Maritimo Racing ready to bounce back in 2019

Its season pretty much ended in the first corner of the first race of the X-Cat World Championships in the United Arab Emirates early this year when the Maritimo factory boat and another Australian racer touched hulls at high speed, leaving driver Ross Willaton and co-pilot Tom Barry-Cotter upside down in the water in an incident colloquially dubbed the Bummer Down Under.

However, rather than face a ground-up rebuild and force it to write the season off, Barry-Cotter said the incident would allow the Gold Coast-based race team to come back harder and stronger in 2019.

“It didn’t work out real well for us,” Barry-Cotter said last week at a Maritimo meeting looking back at the year that was for the brand. “This was quite a scary accident for us, to be honest.

“Roscoe … he was in ICU [intensive care] for five days following this accident – he was, unfortunately, knocked unconscious, and my efforts to get him out weren’t successful.

“So I had the divers yelling at me for me to get out so they could get him by the time the cockpit was completely full.

“So it wasn’t an enjoyable experience. The boat unfortunately, by the time it got back here to Australia and we started getting into repairs we realised pretty quickly that the boat was totalled.”

However, rather than lose focus by chasing down missing points for the rest of the season, Maritimo Racing made the decision to use the remaining races to tweak the X-Cat and come back even stronger in 2019.

“As soon as the boat we put the design team to work and got building and designing inot the development of a new R30 X-Cat to campaign in 2019.

“So that plug has been finished for that and the hull model has been completed, and they’re just laying up the deck mould over at Hope Harbour right now.”

The new R30 should start looking like a finished boat early next year when the calendar for the 2019 X-Cat season is revealed.

Unfortunately for Maritimo Racing, the troubling start to its global campaign was repeated for its pair of entries in the Australian Offshore Superboat Championships, where the same part failed on both boats at the season opener. That one poor result, just weeks in the wake of the X-Cat crash, sealed the deal for the rest of Maritimo’s season.

“The way the points system works is you get almost three times the points just for crossing the start line as you do to win, so both boats unfortunately having this issue right before the race and not getting to the start line, we really shot ourselves in the foot for the championship,” Barry-Cotter said.
“Maritimo Racing went home from round one really with its tail between its legs,” he said.

However, the team was able to bounce back from the disappointment, turning the year into a positive.

“We changed the strategy for the year, instead of just going all out to win the championship when we already thought it was pretty much out of reach, we looked to building for next year.”

That meant Maritimo Racing’s focus was working on “all of the aces we would have up our sleeve”, Barry-Cotter said.

“Traditionally when you’re running for a championship you run what you know and you’re going for a safe,consistent way of approaching each race.

“With the two boats being out of championship contention we could really experiment and try some things and if it didn’t work out, that wasn’t going to be the end of the world.

“That has really put us in a good stead for next year – we’ve uncovered some things, found things we hadn’t known before just because we hadn’t tried setups like that in the past.”

Barry-Cotter said the two boats allowed Maritimo to “go to each end of the spectrum” with its set-ups, giving a diverse approach to race conditions.

“It’s put us in a really good spot for next year,” he said. “We’ve found a lot of power … we’ve found a lot of handling things with the balance of the boat, and some reliability things as well, so we think reliability and pace next year is going to be spot-on.”

In the final round of this season, Maritimo Racing’s Aussie boats took out the top two spots, validating the work the race team had done.

“It’s a good position to head into next year with,” Barry-Cotter said.

Meanwhile, the Maritimo Racing X-Cat will benefit from a “mule hull” located in Australia that will help the team optimise its 8.3-litre V8 engine throughout the 2020 season.

The engine will sit on a dyno bench here as engineers trial tunes and modifications that will aim to squeeze more performance from the circa 750hp powerplants. Any gains made here can then be rolled out to the race engines overseas.

Season 2019 is already shaping up to be much better for Maritimo Racing – and it will only have to get its boats past the first corner to show it.