Dunking a turtle can save your life

We follow new Powerboat P1 competitor Shelley Jory as she undergoes her annual pre-season dunk test – a vital part of the pre-season preparations for the #77 Lucas Oil pilot

Ask most people how they start their year, and you’ll probably get a nice list of resolutions and platitudes – losing weight, stopping smoking, or giving more to charity. Not many people would say the first thing they think about in the new year is strapping themselves into a mocked-up helicopter shell and then being repeatedly dunked, twisted and turned upside down in an over-size swimming pool.

But, for all the Powerboat P1 competitors, this is an annual start-of-season ritual that takes place at the start of every year. Referred to in Powerboat P1’s rules and regulations as a ‘turtle training session’, but called more colloquially the ‘dunk test’, all Powerboat P1 racers are required to go through a safety test procedure for extracting themselves from an inverted, submerged boat if they are to receive their racing licence from the Union International Motonatique.

It’s a process that new Powerboat P1 pilot Shelley Jory of the #77 Lucas Oil Evolution boat is used to, and – as she will admit – it’s a process that has saved her life. For this year’s ‘dunk’, we followed Shelley to the Andark diving centre, just outside Southampton in the UK, to see what it’s all about.

Andark is one of the few, select companies to operate an underwater escape test facility and, as far as surreal scenes go, your first sight of the equipment used is a belter. A large, yellow cabin sits on a hydraulic rack over a 3.4-metre deep heated swimming pool. An operator can repeatedly immerse, twist and invert the cabin at will to simulate a number of scenarios.

The fact that the cabin looks more like a helicopter than a Powerboat is no accident. Dunk testing is used in the aviation and offshore oil industries to simulate helicopter and airplane accidents at sea. On Andark’s website, they describe how they can also offer the experience as a ‘fun’ corporate team-building exercise, but it looks far from fun to us.

Although traditionally the dunk equipment is simply used to simulate a helicopter cabin, Andark have added a two-person cockpit-style front which, when fitted with a steering wheel, is as close to a Powerboat P1 crew’s working environment as you can get. For her first dunks, Shelley sits in the body of the cabin, and, with a flat ditch and then a 45 degree rotation, she extracts herself with comparative ease.

But Powerboat P1’s new closed-canopy rules for 2008 mean the prospect of escaping from the two-person cockpit is potentially more complex this year. Although the pilot and throttles have access to breathing equipment in the cockpit, they have to undo the rooftop hatch while inverted, take a deep breath and then get themselves out. For this, the Andark crew can do a rather alarming, full 180-degree rotation.

It helps that a film crew are here getting some footage for the season preview programme, as Shelley is keen to rehearse this new procedure a number of times. As she admits, the process – at these relatively sedate speeds – is nerve-wracking in itself. When you have to re-orientate yourself after crashing at 100mph, having gone through the procedure as many times as possibly can be potentially life-saving.