The 400 horsepower PWC cometh
from On the Water (240 articles)
The 400 horsepower PWC cometh
Image Gallery ( 91 images )December 21, 2007 The Personal Watercraft (PWC) market is in the grip of a horsepower “arms race” with a rash of new machinery announcements including a 342 bhp 2.2 litre V6-engined PWC from Austrian company HSR-Benelli and a 308 bhp 2.2 litre V8-engined PWC from the famous Italian MV Agusta motorcycle company. It all appears to have been catalyzed late last year when Kawasaki announced its 250 bhp Ultra 250X into a market where Seadoo’s 215 bhp RXP was previously the fastest of the bunch. Subsequently, SeaDoo has announced 255 bhp RXP-X and RXT-X models, Honda has announced a turbocharged 1500cc Aquatrax and Yamaha has announced a new lightweight purpose-built, turbocharged and intercooled 1812cc Super High Output (SHO) motor in its 2008 range. Given the radical upsurge in power outputs, one wonders what might be available a year or two from now.
Until Kawasaki announced its Ultra 250X last year, the most powerful standard PWC available was Seadoo’s 215 bhp RXP and a gentleman’s agreement with the US Coast Guard by all manufacturers meant that no stock PWC could exceed 65mph.
It all sounds like a remake of the motorcycle horsepower wars of the seventies and eighties which were catalyzed by Kawasaki with the release of the 82 bhp 900cc Z1 in 1973 – a landmark motorcycle with significantly more power than anything that had existed before.
The massive success of the Z1 saw the other manufacturers follow suit, and like bidders at an auction, Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki continuously leapfrog each other with ever-more-powerful models, boosting top-of-the-line power to more than 100 bhp before the turn of the decade, 130 bhp by the mid eighties and 150 bhp by 1990. In 17 years, the horsepower of the leading mass-produced flagship models more than doubled. By comparison, in the subsequent 17 years, horsepower of the leading sports machinery has risen only 30%.
The parallels with the motorcycle industry are many – three of the four leading PWC manufacturers (Japanese makers Honda, Yamaha and Kawasaki) produce motorcycles also, and the engines used in PWC are often derived from motorcycle engines with Kawasaki’s Ultra 250X based on the ZX1400 bike engine and Yamaha getting great value in PWC from its R1 sports bike motor. The links grew stronger in the last few months with the news that the revered Italian motorcycle names of MV Agusta and Benelli are set to grace two new ranges of extreme performance PWCs.
Europe’s only PWC manufacturer, Austrian-based Hydrospace, acquired Benelli Motori (the engine arm of Benelli Motorcycles), changed its name to HSR-Benelli in October and announced an entirely new series of PWC at Salon Nautique de Paris earlier this month, all powered by derivatives of the Benelli Tre motorcycle engine.
Then MV Agusta unexpectedly unveiled the F4 Interceptor - a carbon fiber hulled V8-engined PWC - at the Milan Motorcycle Show in Italy a few weeks ago.
Interestingly both of the new European PWC manufacturers have opted to use large-capacity normally-aspirated powerplants borrowed from motorcycles, rather than the turbo/supercharged route of the Japanese manufacturers. Indeed, for their flagship models, both of the Europeans have taken motorcycle engines and created new engines by fusing two motorcycle engines together
MV Agusta has taken two of its high performance 1078cc four cylinder engines and created a Swiss-watch-like 2156cc V8 powerplant which will power a limited-edition 308 bhp, carbon-fiber–hulled, two-seater called the F4 Interceptor.
