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Caught up with Jim Nichols of Lake Racer LLC, the outfit that puts on Desert Storm in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., for a few minutes before the event’s poker run on Friday, April 29. The run was an hour away, and Nichols—still buzzing from the success of the previous night’s Street Party event—was already talking about possible improvements for next year.

“We have some pretty good ideas like having a small-boat poker run earlier in the week, maybe adding a manufacturer’s poker run and maybe adding back the racing,” said Nichols. “We’ve talked about taking the Street Party to the golf course so everything is central in one place, but it’s also great to have it in town because it’s established there and because of the services, restaurants and stores, that are available there.”

Read more: Desert Storm Expanding in 2012

Caught up with Marc Granet, the driver of the turbine-powered Miss Geico offshore racing catamaran, earlier this morning. Granet told me that a Skater 399—the cat builder’s nearly 40-foot-long V-bottom offering—with twin 1,350-hp Chief engines will compete during the 2011 offshore racing season as the “Caveman” race boat. The actual class the boat will compete in will depend upon the technical rules of the sanctioning body for each race its team chooses to enter.

Read more: Caveman Skater V-Bottom to Race Offshore

A week ago today, offshoreonly.com was buzzing with the news that Predator, a Skater catamaran with twin 1,500-hp engines, was “first to the card stop” at the Desert Storm Poker Run on Lake Havasu. Given the quality of the 150-boat fleet, which included several boats capable of 170-plus mph—Predator reportedly hit 185 mph—that’s pretty impressive.

And totally irrelevant, because getting anywhere “first” makes the journey a race and Desert Storm, like all poker runs, is not a race. Yes, that’s been said countless times before. You could even call it yesterday’s news. So why is it worth repeating?

Because that mentality, though much diminished, still persists in some quarters.

Read more: Endnote on Desert Storm: It’s Still Not a Race

Last year during the Desert Storm event in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., I stood in front of the Mercury Racing trailer with company president Fred Kiekhaefer and ogled the company’s new twin-turbocharged, quad-overhead-cam 1350 engine. It was the second 1,350-hp model I’d seen—I caught the first one at the 2010 Miami International Boat Show two months earlier—and like the first it was on a stand. Production of the engine was slated for early fall.

Read more: Seven Pairs of Mercury Racing 1350s at Desert Storm

Of all the outstanding go-fast boats at Desert Storm event in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. last week, the one that captured some of the most attention was also one of the slowest. With a top speed of approximatley 55 mph, Tomahawk, an all-wood, handcrafted 29-foot-long "Torpedo" with a 550-hp Ilmor engine from StanCraft Boats in Coeur D’ Alene, Idaho, could hardly be described as fast. But it is, like all Stancraft creations, a work of art—and that wasn’t lost the Lake Havasu crowd.

Read more: StancCraft Considering a Wooden Catamaran

Don’t look for Ilmor Marine to introduce high-performance marine engines on the power scale of the relatively recent 1,300-plus-hp turbocharged and supercharged products from Mercury Racing, Teague Custom Marine and other notable engine builders anytime soon. In fact, according to Paul Ray, the president of the Plymouth, Mich., company, Ilmor’s plans for its performance-boat engine line are to move in the other direction.

Read more: Big Power from Ilmor: “Not for awhile.”