Steven Mathers

On Sunday 1 May 2016 the Upper Hawkesbury Power Boat Club (UHPBC) hosted the 2016 ‘Double Dash’ on the Hawkesbury River in Sydney with a 2 leg event from Windsor Marine Stadium to Sackville and return. Half a dozen PWC entrants jumped into a standalone class that included Steven Mathers, Hannah Batoure, Joseph Boyagi, Andrew Henein, Amir Khallouf and Mohamad Hussein.

Steven Mathers (51 yrs) won the race on his ‘GPRXP’ with a combined time of 24:16 comprising 12:18 one way and a 11:58 in the reverse for an average speed of 84mph (even more impressive because both runs were against the current as the tide turned) with a top speed of 93.2mph to win from Andrew Henein (25:38) and Amir Khallouf (25:59).

We were intrigued and set out to find out more about Steven’s hybrid GP1200R/RXP, here’s his story.

“I’ve been a petrol head all my life from building 4 circuit racing Mazda RX3’s in the mid 80s to building an open wheel speedway car in the late 90’s and my latest is this GP RXP beast.

My ski is a 2000 GP1200r Yamaha hull with a turbo charged Sea-doo 4 tec RXP engine. I first purchased the hull with the conversion kit in 2013 and then bought the rest soon after. It took me just over a year to get it to the water with me making a lot of the things like the carbon fibre tunnel reinforcement and intercooler brackets etc but I had issues with the fuel and a few other small things that then needed a complete engine rebuild.

I went to see Joe Saliba at JSA engineering for the machine work and advice on what way to go with the rebuild. He was so helpful and his knowledge was unbelievable. Soon after I purchased a prototype GRF turbo kit from the States, then I needed an ECU so I went to Rob at LB Motorsports for a turbo flash for the stock Seimens ECU. Now I had all the go fast bits and spent time tuning them to work together.

The Bridge to Bridge was on my bucket list to enter but did not run last year, then I heard of the Double Dash so I fast tracked my testing to enter a reasonably fast ski. I still believe it has a few more km/h left in it. It’s been a long road but the race win was well worth it.

Thanks to my wife, pit crew Gaz Cruiser and the following business for their help and support Cheetah Race Fuels, JSA Engineering, Adrenaline Sports and Performance Watercraft.

Steven Mathers with son Joel

Turbocharged RXP 4-tec Sea-doo Engine

The race winning GPRXP

The race winning GPRXP