1948 APBA Gold Cup
Detroit River, Detroit MI, August 28, 1948
21 Craft Entered In Gold Cup Today
DETROIT, Mich., Aug. 27 [1948] Twenty-one of the fastest speed boats the regatta world has ever known and constituting the largest entry fleet of the forty-four years of Gold Cup history are tonight stored and guarded in Detroit River berths, slips and boat wells awaiting tomorrow's running of America's ninety-mile classic.
Following a three-hour contest board and drivers' meeting this afternoon at the Detroit Yacht Club when positions were drawn for the two qualifying heats, some of the craft spent the rest of the hot, humid day on practice spins to get the "feel" of the three-mile racing oval between Belle Isle and the Detroit mainland. Others, shrouded in the mystery their owners like to effect before a Gold Cup event, have been polished pampered, tuned and readied enough and were hidden under tarpaulins.
This year's record number of challengers for the famous bauble, known as the Gold Cup, forced Commodore Charles E. Sorensen and his committees of the Detroit International Regatta Association to hold a lottery this noon and require owners of the expensive boats to draw for places. Gold Cup rules stipulate that no more than twelve can compete in any one of the three thirty-wile heats.
Draw for Heats
Accordingly, ten of the twenty-one entrants drew slips out of Commander Charles F. Chapman's hat. The draw assigned ten participants to a qualifying first that will be gunned on its way at 1:05 tomorrow afternoon and eleven others to start their first thirty miles at 1:45.
They will race against time instead of against one another. The fastest twelve in this split first heat will go on, if still afloat and in one piece, to the second thirty miles at 3:25 and then to the third and final thirty miles at 5:02.
No sports spectacle is the world, not even excepting the Indianapolis Memorial Day auto racing, Yankee Stadium baseball or English Rugby or Cup cricket draws anything like the 400,000 persons that a Detroit Gold Cup classic attracts. No sport is as expensive. On some of the twenty-one nautical recreations tomorrow sums higher than $100,000 have been lavished by men who could and did afford it.
Probably as much as $250,000 have gone into Tempo VI, the favorite now-owned by Guy Lombardo, who won the Gold Cup here in 1948 but lost it last year on Jamaica Bay. Twice before, with smaller motors and raced by Zalmon G. Simons as My Sin, the present Tempo VI won the Cup in 1939 and 1941. Probably no entry represents expenditures less than $25,000 and most of them far more. This is a rich man's hobby.
11 Can Do 100 M. P.H.
At least eleven of the boats have done or can do better than 100 miles an hour on straight-aways. The rules demand better than mile-a-minute performances and require contestants to prove they can go faster than sixty-five miles an hour.
Most, if not all, of the Gold Cup records w on the books should be broken `and raised tomorow, including Dan Arena’s 77.911 M. P. H. lap record in the boat now known as Miss Great Lakes and tomorrow being piloted by Danny Foster. Lombardo's 70.828 30-mile heat record and his 68.072 ninety-mile race record could be smashed.
(Reprinted from the New York Times, August 28, 1948)
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