popping sound, that means the driver got out of the gas too fast and is going into compressor stall. So you don't want that. And coming out of the turn as well, if they get on it too fast, the engine hasn't had a time to whirl back up. So there's this lag time and you lose your momentum. So now the driver is charged with going into a turn at 200 miles an hour, turning left and not moving his foot off the gas pedal. So are they trying to slow the boat down with aero drag? Yes. Interesting. So it's all about powering through the turn without losing your power to your motor. And if you do that well, it's all you can do not to get your foot off the gas because that's just instinct. But if you have what it takes to go into a turn at 200 miles an hour and not take your foot off the gas, you can go really, really fast. So is this the back? This is the back end. So this would be the exhaust. Where the big chrome pipe would stick out of the boat. Okay. So if you look in here, you see these blades that turn. Yeah. There's two sets of those blades here. This is actually the power absorbing portion of the engine. All right. And it turns a shaft that actually goes back through the shaft and back out the front end. So if I turn back here, you'll see that shaft turning. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that's the output shaft. So what happens here is there's two sets of fans here. But up here, there's also a fan. And that fan drives this whole compressor. So there's seven sets of what they call axial blades or regular fan blades that lead up to a centrifugal impeller, which looks like a turbocharger impeller. So this gradually steps up the air pressure. And then this really ramps up the air pressure at the last stage. Okay. So now you're basically taking and you've got basically a supercharger here compressing the air. Now the air comes flowing out of here inside this housing and comes back to here and makes a 180-degree turn towards the inside. It's all veined. And these manifolds back here have fuel nozzles in them. And that's where the fuel is injected. All right. And lighting a turbine engine is like a blowtorch. Once you get it lit, as long as you keep running fuel to it, it'll run. So the only way to shut it off is to shut off the fuel. So now you've got the fuel spraying in here and it's burning. That hot air now goes forward and takes another 180-degree turn and hits that first turbine wheel that drives this compressor. So is there a gearbox here? Hang on. We're getting ahead of the game. I'm trying to figure out where the air goes in and out in the same. Air comes in here. I'm sorry. Okay. That's where. Yeah. And you see those are a set of guide vanes. And then there's. So fresh air comes in here and it's incrementally compressed. Until it gets up here. Then it turns and turns up and comes just on the inside of this sheet metal. Turns 180 towards the center. And fuel is added. And it's now burning right here on that inside channel. Comes forward and turns again and hits the first fan that runs this whole section. Interesting. Okay. But these are not connected to that first fan. These are separate from all of this stuff. That's why they call it a free turbine. As opposed to, I believe the term is fixed turbine. Where the power producing portion of the engine is connected to the compressor section. Interesting. So the fuel isn't added until almost the end of the air path. Because you have to get enough pressure built up so that it won't quote unquote backfire. There has to be enough pressure built up to force the air. It's going to go the way you want it to. So if you watch a race and you hear it spooling up when they're starting. What they're doing is you're rolling the engine over on the starter to get the air moving enough. That then you can start the engine. And you actually have to stay on the starter long enough to get the engine up to idle. Otherwise the fuel control says I'm not up to idle speed yet. I'm going to give you more fuel. Well you don't have enough air going through the engine. You'll burn it down right off the bat. If you have weak batteries or you don't stay on the starter long enough you'll burn the engine down. You'll never get to idle. So you have to use this big starter to help the engine get up to idle. And idle is actually 50% of full speed. Which is interesting. So that's just in case anybody's not getting it. So the air is coming in here getting incrementally impressed until it goes through here. And then after it's lit and burning and then flying out through the exit path. It has to go through blades that are connected to that output shaft. Well it goes through the first blades that are connected to the compressor. That's what drives the compressor fan. That's what drives the compressor. In other words something has to drive this thing to make it compress the air. So it has to complete the cycle. So the first set of blades that it hits turns the compressor section. The power producer, the compressor section. And then after it goes and turns that. Then it comes back and hits the next two set of blades that turn the output shaft. The output shaft goes right down the middle of the compressor and comes out the front. And all those things are spinning around it. Yep. These are spinning at 18,000 RPM. And these are spinning at about 16,000 RPM at 100%. So the last thing it touches before it's way out is the drive fins. And then it comes out. Then now you take this output and you run a shaft up to a gearbox. And then the gearbox is a V-drive. And then the shaft goes out the bottom of the boat and down the propeller. You have to be propeller driven. That's pretty wild. See whenever I, you know, not knowing anything about these. I figured it was just like a jet engine that was thrusting out the back of the. I had no idea. So the jet, if you will, or the thrust, and not really thrust, but is more the heat. But the thrust needs to be absorbed by these two sets of fans to drive the propeller. I could sit here and say there's probably not some thrust from the exhaust. But the idea is to absorb all that energy and put it out through the propeller. And yes, about propellers. This is a tube blade. This one happens to be a forged Italian wheel. But it wouldn't be uncommon to run a cast steel wheel back in the 70s, 80s, 50s, 60s. This wouldn't do the job today. You can go anywhere. So once the turbine came along and started making more horsepower. And they started putting more horsepower to the propeller. Pretty soon we started breaking propellers. So then, rather than run cast wheels, guys started building wheels out of steel forgings. And started to add three blades. Or went to three blades and a higher pitch and whatnot. So that propeller there is probably 19, 20 inches of pitch. This would be a more modern propeller here. This would be on the order of 25 inches of pitch. That would be made out of a forging. This propeller happens to be made out of three sections of a forging welded together. How much would one of these cost back then? I don't know about back then, but if you were to buy a propeller now, it's probably $15,000 to $20,000. Just for this? That's crazy. If you want to go fast, that's how you go 160 miles an hour average. Yeah. Speed costs money. Yep. What is the design of this little ridge here? Every prop builder has their own little idea how they should build a propeller. And then most boats tend to like one type of propeller or another. And then after a while, if you run a propeller too long, that's what happens. That's also a forged wheel. So there's only a certain amount of life because you're really stressing that propeller. I think I watched something on YouTube where they were talking about if this blows up, sometimes the broken piece can fly up through the wing and screw the hole. Worse than that, a lot of times if you break that propeller, you'll tear up the driveshaft. You might break the gearbox. And when you do that, then the engine goes into overspeed mode and you lose the engine at the same time. So that's not uncommon. You hope that doesn't happen and you try and set up your engine so that won't happen, but you could lose the whole shoot and match because of a propeller. So that's why they're so expensive. It's kind of the keystone. You can't go fast without a good propeller. You can't. And if you've got one that's not reliable, you could cost yourself a lot more money. And the guys that are out there running, they're changing their setups based on what propellers they have in the truck. That's fascinating. And how many of them. And how much time's on them. Calculated risk. I come from the car world, so it's neat to... Different forms of motorsports are so different on the surface, but the more you dig into them, the formulas and the variables are the same. They're just filled in with different types of pieces. If you've never watched our channel before and you thought this video was interesting, maybe you're a boat person. I have no prior experience with boats before going into this museum. Didn't know anything about it. And that's probably pretty evident relative to the questions I ask. We are like stock car, drag car people. That's my frame of reference. But if you're into history of racing, whether it's boats or cars, you should check out our other videos because we have all kinds of stuff that's very similar on different topics. And if you'd like to support what we do, it costs you absolutely nothing to hit the thumbs up on this video. Helps other people find it. And if you're concerned about the preservation and growth of hydroplane racing, sharing this video with your friend would help us a lot. If you're wondering why there's plastic on the hood, it's because the roof was leaking on it. And yes, that is a Rolls Royce Phantom. It's a flood car. And I have daydreamed many times about putting a Merlin in there, if it would even fit. Which doesn't really matter because I couldn't afford one of those anyway. That car doesn't have any interior. That's the only reason I was able to buy it is it's totaled. But, you know, you get the years going in your head. We got all kinds of goofy projects going on, maybe someday. And that ad for Good Shop that you probably skipped through earlier in the video, I swear that meat is really freaking good. Everything in that box that we have cooked so far has been phenomenal. And we will definitely buy it ourselves. Logan's dad ordered a box. It's legit. If nothing else, it helps us if you just click on the link and see what they have. Even if you've got no intention of buying anything, just click on it because that helps our chances of renewal. And that keeps the channel going. Thank you.