Photo courtesy of speedonthewater.com

Throughout the years, MTI has produced a multitude of amazing boats with unique themes and designs. The creativity and work that go into each creation can’t be limited and has allowed us to create several famous boats over the years. To learn more about the themed Speed Racer boat, continue reading below.

Of all the high-performance “theme boats” that were built in the 2000s, precious few stood the test of time, much less commanded top dollar at resale. That’s because no matter how well-executed—and no builder has been better at creating them than MTI in Wentzville, Mo.,—theme boats are hyper-personal expressions of a given owner’s tastes, sensibilities and imagination. As such, their appeal is inherently limited.

After purchasing Speed Racer in 2009, Bob Christie ran it in an array of poker runs and other go-fast boating events for several seasons. Photos by Tim Sharkey copyright Sharkey Images.

The greatest exception to this, though arguably so of course, is the 44-foot Speed Racer catamaran from Marine Technology Inc. Built for Missouri’s Randy Kent in 2005 (model-year 2006) and painted by Mark Morris at Visual Imagination, the MTI was themed to conjure the popular cartoon series, which was produced in Japan and originally aired in the late 1960s. For boys of the gearhead kind who grew up in that era, Speed

 Racer was “must-watch” television—to miss an episode was to be out of the adolescent-male loop.

Among those boys was Bob Christie of New Jersey, now a semi-retired businessman who worked on Wall Street and later in book publishing, as well as several other ventures during his long career. In 2009, Christie purchased the 44-footer without engines, though it did have surface drives, from Kent. Christie then tapped Ron Potter of Potter Performance Engines to build him a set of supercharged 1,100-plus-hp engines for the boat and also replaced the cat’s surface drives with Mercury Racing No. 6 units.

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Original article published on speedonthewater.com