This week’s Thunderboat Throwback Thursday expands a bit on a recent post by my friend John Woodward over on the Vintage Hydroplane Lovers Facebook page. After I read John’s posting, I came across some photos of the the 1967 U-44 Gale’s Roostertail in the ’67 APBA Yearbook that Doug Miller had gifted me, and I was inspired to find out just a bit more about a boat that was, in and of itself, a true “throwback” to a different era of hydro racing. Following the retirement of the My Sweetie and Miss Pepsi hulls in the 50s, the three point hydro design was the design of choice because of its better cornering ability and its superior straightaway speeds. By 1966, the design was arguably stretching the limits of both speed and stability. It was also arguably doing so without a tremendous amount of focus on the personal safety of the drivers who drove them. That issue became abundantly clear in the early stages of the 1966 season when four drivers were killed in three separate accidents on the Potomac and Detroit Rivers. In the wake of the deaths of Ron Musson, Don Wilson, Rex Manchester, and Chuck Thompson, some of the owners and boat builders began to think more along driver safety lines. You can see some of that thought in some of the hull designs that were tried in the years that followed those horrific accidents. One of the first, and perhaps most radical, “new” designs was the ’67 U-44 Gale’s Roostertail. In the off-season after the tragic death of their driver Chuck Thompson at the wheel of Miss Smirnoff in the Gold Cup, the Gale Enterprises team commissioned the building of a new boat that would revive the once abandoned multi-step hydro design. The thought by Joe Schoenith and his Gale team apparently was that the step design had a solid history of being more stable and thereby was inherently safer. Because the boat rode on and through the water rather than above it on an unstable cushion of air, the number of fatalities related to that hull design was nearly non-existent. The master designer of the golden era of step hydros had been John Hacker of Mt. Clemons, Michigan. In collaboration with budding designer Les Staudacher, he had created the highly successful My Sweetie hulls and also came up with the designs for the last hydro to win an unlimited event - the Dossin Brother’s Miss Pepsi. Unfortunately, Hacker had passed away in 1960 at the age of 83, leaving the Schoenith team to look to Staudacher to design and build their new boat. The relationship with the Kawkawlin, Michigan designer/builder was a solid one as Staudacher had created the designs for and/or had built the majority of the Schoenith’s previous Gale racing craft. One source I found reported that Staudacher had to start his design of the new boat from scratch and largely from memory. According to the source, Hacker had held tightly to his plans for the Pepsi and his other step boats to the point that Staudacher had only seen them on a limited basis during the construction of the boats. Another setback lay in the fact that Hacker’s plans were nowhere to be found follow his death, thus leaving Staudacher without any tangible reference point whatsoever. The result of Staudacher’s labors was a 36 foot long, 13,000 lb. modified V-bottomed step hull which only bore a slight resemblance to Hacker’s Miss Pepsi design. The new boat was much bigger than its celebrated predecessor - nearly two feet longer in fact. It also had a slightly higher profile on the water and its angles were much sharper than the Dossin’s “mahogany cigar”. The bow was noticeably more pointed and the edges more angular. In addition, the new Roostertail sported four steps rather than the three that the Pepsi had in its design. The first step was about a fourth of the length of the boat away from the bow. The second step came at near the half-way point between bow and stern. The third step was almost at the three-quarter point, and the fourth step was just ahead of where the shaft exited the hull near the boat’s transom. The new hull was also designed to support a pair of Allison engines that were placed similarly to the Pepsi, that being in a tandem configuration with the the output shafts facing a gearbox that was positioned between them. At the time it mades its first appearance in July of 67, Gale Enterprises President Lee Schoenith was quoted by the media as saying that the group’s new hull was of “revolutionary design”. “Instead of the usual three-point, air suspension hull, our hydroplane will have a four-point, V-bottom, water suspension hull,” he explained. “Although this design may give us less speed, we expect that it will be more than compensated for by better acceleration and greatly improved performance on turns.” Reports at the time reflected that it was hoped that the new design would also ease the pounding suffered by its assigned driver, young Jerry Schoenith. Jerry was one of Lee’s twin brothers, and the young driver had suffered several nagging injuries behind the wheel of the previous Gale’s Roostertail three-pointer and had missed several races as a result. The record shows that Lee was correct in his assessment that the hull would be slower. It also shows that he was a bit off the mark concerning improved turning performance and the provision of a more stable ride for Jerry. The Schoenith’s unveiled the U-44 for the first time at the 1967 UIM World Championship race on the Detroit River on the first weekend in July. Low visibility due to fog and winds ranging from four to fourteen knots greeted the boat teams as the course was set to open on Thursday. The resulting roiling swells led to a shut down the course for the entire day and prevented any qualifying whatsoever on Thursday. Conditions were only slightly improved on Friday. The temperatures were twenty degrees warmer and the visibility was nearly double at six miles, but the variable winds were roughly the same, and the day was further punctuated by periods of rain and drizzle. According to one source, the U-44 appeared to be underpowered during testing, and that Jerry took the brand new bright yellow craft out onto the course for its qualifying attempt with an eye towards making an “all out effort” to attain the minimum qualifying speed of 100 mph. It was then that things fell miserably apart. As can be seen in the attached sequence of photos from the ’67 APBA Yearbook, Schoenith began his move into the Roostertail turn. As he did so, the boat dug in and suddenly rolled violently to the right. Its inertia combined with a wall of water from the spin threw Jerry from the driver’s seat and out of the cockpit. Just as suddenly the boat hooked back to the left and the resulting wall of water tossed him back onto the boat where he landed against the rear cowling just behind the cockpit. Stunned, Schoenith rested there for a few moments before gathering himself enough to signal to the officials that he was okay. The crowd at his family’s Roostertail restaurant nearby reportedly saw this gesture and cheered loudly. Jerry then slid back into the cockpit, regained control of the twin-engined craft, was able to reduce his speed, and safely motor the big boat back to the pits. Miraculously, a medical evaluation revealed that Jerry had reportedly suffered only a shoulder injury, and that the boat suffered even less damage. Portions of the U-44 had filled with water when it spun sideways, but there was no apparent structural damage despite the strikingly violent nature of the accident. “I was traveling about 140 mph on the back stretch before I hit the turn,” Schoenith was quoted as saying in the Detroit News a day after the accident. “As I turned the bow of the boat, it nosed under, and a solid wash of water threw me out. I hit a wave and landed back in the seat sideways on my shoulder. Whew.” Not surprisingly, Jerry was done for the day, but with veteran Detroit driver Danny Foster at the helm, the team would give it another go at qualifying the Roostertail. Despite a supreme effort, Foster’s best lap recorded was only 93.586 mph and the boat failed to make the field. I remember reading somewhere that the team made some tweaks to the hull before heading west to Seattle a month later to participate in the Gold Cup. Whatever they were, the tweaks didn’t change things measuredly. The record shows that Jerry made two attempts to qualify for the race. The first was measured at just over 87 mph, and the second was just a smidgen above 88. According to Doug Ford’s account of the history of the boat in his book What Were They Thinking?, an embarrassed Joe Schoenith ordered both the Gale’s Roostertail and Miss Smirnoff teams back to Detroit, thus ending their seasons. The Smirnoff had also failed to qualify in Seattle because of a balky computerized engine system. Whatever the reason, the experiment with a step hull appears to have come to and end and that the hull was retired on the spot after its second Seattle run and never raced again. [Note: Jim Sharkey’s Hydro’s Who’s Who reports that boat was sold to an Arizona collector, but I could find no other documentation of its current whereabouts.] I remember reading somewhere that Jerry blamed team manager (and brother) Lee for making modifications to Staudacher’s plans regarding the placement of the Gale’s Roostertail propeller and the number of steps built into the boat’s bottom. This memory could be incorrect, since I (frustratingly) was not able to locate the conversation upon which I was basing the memory. [I am sure Jerry or someone else will correct me if I am wrong] It seems to me that Jerry’s criticism was that, rather than amidships (like Hacker’s placement of the shaft and prop on the My Sweetie and Miss Pepsi hulls), the Roostertail shaft and prop were located further back near the transom, pushing the ballance point of the boat to the rear and changing its turning characteristics. The extra step was said to affect the amount of the boat’s surface area in contact with the water’s surface, something that Bill Cantrell was also supposedly critical of according to another source. Unlike his temperamental experimental step hydro, Jerry would return for one more year of driving at the unlimited level, this time at the wheel of the time-tested 1965 Gale’s Roostertail hull. He would finish the ’68 season at tenth in the National High point race. Sadly, it was another year of struggle, as the team’s best finish was fourth in the Madison Governor’s Cup race and they failed to finish higher than eighth in any of their other contests that year. The good news from this story is that our friend Jerry survived that accident in Detroit and lived on to make contributions to the advancement of the sport, doing so as both an owner and as a race league promoter. For that we all can be thankful. Happy New Year, Jerry…and to all of our Hydromaniac friends. May you all enjoy a year of good health and the rewards of a lives well-lived.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:25:01 +0000
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