No one gets paid for competing in the Lake of The Ozarks Shootout. Driven by simple passion for speed on the water, competitors from all over the country travel to the Central Missouri waterway—as they will August 29-30—in the hope of snagging top honors in their assorted classes.
But even if that doesn’t happen, they really compete for the love of seeing how fast they can go in a relatively short distance.
The 32-footer is almost ready for its Lake of the Ozarks Shootout debut.
A fan-favorite among Shootout fans, Tyler Crockett has been absent from competition for several years. During the 2021 event in his open-cockpit, 25-foot V-bottom, he reached 132-mph on the three-quarter-mile course and notched another place in Shootout history.
Set by Canadian Thomas Weigl during the 2023, the current single-engine V-bottom Shootout record is 135 mph.
Done with the particularly risky business of running high speeds in a small open-cockpit V-bottom, Crockett bought a canopied 32-foot Phantom V-bottom and went to work. But combined with making a live through his engine-building business in Ruby, Mich., and his passions for automobile drag-racing and offshore, his best-laid plans of having the boat ready to compete kept hitting the wall of limited time.
This time around, Crockett is the most confident he’s ever been about competing in the 38th annual event later this month.
“It’s looking really good here,” Crockett said. “The wiring is 95-percent complete, and my wiring guy is coming back Friday to button everything up.
“Everything is about 95-percent done,” he continued. “The last thing I have to do is put the windows in it. I didn’t want them to get scratched by the guys climbing all over it.”
Fueled by alcohol, the supercharged engine produces 3,000 hp.
Crockett built the boat’s alcohol-fueled engine, which boasts Alan Johnson Performance Engineering 481-X Stage IV cylinders heads and a crank-driven ProCharger super-charger, from scratch. Using a creative combination of an SCS crash-box, an SCS drop-box and a Mercury No. 6 drive, the boat has right-hand propeller rotation.
Crockett’s plan is to test the 32-footer with a “stock” propeller in about a week before he heads to the Lake of the Ozarks. Once there, he’ll pick up a new custom-made wheel from locally based Hering Propellers.
“Right now, the engine is making 3,000 hp with 40 pounds of boost,” he explained. “We’ll have to see how it handles, but it should run over 150 mph. My goal is 150.
“My plan is to turn it down to 6,000 rpm and run at 100-110 most of the way down the course, then get on it,” he added. “We’ll see how that goes. But I think it will be enough to run 150.”