Ken Warby opened the throttle on the Blowering Dam reservoir. His craft, the *Spirit of Australia*, was a 27-foot plywood hull with a Westinghouse J34 jet engine salvaged from a Navy fighter. There was no cockpit canopy. Wind pressure at over 300 miles per hour forced his eyelids shut. He steered by looking through a slit in the bow. On his second run, the timing clocks recorded an average speed of 317.60 mph, or 275.97 knots. The spray settled. The record, set by a self-taught mechanic in a boat he built in his backyard, was his. It remains unbroken.
Warby began the project in his Sydney garage in 1972 with a budget of $8,000. He taught himself aerodynamics from library books. The design was brutally simple: a three-point hydroplane meant to skim, not plow. He risked disintegration or ‘stuffing’—a catastrophic nose dive into the water. Before the record attempt, he had never driven the boat at full power. The official observer from the American Power Boat Association reportedly said, ‘If you try to go that fast, you will die.’ Warby succeeded through a combination of intuitive engineering and absolute nerve.
The record endures not for lack of trying. Several contenders, including Warby’s own son, have died in subsequent attempts. The record sits in a dangerous plateau, the ‘killer zone’ between 250 and 300 mph where water behaves like concrete. Warby’s achievement is a relic of a certain kind of amateur audacity. It exists at the intersection of sport, engineering, and mortal risk, a mark set with home-built technology and sheer will that modern teams with corporate sponsors have yet to surpass.