A little more than a year ago when offshore powerboat racer Brit Lilly of Lilly Sport Boats in Arnold, Md., began building a 29-foot canopied raceboat for his friend and fellow competitor Kyle Miller of the Speed Marine team, the finished product was slated for Stock V competition. But thanks to a seismic shift in the offshore racing world, the new LSB Powerboats Extreme 299—Lily’s second Extreme 299 creation—will run in Mod V ranks.

A year in the making, the new Speed Marine Mod V-class raceboat will be picked up and hauled to New Jersey for rigging this weekend.

Miller, whose Speed Marine shop in Brick, N.J., specializes in custom parts fabrication from high-performance exhaust systems and motor mounts to billet hardware—and builds its own racing engines in-house—plans to pick up the boat this weekend from Lilly. The 29-footer will get a second round of Clear Coat tonight and will be buffed and sanded tomorrow.

“The reason we ordered the boat from Brit is because it’s the best product on the market as far as we’re concerned,” explained Miller, who will share the cockpit of the 29-footer with Jay Wohltman, Speed Marine’s lead rigger. “I fell in love with it the first time I saw it, and I loved it even more after I tested it in Englewood Beach (Fla.).”

More than a raceboat, the new Speed Marine creation will serve as a real-world marketing piece for the company, which currently fabricates a host of parts for offshore racers and also offers custom-rigging, paint and fiberglass work.

Said Miller, “I fell in love with it the first time I saw it, and I loved it even more after I tested it.”

“Our shop isn’t a ‘normal’ performance shop,” Miller said. “We specialize in high-performance exhaust systems, but we do a lot of custom fabrication work. If we don’t have a part that we need, we make it. If it’s not perfect and up to our standards, it doesn’t leave.

“The other reason we are building the new Speed Marine boat is to demonstrate what our shop can do with custom fabrication work,” he continued. “From our own engine to our shock-mitigating seats that let you adjust dampening on the fly to all the really cool billet pieces we’ve created, we want to let the boat speak for itself—and our work.”

Miller certainly doesn’t have to convince Lilly. He’s already a loyal Speed Marine customer.

“We do a lot of work together,” said Lilly, who also painted the boat for the team. “Speed Marine has been making exhaust systems and fabricating many parts for me for years. Last year, they also built an engine for Travis Pastrana’s Twisted Tea raceboat.”

The new Speed Marine raceboat will showcase the company’s parts-fabrication talents as well as those of boat-builder/offshore racer Brit Lilly.

Speed Marine’s Scott Thurber is building the boat’s carbureted engine, which will produce 650-plus hp. The race team includes crew chief Mike Mironyk, Chris Carbone, Reese Hackett, Lenny Gerome and Bobby Kraemer.

Miller isn’t just eager to run the new Speed Marine team raceboat. He’s eager to campaign it in the Mod V class, which offers some off the strongest competition in the single-engine V-bottom ranks.

“We do this kind of racing because we want to compete against the best,” he said. “We aren’t looking for a guaranteed win. We want to win, of course, but we want to do it against the best guys out there. If you beat guys like Brit Lilly and Brian Forehand, you’ve really accomplished something.”

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