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Victory Team now eye the 38th Annual Key West World Championships

Chris Davies on 2nd October 2018

Dubai’s Victory Team has vouched to build on the positives from the team’s debut at the Super Boat International race held in Clearwater, Florida last weekend.

Victory Team fielded a two boat team, Salem Al Adidi / John Tomlinson, and Eisa Al Ali / Gary Ballough, competing in the Superboat Unlimited class before the race came to a premature end due to the intrusion of a swimmer onto the course.

The penultimate round in Clearwater was meant to be a dress rehearsal for Victory Team’s debut at the 38th Annual Key West World Championships in November.

Up against Steve Curtis and James Sheppard in Miss Geico, the two boats from Victory Team remained competitive behind the likes of Wake Effects and DF Young.

As the race progressed, Victory 3 started gaining on DF Young and a possible podium finish on their debut, but in a bizarre turn of events, a stray swimmer ventured onto the course and the race had to be cut short with eight laps completed.

Huraiz Bin Huraiz, Chairman of Board of Directors at Victory Team commented after the curtailed race:

At the end of the day our participation was important to the sport and to us as well as we needed to know where exactly we stand as a world-class team.
From the start we knew the race would be tough as some of the powerboats here (in Clearwater) had much more horse power than us.
Our boats have between 2,000 and 2,200 hp whereas most of the other boats have close to 3500 hp, so it was always going to be an uneven competition.

However, new regulations from next season will see all boats have a mandatory power range of 2,200 hp maximum.

Financially, it would not have been the right for us to change the engines.
We are aware we have the ultimate engines that in fact will be made mandatory for all boats from next year.

Ultimately, this has been a great learning experience for all of us.

We can only get better from here.
We had to find out where we stand, and I think we were competitive today.
The next one is the big one and I am sure our boats will fare much better as the conditions there (Key West) are better suited for the package we have.

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