Test-driving new boats for a living sounds fun, but MasterCraft shows it’s tough work. Especially if you’re Phil, who has one of the most punishing jobs around. As the guy who takes wakesurfing, wakeboarding, and ski towboats and drives them in miserable conditions.
You Can’t Test a Boat Inside
When you’re building a new truck or SUV, you can do a lot of testing without even going outside. Fancy four-post rigs let you simulate years of driving without anyone inside, even running the engine up and down. All before a prototype hits the road for the first time.
You can’t fake boating, though. So MasterCraft’s proving ground is the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida, not the place you expect to see tow boats.
Test driver Phil takes new MasterCraft designs into brutal open-ocean conditions to try and find problems. Each new and revised design goes through a 24-hour endurance test. No, it’s not 24 hours straight, because Phil needs to sleep once in a while, but it’s not exactly a walk in the park.
Engineer, Daredevil, Crash Test Dummy
The company calls him part engineer, part daredevil, and part crash test dummy. To make sure the boat takes more of a beating than he does, Phil gets a zero-gravity seat. But with up to eight times the force of gravity on impacts, some of that is making it through. Hour after hour.
MasterCraft doesn’t design its boats to be used in the open ocean, but it wants to make sure they can handle it. That identifies stress points, lets the company refine designs, and helps the company fix durability issues before its boats go on sale.
The goal of the testing? To “push every boat beyond normal use so owners never have to question whether their boat can handle long days, rough water, or years of memories on the lake.” If it can handle open water, lakes are a breeze.
Watch Phil Thrash the MasterCraft X22
It is showing off this test as part of the launch of its new X22. The new 22-footer launched last month as a smaller version of its X24 boat.
The X22 is built to deliver clean, powerful, and adjustable waves for the person getting towed off the back, and comes with the company’s Wakes & Waves and Surfstar systems that let the pilot dial up different waves in their wake.
MasterCraft says it is the only towboat maker that does a test like this. It’s a serious commitment, making the boat live where it’s never expected to be used. The idea sounds like a lot of fun, unless you’re poor Phil’s back, that is.
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