Luxury motor yacht manufacturer Maritimo’s international race team, Maritimo Racing, has had a year of highs and lows on the national and international race circuit in the 2018 race series and is well positioned to be a competitive force here and overseas in 2019.
Maritimo Racing’s Andrew Willaton and Steve Jellick rounded out the year with an outright win in the Upper Hawkesbury Power Boat Club’s Bridge to Bridge event. Maritimo Racing ran in partnership with Team 3 Offshore powerboat racing using Maritimo engines, propellers and drivers.
Andrew Willaton and Steve Jellick claimed the offshore class, and outright victory with a blistering time of 31m 29s – the fastest time in the last five years. Maritimo Racing hold the offshore class record at 30m 26s set in 2012 with Tom Barry-Cotter and Ross Willaton in the cockpit, but have yet to run a sub-30 minute time, or close in on the overall record of 29m 47s set in 2008.
Barry-Cotter has stated they will announce 2019 Bridge to Bridge plans and whether Maritimo racing will campaign its own boat or partner again with Team 3 Offshore Powerboat Racing later in 2019. Maritimo has used the past year to ramp up the testing and fine tuning of its race boats for a major assault on the local and international series next year.
Maritimo racing was involved in a high speed accident in the season opening race of the 2018 Union International Motonautique XCAT world championships in Fujairah, UAE in April which ended its 2018 campaign.
And in the shortened Australian Offshore Superboat Championships the team encountered mechanical issues at the opening round of the season which impacted the team’s mathematical chances of retaining the national championship.
“The opening rounds of both series we compete in saw 2018 championship aspirations crushed from the opening rounds, so our strategy shifted toward focus on development for 2019 during this year,” said Tom Barry-Cotter.
“We have used the season to concentrate on power, reliability and experimenting with setups. As we are always pushing to be at the front, we sometimes have to take known/safe options in terms of setups, but this year because we had nothing to lose we tried lots of different setups to gather data that we wouldn’t typically have tried in other years. This will pay huge dividends for us in 2019.”
“Our new R36 is now performing even better than the well established 40 ft catamaran that we’ve campaigned since 2012 and it performs in all conditions and importantly is still being improved.”
Maritimo Racing are also in the middle of constructing a new R30 catamaran destined for the UIM XCAT World Championship in 2019. The R30 XCAT in construction has been designed by Maritimo and will be constructed using the latest advancements in carbon fibre technology.
“There has been heavy design consideration of acceleration and handling to suit modern course designs and heavy analysis of the aerodynamic properties of the hull and deck.”
The latest cockpit safety design is currently undergoing panel deflection and failure testing in liaison with the UIM. The latest generation cockpit has increased head clearance and crash deflection protection engineered into the design and construction.
Barry-Cotter said much of what Maritimo racing learned on the international and national race circuits eventually was incorporated into the company’s range of production motor yachts.
“We are the only production motor yacht manufacturer with a dedicated race team and that gives us a great advantage over the competition,” he said. “The knowledge we gain through racing gives us a distinct advantage in terms of staying at the leading edge of production motor yacht manufacturing.”
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