Originally Posted by
T2x
No it wasn't Dick, I met him a few times, but it could have been one of his guys. Freddie Fincham and I were pretty close in those days and he was constantly trying to find an older prop for the Miles. Bob Patterson worked on it as well, to no avail. Bottom line, I never got that thing propped out and hated it....... By the way, I barrel rolled the b*tch the following morning at Picton in testing and ran the race with one side of the boat duct taped back together.
Mine was undriveable, except in rough water, where the chop "spanked" the lope out of it and gave it reasonable acceleration. The day before I flipped it in NJ as shown in the pictures above, it actually ran pretty good on a snotty course in North Carolina. I ran for 1/2 an hour with Buck Thornton in a see saw battle and basically had him on the straights..... The turns were another story. The bloody Miles actually rolled up on its inward hull side in one memorable maneuver which makes sense if you have too much blade area and torque transfer going on. WE actually wasted the time required to convert the thing from a T2 to a T2x and the fun really began then as we had even more excess torque to play with......
Merc quickly provided a string of Molinaris as a gesture of peace and they rode and handled like sportcars compared to the feeling of sliding downhill backwards in a wheel barrow that the Miles provided.
Sorry to go on and on about that P.O.S., but of the dozens of hulls I raced, I can honestly say that was the only one I ever hated. I often referred to it as " a British thing, from the people who gave us warm beer and won World War 2".
T2x
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