Why We Race
The truth is in the brand.
By Stuart Halley, Mercury Racing General Manager
We are Mercury Racing. And we are racers. Competition is in our blood and locked in our DNA, code that was written in 1973 with the creation of the Mercury Hi-Performance Division specifically to support Mercury Factory race teams and independent racers using Mercury products. The ultimate goal was promotion of the Mercury brand and the development of new designs and technologies in the white-hot crucible of competition.
In 1999 the name of this endeavor was changed to Mercury Racing, and our business objective changed with it. Rather than exist as a promotional tool, Mercury Racing is a true business unit of Mercury Marine. This new focus expanded our reach into the consumer high-performance market, which today accounts for the majority of our products and our business.
Our passion for competition, however, has never diminished. Witness – the new Mercury Racing Apex Series of competition outboards that combine high performance with low emissions, a sustainable formula for the future.
Mercury Racing culture is populated by driven individuals. In our spare time we race boats, cars, motorcycles, and snowmobiles. We design and 3-D print parts in our home shops. We build and re-build race engines. We organize events for other racers. We are racers, with the greasy hands and wincing credit cards to prove it.
Racing is an emotional response, an intoxicating adrenaline rush. Racing is an intellectual enterprise that requires preparation, attention to details, and thoughtful innovation. Racing at all levels requires successful relationships between individuals and organizations. In so many ways success in racing mirrors success in business, and in life.
“Life itself is a race, marked by a start and a finish,” Ferdinand Porsche once said. “It is what we learn during the race, and how we apply it, that determines whether our participation has had particular value. If we learn from each success, and each failure, and improve ourselves through this process, then, at the end, we will have fulfilled our potential and performed well.”
We think big and go fast to harden Mercury Racing product. A drive and transmission that can reliably handle 1750hp in the heat of competition on an open-ocean course can certainly see you through poker run season. The lessons learned in creating a four-stroke outboard that can win in the sprint-stress, cut-and-thrust action of Formula 1 tunnel boat racing will inform our next generation of performance consumer outboards. Fine-tuning propellers for professional bass and walleye anglers who need to squeeze the last ounce of speed and performance from a Mercury outboard is another way we are testing and learning and winning through competition.
We make tools purpose-built for competitors to realize their dreams, providing a complete propulsion solution. Experience and gut instinct is increasingly supported by insightful data, an important tool often not available to the racer in the field. Mercury Racing is leveraging technology and data collection and analysis to put more clean, responsive, reliable power on your transom or in your engine bay. In this way we are racing towards the future of high-performance boating.
Certainly racing burnishes our image. But racing is also the fuel that propels a culture at Mercury Racing that thrives on competing.
With regard to performance, commitment, effort, dedication, there is no middle ground. You do something very well or not at all. – Ayton Senna
We race Wide Open to learn – and to win.
