The Spirit of Inverclyde race boat will again fly the flag for Scotland at every round of the P1 SuperStock Championship this summer with a father and daughter crew in the cockpit.
The experienced duo of David and Ashleigh Finlayson from Musselburgh will race the P1 Panther powerboat in the one-design championship at events in England, Wales, Denmark and Scotland.
A love of racing and being on the water started a long time ago for Davie and Ash. The starting point for Davie was waterski racing in the 1980s and, by the time she was five years old Ashleigh had followed her father around the UK and European circuit.
Over the three decades since then, Davie has competed internationally in a number of series and at the age of 17 Ashleigh joined him to race in the National Zapcat Championship where they picked up the RYA Best Newcomer to Powerboating award in their first season.
Other racing successes followed, including becoming British Champions in the Zapcat ZCR50X class in 2014 and Davie setting a national speed record at Coniston Water in the same year.
For the last two years Davie and Ashleigh have been competing in the ThunderCat Racing UK Championship.
Their first outing in the P750s culminated in second in the Stock Class at the Europeans in Gibraltar.
Davie got his first taste of P1 SuperStock racing last summer when he grabbed a last-minute opportunity to jump into the navigator seat of a P1 Panther race boat in the P1 Scottish Grand Prix of the Sea in Greenock.
He said: “Being able to compete in such a successful powerboat series at the fantastic location of Greenock was a brilliant experience.
“When the opportunity came up to crew the Inverclyde boat, I jumped at the chance. I can’t wait to get on with the season.”
Davie is involved with auto salvage, managing the family business in Musselburgh while Ashleigh is based in East Anglia as an account manager with Johnson & Johnson, the American multi-national corporation.
The Spirit of Inverclyde boat will make its 2017 debut in Denmark in early June in the P1 Aalborg Grand Prix of the Sea, and just two weeks later it will head home to the River Clyde where Davie and Ash will be cheered on by thousands of Scottish supporters in Greenock
Next stop for will be Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire and the P1 SuperStock UK Championship will return to Scarborough in September for the final event of the season. Race action from all four rounds will be broadcast on Sky Sports in the UK and internationally on more than 150 countries.
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