It’s fair to say then that Ice Marine have a pretty impressive track
record both on and off the powerboat racing circuit. However,
like many marine businesses, when the recession
hit, it temporarily pulled back from the leisure market
and focused on its military side of the business, most
of which remains below the radar. Literally.
Now it has decided the time is right to reenter
the market with a brand new boat that’s far better
suited to the current breed of cash-rich, time-poor
consumer than its previous generation of edgy,
go-faster craft. Powered by standard triple 370hp
Volvo D6 engines on Volvo’s own low-drag duo-prop
drives, the new BR45 is designed to be as simple to
drive and as painless to own as any other production
diesel sportscruiser. Only faster. Not scary fast like one
of its 100-knot raceboats, but a solid 50 knots-plus fl at
out and all-day cruising at 40-45 knots without even
breaking a sweat.
“We wanted to build a genuinely comfortable long-
range tool that would give owners the freedom to
go anywhere they wanted in a short space of time,”
says Watts. “We could have made it faster by fi tting
big petrol engines or low-drag surface drives but that
would have made it far less user friendly.”
In fact, the original Bladerunner 45 prototype was
fi tted with triple Cummins 550hp engines on Arneson
surface drives and clocked up a top speed of over 70
knots, but as Watts so rightly says, “Those kind ofspeeds are only fun for 20 minutes, they’re not that much
fun for three or four hours.”
Surface drives also went against Watts’ desire to create a boat that
was as easy to drive as it was to own. They are
slow to plane, tricky to trim and notoriously diffi cult
to steer during low-speed berthing manoeuvres,
whereas duo-prop sterndrives give rapid acceleration,
are much less sensitive to trim and turn on a sixpence.
And that’s before you consider the benefi ts of the
Volvo network with a dealer in every port stocking
off-the-shelf D6 parts.STRONG AND STABLE
Like all Bladerunners, the BR45 uses a stabilised
monohull designed by Adam Younger and Ice Marine.
The design gives the offshore seakeeping characteristics
of a deep-vee monohull with the speed and stability
of a multihull. The early Bladerunner designs were
all about maximising race performance with air
entrapment tunnels designed to create aerodynamic
lift at speed. They worked brilliantly, winning
countless races, but as a leisure boat, the low internal
volume of the BR34’s slender hull and its reluctance
to run comfortably below 40 knots limited its appeal.
The BR45 has a third-generation hull with the focus
on fast, comfortable cruising rather than outright
performance. The beamier main hull creates more
accommodation space below decks while a deeperBRIT PACKDrop-down side
windows keep things
cool in the cockpit
The Bladerunner’s
hull has evolved from
a pure raceboat (top)
to a more civilised
all-rounder (bottom)