On a clear Manhattan afternoon, driving the nine miles up the West Side Highway from the Chelsea Piers to the George Washington Bridge can rob 50 minutes from your life. Maybe with luck and deft lane changing, you’d manage it in 40 minutes. This is one reason that, despite Michigan’s relative dearth of Jewish delis, Car and Driver editors left the Park Avenue office for good in 1978, trading clogged New York parkways for underfilled Ann Arbor parking lots. But, good God, had we only raced boats on the Hudson.
Pier 60 is where we met the Outerlimits SV43. By any description, the SV43 is a floating Koenigsegg Agera. Its 43-foot-long body is made entirely of carbon fiber. Behind the enclosed canopy is a twin-turbocharged 9.0-liter Mercury Racing V-8. Behind that V-8 is a second twin-turbocharged 9.0-liter Mercury Racing V-8. Behind that V-8 is a localized hurricane, the sort of ocean-spewing fury caused only by navy jets and speedboats with 2700 horsepower. With all that at our backs, we leave the piers and approach the GW Bridge in 10 minutes. Maybe five.
“There’s not a much easier way to commute around the city,” says Dan Kleitz, steering and manning the throttle at a medium pace. “This is the ultimate Uber.”
This SV43 is also the world’s fastest V-hull speedboat, faster than anything rival Cigarette Racing built in the 1980s for Miami drug runners, and faster still than that Florida shop’s latest tie-ups with Mercedes-AMG. In 2014, during a run timed and sanctioned by the American Power Boat Association, the SV43 hit a two-way average of 180.47 mph over a standing kilometer on North Carolina’s Pamlico River. That was with twin 1650s, whereas today it runs a more comfortable pair of Mercury 1350s.
Outerlimits manufactures a dozen speedboats each year at its Bristol, Rhode Island, headquarters, ranging from 29-foot base models to 48-foot catamarans and 52-footers with air-conditioned below-deck lounges. Its customers hail from the Missouri Ozarks to the Middle East, all of them bored by hypercars, yachts, jet planes, and whatever other riches have dulled their senses. The SV43 has a nine-foot beam and weighs about 9000 pounds. It is a million-dollar toy like no other, a racing machine that gulps a gallon of fuel every mile. An Agera won’t seat five. And although one owner tried, a Bugatti Veyron is not seaworthy.
It’s a long drop into the SV43’s cabin. Once settled into the carbon-fiber bucket seats, there’s no way to bail out. We’re committed to a padded cell lined in diamond-quilted leather and microsuede. Mercifully, with the two roof hatches removed, there’s more in common with a Ferrari 488 Spider: the sunken seating position pressed against a vertical firewall, plenty of sky, and generous legroom across the flat floor. The dashboard does its best impression of an early-1990s Lamborghini Diablo, except for the steering-column mounts on both sides. Miniature Fox Racing shocks support the front seats with three inches of travel. Rear passengers like myself just bounce.
We’re with two friends and we’re all unbuckled, since Kleitz says he’ll do only 100 mph. The dual V-8s—staggered to lower the center of gravity—emit a straight-piped rumble as we putt-putt out of the dock. Unlike the case on I-95, picking the center line is the best way to avoid Hudson traffic. The kayakers and ferries keep to the sides, and the NYPD has better things to do than enforce a speed limit, in part because there isn’t one.
Kleitz gooses the throttle as he gets the SV43 on plane. We’re riding a literal wave of torque, the roar of wind and wake shouting over the bellowing V-8s. Like the sound of the 488 Spider accelerating in top gear, all you hear are turbos whooshing and hissing. The engines are practically loafing—at an indicated 108 mph, they’re turning 4500 rpm and a giant roostertail flings out the backside. There’s more power available, a lot more, that Kleitz isn’t tapping.
Captain Sully Sullenberger landed U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson at 143 mph, so it’s not implausible to picture the SV43 taking flight. Outerlimits thought about that, and while the SV43 is unshakable as its bow rises and clears the chop, there’s our underlying fear that some gust will toss us backward and splinter our bodies into 1000 pieces. But out on the river, at speed, separated from the concrete and eight million people, the sensation is singular. So alone, freer than Jerry Seinfeld exiting his Porsche garage on the Upper West Side, that sort of freedom on which Car and Driver was founded in the first place. Maybe we could have stayed.
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