A champion’s eye for detail

#77 Lucas Oil team boss and throttleman Nigel Hook talks about his new outfit and its ambitions for 2008

Success is a heady cocktail and, once tasted, it’s highly addictive. Nigel Hook knows that better than most. A veteran of offshore racing, Hook won the APBA Pacific Offshore championship nine times between 1989 and 2001 and was inducted into the APBA Hall of Champions in 1998.

More recently, he won the Super Vee championship in 2006, and last year finished third in the Evolution class on his Powerboat P1 debut, racing the #97 Lucas Oil Outerlimits boat with Joe Sgro and Mike Fiore.

Hook’s desire for success is as heightened as ever. He enters the 2008 season with a new Evolution class team, a new pilot in the other hot seat and a new-to-Powerboat P1 boat in the shape of the #77 Lucas Oil entry. So why have he and Lucas Oil taken such a radical step?

“We had a pretty good year last year,” Hook says. “We took third place in the championship, we won the British Grand Prix of the Sea in Cowes – there were a lot of good things about the year. But we didn’t have as much control over the team, so we wanted to bring our own race team over to do that. This also gave us a chance to select our own crew.

“We’re very excited that our pilot is Shelley Jory, who I’ve saw racing in the Honda Formula 4-Stroke series. I had great success in 2006 with James Sheppard, who also used to race in the Honda series. He and I won the 2006 world championships in Key West in Super Vee. So looking back to the series that made him successful, the Honda series, then probably [the] top driver in that series has been Shelley Jory. I plan on having the same success getting Shelley up to speed in the top classes as James has had.”

Hook has 30 years’ experience of racing monohulls around the world and is one of the sport’s elite. So it says much for the stature of Powerboat P1 that this championship is his focal point for 2008.

His enthusiasm is obvious. “Powerboat P1 is truly a global series now on three continents and there are plans to grow further,” he says. “It’s attracting all the best boat manufacturers, which is really the litmus test of success. You’ve got Skater, Fountain, Cigarette, Outerlimits, the Buzzi boats – all the top boat manufacturers in the world. You can’t really say that for other series.”

The #77 Lucas Oil boat being used for 2008 is the Skater that took Hook to the SuperVee title in 2006, but with different rigging and, crucially, all-new Mercury engines developed specifically for Powerboat P1’s Evolution class. The engines are 9.1-litre supercharged petrol V8s, called 711 after their horsepower output. Together, they give the Skater V399 Superboat 1422hp. Mercury expects the engines to last the entire season without a rebuild.

Hook concedes that, as an independent team, it has been “incredibly hard” getting everything in place for the 2008 assault. “Last year we were Outerlimits’ factory team,” he says. “But this year we’re an independent team. Putting all that together and getting it shipped over – not just the race boat but all the spares, race truck, spare engine, tools and our people – just getting all those logistics streamlined to get over to Europe in time for the race series was very tough.”

Lucas Oil may be an American team at heart, but for the Powerboat P1 season its race shop will be based in Taunton, England. That echoes Hook’s dual citizenship – he was born in England and lives in California. Hook says that once the boat leaves for the first race in Italy, it may not come back to the race shop until after Malta, if then. Meanwhile, the race team is in daily contact with its technical base in America. It all underlines the global nature of the series.

Hook pulls no punches about his ambitions for 2008, but he’s also calmly realistic. “Ultimately the world championship is the goal,” he says. “To be practical, while I’d like to win every race, that’s not always the goal. You’ve got to keep in mind the war, not the battle. So there may be occasions where we’ll be delighted to take a third place if it keeps us in the lead for the overall series.

“It’s a long series, an endurance series. Our goal is to be consistent and reliable above all else. I know we’ll be fast, because the Skater hull is, with all my experience in vee boats, the fastest out there. And we have, in my opinion, the best engines. When you go out, you’ve got to have the best equipment. That’s been our mission and we feel we have it.”

From someone else, that might sound like fighting talk. But not from Hook, who saves his fight for the race. For him, this is a simple statement of the facts as he sees them. Which makes it all the more worrying for his rivals.

Cocktail for Nigel Hook? Don’t be too surprised if that’s the refrain at the 2008 Powerboat P1 awards dinner.