With the Sarasota Grand Prix having faded into the sunset after the 2024 season, July is officially drought-season for offshore racers. The next World Powerboat Racing Association-sanctioned race is the XINSURANCE Great Lakes Grand Prix August 1-3. The next American Power Boat Association-sanctioned Midwest Challenge, the second event in Monster Energy Triple Crown Series.
Offshore racers are by nature a devoted, competitive bunch and they cherish their cockpit time. It doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come cheap. They do it because they love it.
But what might surprise you to know is that many if not most of them—at least among the racers I know and I know a few—appreciate the month-long break.
Why?
First, the mid-summer heat makes being strapped into a raceboat cockpit next to a sweaty teammate less than comfy. Weather-wise, the former Sarasota event was among the most miserable events of any given season for drivers, throttlemen and crew members.
Second, offshore racers have families and friends and jobs—you know, lives—outside the cockpit. When the season resumes in August, it’s packed with events that don’t wrap up until the last race of the Key West World Championships in early November. Teams often travel with their families to early-season races, but from late-August through early November pesky details such as kids going to school make family trips more challenging.
So whatever summer free-time racers have with their kin-folk gets packed into July.
“To be honest, I always dreaded Sarasota with the extreme heat and the fact that it was on for the July 4 weekend,” explained Myrick Coil, the driver for the Monster Energy/M CON team. “Every year, we missed the Fourth of July at Lake of the Ozarks, which is pretty epic.”
Like Coil, Monster Energy/M CON team owner and throttleman is a family man above all else. This month, he said, he gets to devote his time to his wife, Lindsey, and their children—and pleasure-boating on the Central Missouri waterway the Kansas-based gentlemen he and his family call their home-water.
“In July, I’m going to become a professional bass fisherman,” Miller said, then laughed.
He certainly has the right cockpit-mate to lead him. Coil is an accomplished, tournament-caliber bass angler.
“For the record, he’s never asked me to join him,” Miller quipped, then chuckled again.
Perhaps that will change before August erases the opportunity. Regardless, like so many of their fellow racers, Miller and Coil will savor their time off the racecourse this month.