In association with The Vintage Hydroplanes The Vintage Builders Guide Part I

Most of the hull designs on these pages are ones that were successful during the time period of from 1950 to 1975. Opinions vary about their successfulness, but the fact that people were trying anything that would give their particular hull design a competitive advantage is historically worth mentioning. Books could be written on certain designers such as Henry Lauterbach, who has over 200 documented hulls he designed and built over a 40 year period. Some builder/designers handcrafted less than 2 or 3 hulls during their lifetime. Varying backgrounds of each of these builders probably played a role in the way they were built, but one thing they all must of had in common was a love of woodworking. Each builder must have believed that their hull would have an uniqueness of special characteristics that would make their hull faster and different from the others. There are abundant stories you will hear about the characteristics of a particular hull.

Different theories on such items as the placement of the sponsons on the hull, angles on the chines, the beam width at the front, middle, and aft section and how those dimensions flow into the right combination for speed in the straightaways and the turns. Each hull would be tweaked trying to find the ultimate agility, responsiveness, and total overall handling needed by the driver to be the first across the line. Some hull ideas worked, some did not. Prior to the late 1960's, the round nose 3-point hydroplane design was dominant. This design was basically patterned off the Slo-mo-shun IV that Ted Jones designed and Anchor Jensen built. This hydroplane shattered the world water speed record, then the egos of its competition when in debuted in the unlimited ranks in 1952. From then on, all the style designs of hydroplanes basically adopted this design. Even the stepped,  displacement V-hulls (the original "hydroplane") which were an improvement over the conventional V-hulls, with having their "notched" out steps in the bottom of the hull, were no match for the 3-point hydroplane.
This style of hull would literally fly over the water and therefore eliminate the water resistance problem. With their propeller about 50% out of the water, huge amounts of water would be displaced into the air behind the racing craft creating the famous roostertail that was associated with these hydroplanes. With most round nose hydroplanes, the motor was in the front and the driver was seated behind the motor in the rear of the hull with the drive shaft running underneath the driver.  No seat belts were worn by the drivers, with the thinking that in case of a blowover, if would be wiser to be thrown from the hull, than to be strapped into a wood craft that could literally disintegrate upon contact with the water.