One more Molinari boat with Mercury power..1983-PV-VE Race, Driver Alberto Fioretta.
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One more Molinari boat with Mercury power..1983-PV-VE Race, Driver Alberto Fioretta.
Not really sure about this Saffa/Molinari/Johnson V-6..Been told it is Renato driving in Bristol 1979..but I did never see him race Johnson..only Evinrude cowlings??
I was in Bristol 1979..The first year Merc raced the T-4 and Renato raced a 3 liter Evinrude..The driver in this picture must be someone else..Maybe Bob Hering and it looks like the old style cross-flow Johnson.
Maybe the year of this picture is 1977 or -78.
You are right Steve..It is Bob Hering in Bristol 1977..
Bob Hering drove that same Molinari boat in the 1977 London Thames race he was lyng 2nd when he submarined it Molinari himself ran a 20ft boat for that race only and lead the race until he retired with lower unit failure they did not break but the props hitting driftwood in the water bent the driveshafts that happened to all of the omc boats then they ran out of spare lower units.Mercury had a good supply of lower units and managed to keep the few rigs left running to the end of the race.Just a little story about Bob Hering to finish with after the Thames race Bob came with a sprint boat to a 1 hour race in holland he came alone with a few of Molinaris crew and the head of OMC Racing in europe Paul Kalb had just been told the 2.5 crossflow engines could be reved out to 8400 revs for shorter races so when Hering heard this he jumped in his car to find a garage workshop with the tools to work his magic on his own prop.
Brad Miller bought a Molinari that we were told, later, was a boat that Bob Hering "STUFFED" in Paris, 1977. Does anyone know if Bobby Hering "STUFFED" in Paris also? I'm think the boat we bought might have been Bobby's boat from England. Fred Hauenstein and I drove this boat to win the Parker 9 Hour, 1978!
I'll add, I don't think Bob worked on a propeller of his own until he went to work making them up in Seattle area...Renato was REAL close to Record Props in those days....and Record props "kicked ***" on most propellers in those days!
Paris 1977
Gene Thibodaux drove this in Mod 50. I bought it from him in 1983, ran SE in the new league
but the boat didn't run with a 75, was glued to the water (bad acceleration) even after I added
a lift strake. Bill Kelly, then out of Seattle, had the sister boat, he ran a Super Strangler and won his class at
Little Rock where I may have managed a 4th in SE by exercising 'driving skills' in the slowest boat on the
course. Those were the real days of boat racing, the 1970s and 1980s.
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