H1 Annual Awards on UStream – Tonight!

The H1 Unlimited Annual Awards Ceremony will take place this evening, live from the Westin in Seattle.   You can watch it live here:

(UPDATE: a recording of the event is now available!)

This is Unlimited Hydroplane Racing’s night to shine! Enjoy the replay of the annual awards banquet.  Then, continue reading below to compare what you saw with some more substantial topics of conversation.

Any annual awards banquet is certainly a time to share rubber chicken and listen to acceptance speeches, and I’m sure this will be no different.  I haven’t watched one before, nor have I attended, so for those of you who will be in the audience, I hope your chicken will not have died in vain.

While the banquet may be fun, it’s the results of the annual meeting that will be interesting. As someone who is new to the sport, I have a different perspective than those of you who really know your stuff.  How about I ask a few rookie questions:

• Starts     How can they make them more consistent? Rule changes may be in order to prevent the seriously contentious start of the final heat in Doha, where 3 boats were determined to have jumped the gun after the heat was over. There must be a way of “recording” in an official manner, how the start unfolded.
• Equipment     Will they announce that a start clock will be used at every race, including Seattle and Doha?
• Safety     Will they institute new methods of identifying course judge and patrol boats?  Even a simply dune buggy flag atop a fishing pole, let alone high tech flashing beacons with high mast flags, could have prevented the accident like they had in Madison in 2011 where a hydro ran over a patrol boat.
• Consistency     Will the start procedure be changed to a format that will be used at ALL races? Protocol such as assigned lanes, lane assignment picked by draw, fight for lane, of course have varying ranges of safety and crowd appeal, but at least a decision to use the same process at each race would be a step in the right direction.

Any sport benefits from having easy-to-follow procedures and rules applied in a consistent manner. Unlimited Hydroplane Racing is such a wonderful sport, but consider just how much it could be improved with a few simple (or at times not-so-simple) changes like these. I am not naive enough to think my observations will change anything, but there are a lot of people who are much closer to the sport that can influence what I might suggest are “common sense” decisions.

Here’s the press release H1 published last year citing rule changes for 2011 – I’m sure we all hope they step up again.

As experienced fans of this exciting sport, I’m sure you have considerably more things on your mind for the annual meeting. What are some of the other improvements you would like to see to the sport? I’m probably overlooking the obvious, but I want the not-so-obvious as well!