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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

What are these guys trying to prove? Who the biggest and irresponsible asshole is? If you want to go fast, go to a race track and race against real drivers. If you don’t like tracks, do rallye.

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It's strange how in other areas such behavior is encouraged. Where is the anger when people try to set speed records on boats? Every time some rich idiot gets into trouble on the high seas, other people have to risk their lives to save them. Setting aside rescue personnel, many innocent bystanders have also been killed by racing yachts.

2018: "One Fisherman Killed, 9 Saved After Boat Collides With Ocean Race Yacht" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjrq0NDL8r4

"On the night of 19 March 2007, while around 22 kilometres (14 mi) offshore from Guatemala, Earthrace collided with a local fishing boat. No Earthrace crew were hurt, but one of the three crew members from the fishing boat was never found." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MY_Ady_Gil#2007

2012 "A yacht involved in a race off the coast of California and Mexico apparently collided at night with a much larger vessel, leaving three crew members dead and one missing, a sailing organization said early Sunday." https://www.guelphmercury.com/news-story/2698368-collision-s...

And if you want to compare statistics, how many people died on Titanic as it was racing across the Atlantic? Including that tragedy would probably make ocean racing more dangerous than the cannonball run even on an hourly basis.

I think it's probably a function of how big the risks are to themselves vs. others (both relatively and absolutely). I don't think ocean yacht races are as dangerous to bystanders as pirate road races are to even an order of magnitude, probably several.

That speaks to the danger factor, but the OP wanted to know why they do take these risks. I'd say that those on the cannonball run have exactly the same motivation as Ellen MacArthur. She was knighted for setting an around-the-world yachting record, making her an official hero, but in terms of motivation she is no different than these people trying to break the across-the-us driving record. Different vehicles, different legal regime, but same drive to be the fastest.

I doubt it. They are getting a kick out of breaking rules. Otherwise they would do real racing.

Speaking as someone who doesn't race or watch racing, it seems like the fun has been taken out of racing, in order to quite deliberately make it a game of human skill, eking out tiny gains against a pointless ceiling.

As someone who enjoys driving fast on a racetrack and occasionally watching racing, this comment is entirely nonsensical to me. How is "deliberately making it a game of human skill" in any way "taking the fun out of it?"

Every sport ends up with its elite participants taking it very seriously and eking out tiny gains to win. That's just the nature of competition. This is orthogonal to it being fun.

There was a time when the competition was about who could build a better car. Eventually this was turned into yet another game of depending on the human element. With limits on engine output or other mechanical improvements, there's no way to have impressive gains, any more. It's just another way to pit one person's reflex against another's. You'll never see anything surprising from Nascar, because they literally ruled it out.

The entire point is to make it a game of skill, yes. In spec racing, you can't just buy yourself a win by having more money to spend on a faster car. Thousands of amateur-level racers deliberately seek this type of competition out specifically because it's more fun to them to have a competition where it's all about skill rather than how good your equipment is. The idea that this is "taking the fun out" seems precisely backwards to me.

"Every time some rich idiot gets into trouble on the high seas, other people have to risk their lives to save them. Setting aside rescue personnel, many innocent bystanders have also been killed by racing yachts. "

This shouldn't happen either.

I dunno, if my government created an ocean with my tax money to move people and freights, and some rich idiot with a yacht is racing down the artificial ocean endangering other ships, I guess I would be also pretty angry at that.

> Where is the anger when people try to set speed records on boats?

These do not seem to be remotely comparable.

Wikipedia has a list [1] of several people that died in water speed record attempts. This list does has several names on it. This pales in comparison with the 36,000 people [2] died in auto-collisions in just the US in 2018.

Driving 100mph+ on public roads is completely reckless. If you fuck it up, someone's going to die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_in_mot...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The cannonball run isn't comparable to streetracing any more than "motorboat" racing is comparable to ocean racing. Note that wikipedia article doesn't include any of the accidents I listed above. It's like comparing baseball and tennis because they both involve hitting a ball. Actually, it's worse than that because yacht racing doesn't even involve motors. The only similarity between motorboat racing and ocean/yacht racing is that they both involve some sort of water. I'd say "things that float" but motorboats don't really 'float' while racing.

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