The Year of the Dragon

The Year of the Dragon
The Highly Anticipated 39-Foot Dragon Powerboat Has Made Its Arrival— We Test Hull No. 1

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY BY WARREN KOSIKOV & DRAGON POWERBOATS

Dragon Powerboats was founded in early 2002, but the first boat didn’t make its public debut until the 2004 Miami International Boat Show. “I realized there was a higher level of quality and luxury to which performance boats can be manufactured,” said Craig Barrie, president of Dragon Powerboats. This is a pretty bold statement coming from the guy who spent 16 years of his life first as a vice president and then as president and CEO of the famed Cigarette Racing Team. In fact, Barrie was instrumental in the design of some of today’s most popular Cigarettes, including the 35-foot Café Racer, 38-foot Top Gun, 42-foot Tiger and 46-foot Top Gun. That is a pretty impressive resumé for a guy who now plans to build boats of his own.

Considering all the time Barrie has invested in the boat-building business and all the seat time he has in raceboats with world and national championships under his belt, most who knew Barrie knew he wouldn’t be away from boat building for long. We were impressed with the styling, the construction methods and the attention to detail when we saw the boat at the Miami International Boat Show, but since it was the only Dragon in existence and landlocked, we didn’t think we would have the opportunity to water-test the boat any time soon. The opportunity presented itself later,thousands of miles away from the company’s Fort Lauderdale, Florida, facility, as Barrie had the boat towed to Lake Havasu City for the annual Heat Wave Poker Run. At a campsite barbecue with some friends and business acquaintances, we scheduled a test ride for the next morning.

The all new Dragon has an LOA of 39 feet and a beam of 8-1/2 feet. The most noticeable feature at first glance is the open-canopy design. According to Barrie, this was the boat of his dreams, “a different design, planned and built differently from anything on the market today. It is fast, it is safe and it is the strongest high-performance boat ever built,” Barrie said. This is why it took two years to design and build the first boat. When he says the boat is being built differently, Barrie is referring to the fact that this is a total composite, all-epoxy boat. The boat was structurally engineered by Mark Bishop and fabricated by Doug Wright, Jr. “This construction method makes for a strong but light boat. The boat is engineered for high speed, and the windshield has no distortion. The epoxy hull is smooth and perfect, and the Dragon has no gelcoat,” Barrie says proudly. We couldn’t disagree. The hull was as straight as we’ve ever seen, and the lack of a rubrail gives it an even sleeker look.

The entire boat has a “James Bond” feel, but the cockpit has an especially high-tech feeling. The driver and passenger sit in Italian-built Recaro racing seats, which can tilt and move forward and backward. The dash is both simple and high tech. Gone are the days of a “zillion” gauges. For instrumentation, there are two mini-tachometers, one GPS speedometer, a color GPS and two Mercury SmartCraft screens. There is also a trim indicator for drives and tabs. A nice feature of the dash is the ability to quick-release the steering wheel and put it on either side of the dash for a driver/throttleman setup. The windshield, designed from scratch, is 3/4-inch thick and wrapped in a 2-inch highly polished stainless-steel frame that the company says is engineered to 180-mph impact resistance. The sides of the canopies’ frames are open still, which provides an opportunity for some “wind-in-the-hair” feeling. All the panels in the cockpit are stainless steel and the Dragon is outfitted with military-style toggles and custom collars. The floors are by Pirelli.

The boat is built for side-by-side twin engines, all Mercury applications. Engine options start with a pair of 496 HOs and go up to the new 1075 CSI performance engines. Custom oval tailpipes were designed by the company and manufactured by CMI. Of course, with Barrie’s racing background, he kept racing applications in mind when designing the Dragon. “It will fit nicely into either F-2 or Super Vee classes,” he said. “We’re offering a five-year warranty on all pleasure boat hulls and a full two-season hull warranty for raceboats,” he added. Currently, three versions of the Dragon are available: pure pleasure, pure racing and a combination of the two.

Looking at the Dragon resting at the docks, it sits high in the water, as its only 8,600-pound weight, 36-inch draft and 43-inch freeboard would attest. I got into the boat with Glen Martin of Martin Marine, who handles sales for Dragon, and headed out for our boat ride. At 5 feet, 7 inches, it was a bit of a challenge to see over the dash and past the bow while we were idling.

Ordinarily, I would have been standing, but in a sit-down boat with a canopy, you just can’t do that. This reminded me of a conversation I had with Barrie the night before in which he asked, “Why are you fine with sitting in a cat, but you question it when it comes to a V-bottom?” A good question.

This first Dragon was outfitted with a pair of Mercury Racing 525 EFIs mated to Mercury’s Integrated Transom System (ITS) XR drives with Sportmaster lower units. The boat was spinning Hering six-blade 34-pitch propellers. Martin said it can take some work to get the boat up on plane, but, frankly, I was impressed with the boat’s hole-shot. The propellers quickly wound up to about 4,000 rpm, and the boat planed out and took off. Running through the power band, the boat ran 35.7 mph at 2,500 rpm; 41.5 mph at 3,000 rpm; 54.6 mph at 3,500 rpm; 67 mph at 4,000; and 79.7 mph at 4,900. We hit a top speed that day of 89.5 mph at 5,000 rpm. The boat cruised impressively and efficiently at 3,250 rpm at 55 mph.

Martin was quick to hit the GPS speedo tattletale recall switch to show us that the boat has hit 97 mph, which was done on the waters of Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. At nearly 90 mph, the boat ride was like the proverbial “walk in the park.” No white-knuckling. In fact, I was not even looking for a grab handle. The twin-stepped patent-pending ventilated bottom also handled well in turns. In fact, in the smooth waters we had that morning, we could put the boat into a sharp circle turn at 60 mph. The only complaint I had was that, with the portside driver setup, the throttles are next to the right-hand side of the driver’s seat and the trim switches are on the portside gunwale. With this setup, if you have one hand on the throttles and another on the trim switches, you need a third arm to hold the steering wheel. To fix this, Dragon plans to relocate the trim switches to just forward of the throttle. With the attention that the Dragon has been getting at the boat show, on the docks and on Internet sites, it looks as if Barrie’s dream may have been realized.

The boat certainly has unique styling, different construction and excellent performance. It definitely is the year of the Dragon for Barrie and his team.