Here is Part 2 of this weeks Thunderboat Throwback Thursday. This part brings us from 2004 to the present and chronicles Eds trials and tribulations with the H1 Series. Part 2 - Ed Cooper Jr. - A Question of Integrity There is a rule of thumb that seems to apply to any individual or entity that engages in competition against others that when that person or entity separates itself from the rest of the competition and becomes what is considered a “dominant force” that they invariably go from being “in the hunt” to becoming “the hunted”. The theory has also seemed to be that if you can’t beat someone or something, then use rule changes or new interpretations of existing rules to “neuter” them, thus making them easier to compete with or defeat. There are many instances in the history of sport where this has happened. One such situation appears to have happened to the legendary boat builder/owner/racer Gar Wood after his historic string of winning five Gold Cups (1917-1922) and the incredible winning percentage he recorded in Gold Cup competition during that time, having won 12 of 15 Gold Cup heats conducted during the record string. The governing body of boat racing suddenly restricted engine size and outlawed boats using “step” designs or “shingles” in attempt to allow others to compete on a “level playing field” with Wood. Bernie Little’s Budweiser team also felt the “hunter” to “hunted” heat when fuel flow rules and special lane assignment rules were instituted when the wins for that team started to pile up. It appears to also be what happened to the Coopers after their successes of 2003. The boat team that was for a long time no concern to anyone when they were consistently placing fifth, sixth, or seventh now was looked at with a different eye. Because they had won half the races run in ’03, surely, the U-3 team was doing something “illegal” or their new configuration somehow had given them some kind of “unfair advantage”. Whatever the reason, rule changes and new interpretations of old rules suddenly seemed to target the Turbinator gang as they entered the 2004 campaign. The sanctioning body during that era was Hydro-Prop. They had been handed the control of the unlimited class of race boats in the middle of the 2000 season when they replaced the defunct Unlimited Hydroplane Racing Association. One of the new ruling bodys stated goals was to establish parity on the racecourse, and they did so by placing restrictions on all of the boats but they seemed to save the harshest restrictions for the most successful boats. The initial target of the new group’s goal seemed to be Bernie Little’s highly successful Miss Budweiser team. In 1999 and 2000, the T-3 and T-6 Budweiser hulls had combined to win sixteen of the twenty-one races run during the previous two seasons. They had also placed second twice and third once in the five races that they didn’t win. Few teams in the history of the sport had dominated the sport so effectively. Hydro-Prop’s Chairman Gary Garbrecht and his board of directors sought to bring parity and fan interest back to the sport by reigning in the big red Bud boats by issuing new rules during the 2001 season that restricted fuel flow to race engines and through the assigning of lanes, giving the inside lane advantage to the slower boats. The “managed competition” strategy was certainly a success in reducing the number of wins by the Bud team - they won only the opening race at Evansville that year - but it failed to keep them from winning the National High Point by more than 200 points over its nearest competitor, the team’s fifth championship in a row. While Hydro-Prop’s restrictions had improved head-to-head competition, the organization had done little or nothing to solve the other problems facing the sport. They had brought no new boats or race sponsors on board and most of the race sites were struggling to survive. By the opening of the 2004 season these problems really came home to roost. The situation was triggered by the untimely passing of Bernie Little more than a year earlier of pneumonia. The circuit had survived the 2003 season without him, but the long term effects of Little’s death were about to show themselves, and things did not bode well for Hydro-Prop’s future as a result. Without the charismatic Miss Budweiser owner to help guide and cheerlead for the sport, a void began to develop which significantly contributed to the decision by the sport’s major title sponsor to withdraw from funding the sport and the circuit’s most successful team. Anheuser-Busch, parent company of Budweiser, announced that it would no longer underwrite the sport of unlimited hydroplanes racing’s infrastructure or contribute to the sponsorship any of the races on the circuit beyond the end of the 2004 season. The St. Louis based brewing company also announced their intention to withdraw their sponsorship of the Miss Budweiser race team at the end of the season. Bernie’s son Joe had already announced his decision to retire the team at the end of the 2004 season while attending the 2003 Hydro-Prop awards banquet. Wandering into the middle of this situation, of course, was Ed Cooper Sr. and Jr. and their new red hot U-3 race boat. The situation would blow wide open with the announcement by Garbrect and the Hydro-Prop board that they were assessing fuel flow restrictions on the Cooper’s turbocharged Allison engines in response to their success in 2003. Ed Jr. contends that he was told at one time by Hydro-Prop’s leadership that fuel flow rules would never be applied to his team as long as they used piston engines. After all, the restrictions had come from the turbine owners to save their equipment from damage. Now it appeared that the Hydro-Prop leadership had gone back on their word, and the Cooper’s boat would be held to the exact same scrutiny and restrictions as the turbine teams. Ed. Jr. refused to submit to the restrictions, citing the inherent advantages of turbine versus piston power. Piston powered boats came nowhere near the power potential of the turbine boats, and it was nowhere near a level playing field. In their announcement of the fuel flow restrictions on the U-3, Hydro-Prop contended that the restrictions were necessary to “even the playing field” even though no races had yet been run for the 2004 season that would show a need to reign in the U-3 from “dominating” the circuit. Just as the U-3 team was poised to have their day in the sun, Hydro-prop had effectively covered that sun with an administrative bank of clouds, and this did not sit well with the Coopers - or several others in and out of the sport for that matter. It was not surprising then that the U-3 team announced their intention to sit out the 2004 season unless the fuel restrictions were removed. What may have been most surprising to the Coopers was that others stepped forward to support the team’s decision and to stand up to Hydro-Prop. In solidarity with the Coopers, Evansville race volunteer Tom Sawyer and others stepped up to help initiate a revolt against Hydro-Prop. Out of the Sawyer led revolt came the decision by three of the circuit’s seven race sites to proceed with holding their races without Hydro-Prop’s sanctions and to therefore allow the U-3 team to participate. First was Evansville’s Thunder on the Ohio, and it was followed later in the season by the Columbia Cup at the Tri-Cities, Washington and Bayfair in San Diego, California. The back story was that the three sites refused to pay their sanctioning fees unless Hydro-Prop guaranteed the number of boats that would show for each race. They also wanted Hydro-Prop to pay the sites a penalty if the minimum number of boats did not materialize at their races. They also demanded increased prize money. Prize money had been frozen in 1998, and it was felt that money was being siphoned off by Garbrecht to pad his own pockets rather that returning it to the boat teams. Hydro-Prop refused to capitulate to the rebel’s demands, so the three sites broke away and raced anyway. The resulting season of turmoil and drama did nothing to help Hydro-Prop’s situation. During the off-season, the owners and race organizers created a new organization - the American Boat Racing Association (ABRA) - to oversee the sport. Sam Cole was chosen as the new ABRA Chairman and the new board of directors was purposely divided evenly between the boat owners and race organizers, and for the first time in several years politics did not take central stage. Because of the unsanctioned status of the three races it entered in 2004, the U-3 scored no points toward the National High Point Championship. They did place second at Evansville and San Diego to the T-5 and T-6 Budweiser hulls and a fifth place at the Tri-Cities, validating its new status as a contender. A high point of their abbreviated season was the setting of a new record for a piston-powered boat on a 2-1/2-mile course at the Tri-Cities with a speed of 161.146 mph. With the restrictions removed and a brand new race organization in place for 2005, the Cooper team prepared the boat in the offseason for its return to sanctioned competition. The results were mixed, with three top-three finishes in the first four races , but the team stumbled in the final three contests to the middle of the pack or lower. They finished with a fourth place overall in the National High Point race. Tragedy struck Ed Jr. and the team in the ensuing offseason. Ed Sr. passed away at age 86 at a Madison hospital in mid-December. Deeply saddened, the team carried on with Ed. Jr. now alone at the helm. The 2006 season saw the U-3 improve to third place overall in the High Point race and they notched two second place finishes in the process. From there, the team seemed to briefly lose a bit of its competitive edge. 2007 saw the U-3 Cooper Racing team slip to seventh in the High Point standings because of engine and equipment issues. 2008 was not much better with the team’s best finish being seventh at San Diego and a disappointing tenth place overall. 2009 was more of the same with a ninth place High Point finish while brought on by two disappointing tenth place finishes. There was hope though as the team put together back to back third place finishes. There probably could have been another third (or even higher) had the team opted made the trek to Qatar for the season ending inaugural race. As it has turned out, the U-3 team’s third place finish at the 2009 Evansville’s Thunder on the Ohio would be its last at a sanctioned unlimited race. By the start of the 2010 season, the ABRA had given way to the newly renamed H1 Unlimited Series. Coinciding with the season ending race in Doha, Qatar in November of 2009, Chairman Sam Cole announced that the American Boat Racing Association was being rebranded under the title of H1 Unlimited Series. The U-3 team had opted not to travel to the Arabian Peninsula for the Qatar race, so the next opportunity for the boat to be raced was the 2010 race at Madison. Unknown to public, the U-3’s arrival on the shores of the Ohio River for the 60th annual Governor’s Cup race carried with it a good deal of tension over some off season wrangling with H1 officials over a proposed rule change that had been offered by Sam Cole. Cole’s proposed rules change sought to separate testing time from qualifying, and Ed Jr. had argued that this diminished the time available for his team to properly prepare. The owners and the H1 Board of Directors had responded to Cole’s proposal by passing resolutions several times during the period from January to June 2010 to keep the 2009 testing and qualifying rules in place and unchanged. On the Saturday previous to the Madison race, in fact, the H1 owners had once again unanimously agreed to keep the 2009 rules for qualifying in place, and for this reason the U-3 team had agreed to go to Madison. With his disagreement with H1 still hanging in the air from the off-season, Cooper and the U-3 team arrived in Madison and Jimmy King easily qualified the boat on Friday afternoon with a speed of143.241 mph. Unfortunately, the big turbocharged Allison was damaged in the process. During the driver’s meeting later on Friday, simmering tensions between Cooper and Cole boiled over when the chairman announced a new administrative interpretation of the testing and qualifying time rule and that there would be only Friday afternoon qualifying for the Madison race. Cole was reportedly “reinterpreting” a rule from the H1 rule book which clearly stated that a total of six hours were to be reserved for testing and qualifying for each race. Ed Jr. saw it instead as the beginning of the end, and that Cole’s new “interpreting” of the rules was itself a violation of the rule book. “Basically that rule changed, and it was a rule that I wasn’t going to go along with, so I quit” Ed. Jr. said of his decision to withdraw in protest. Cole had eliminated all qualifying time on Saturday in deference for an air show being sponsored by the Madison organizers . The take away of on-the-water time angered Ed Jr. because he reportedly had been told the week before that at the Madison race that no such rule changes would be made. No Saturday testing time also meant no time to get a new engine race ready for the U-3. Ed. Jr. voiced his refusal to submit to the rule change by interpretation, but Cole and H1 Referee Mike Noonan refused to budge on the issue. Cooper responded by withdrawing his boat from competition. Cole defended the rule change in several public statements following the decision, saying that H1 worked with each race site and each site had different offerings. If that included carving out time for air shows from the race schedule then so be it. The holdout by Cooper and the U-3 GoRacing team has now held for nearly five full unlimited seasons. During that time, Ed jr. has stayed with his initial decision, ignoring efforts by some to entice him back with more money and assistance with sponsors. “Either you follow the rules or you don’t,” Copper said in one news report. “If a guy has the ability to change the rules at a whim, I’m not gonna do this. It is a matter of integrity.” “My whole real fight is with Sam Cole,” he added. “I’m sorry that it got to this point, but I’m really comfortable with this decision.” According to another media report at the time of the withdrawal, Ed Jr. was also upset with Referee Noonan. It was said that Cooper felt that Noonan didn’t do his job in enforcing the rule book as it was written. At the heart of the matter was Cooper’s contention that his team was unfairly being discriminated against by the H1 leadership by what he saw as arbitrary rule changes. In his eyes, in order to compete and win races, he needed a fair and level playing field and the current rules and the way they were being interpreted and enforced did not allow his race team to have that. This past summer, Ed. Jr. did thaw his position just enough to allow a June 13-14 exhibition race in Evansville, Indiana between his U-3 and one of the H1 turbine hulls. He worked with an event promotion team from a group called Nauticpromo and its Managing Director Sian Holley to set up the race in Evansville and with exhibition race organizers from a group called Evansville Hydroplanes LLC. Sian’s husband, Dave Holley is the sponsor of the Shannon and Scott Raney’s U-11 Miss Peters and May which was the other participant in the exhibition. The exhibition came off without a hitch, with the “3” winning all of the heats over the U-11. the rubber match exhibition heat over the U-3. The event was well attended and may well portend that there will be a return of a fully sanctioned Evansville race to the H1 schedule in the near future. In the wake of the Evansville exhibition, two of the 2014 race sites reportedly approached the Cooper team about coming to race at their sites as well, but that didn’t work out. “We told them that we would come and participate in an exhibition like we did in Evansville,” said Ed. Jr. “They could pick a turbine boat…or they could let the fans pick one on the internet, whatever they wanted to do…and we’d do a race like that…but that I wasn’t interested in participating in any H1 activity.” Ultimately the race sites backed off and decided against the proposed exhibitions. It is not known what the decisions were based on, but Ed Jr. felt that it likely was because the H1 leadership wasn’t interested in such an event happening. When I interviewed Ed Jr. in late August of this year, he reiterated that he would not consider returning to any race sanctioned by the H1 Series until Sam Cole was no longer involved and that Cole was not the only obstacle. “They have to fix all those things that drove me off,” he said. “In the beginning it wasn’t the personality of the person that drove me off, it was the actions of that person. It was the actions, the rules, and the procedures that were, for me, just unacceptable. So (for us) to participate with H1, not only does some of the personnel need to change, but it has to be fair to all the competitors not just for a few of them. To Ed Jr. that means being treated the same as everyone else in the H1 Series, and not being singled out just because his boat is piston powered. For him, the rule of thumb has always been that the reason that you run in any race is because you don’t know what the outcome will be, and to reimagine rules to make the chance of reaching that dream of winning less possible for anyone is being unfairly discriminatory. In his view, that attitude needs to show signs of change as well in order for Cooper and the U-3 to return. Cooper did say that he would be open to considering coming to Coeur d’Alene for an exhibition during the 2015 Diamond Cup on Lake Coeur d’Alene, a special appearance that race organizer Doug Miller has proposed, but only if the conditions were correct and that it was worth his while (and that of his team) to make the trek to Idaho. Of course things have a way of changing rapidly sometimes. Indeed, before I could get this piece done for your enjoyment, the winds of change blew through the H1 leadership with hurricane force. That change came on Saturday, September 13th, when it was announced that Cole had stepped down as H1 chairman. No reason was given at the time for the decision, but there were apparently internal issues that involved Cole’s handling of relations with race sites and race teams, as well as his administration of the rules of the sport. Cole was replaced on an interim basis by the recently retired legendary driving champion Steve David, one of the winningest drivers in the history of the unlimited sport. David has pledged to be transparent and fair in his dealings with the rules, the owners, and the race sites in an effort to restore the sport’s image in the eyes of spectators. Time will tell whether Cole’s decision to retire and David’s ascendency to the helm of H1 will spur a return to unlimited racing by the U-3 team in 2015. Early reports show that Ed Jr. is leaning in that direction. Cole’s departure certainly satisfies at least part of the criteria that he has consistently set forth for that to happen. As a man of integrity, Cooper will likely live up to his word. Stay tuned as we all await further developments.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:28:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015