By Matt Trulio

With the obvious exception of Don Aronow, no one is more inextricably linked to Cigarette performance boats than Phil Lipschutz. The 52-year-old Cincinnati native began selling the renowned boats—new and used—with Ron Doller in 1986. He started his own brokerage outfit in Miami called Lip-Ship Performance in 1990, which dealt only in the highest of high-end Cigarettes featuring engines from famed builder Richie Zul and over-the-top, custom paint jobs. After 16 years in the business, Lipschutz remains one of Cigarette's most respected and productive dealers. A good measure of his success stems from his unadulterated passion for the product he sells, and a need for speed on the water that started when he was a 13-year-old racing hydroplanes on the Ohio River. Lipschutz, who has won more than 150 hydro races, eventually took his racing act offshore in one of the first 24-foot Skater catamarans Peter Hledin, founder of Douglas Marine, ever built. But fittingly, he wrapped up his racing career in a 46 Cigarette.

What does it mean to own a Cigarette?

The last four digits of my mother's phone number are 3588. I memorized that a long time ago saying to myself, "By the time I can afford a 35 Cigarette I'll be 88 years old.

So many people want to own Cigarettes because they are everything they think they are going to be. You set them up right, and they are awesome. I don't know how to set up a Nor-Tech or an Outerlimits or a Skater, but I do know how to set up a Cigarette.

I can go anywhere in the world, pull up next to a yacht in a Cigarette, and people on the yacht will give me a thumbs up, because they know what it means.

In the early 1980s you started racing offshore. That must have been an interesting transition from hydroplanes.

I was at the top of my game in Grand Prix hydro racing when I stopped. I raced against Dean Chenoweth, Bill Muncey, Chip Hanauer, Steve David, all those guys. But this was before capsules and a lot of people were getting killed. My brother, who had started racing before me and owned our boats, finally said, "This is it, we're done. We've lost too many friends."

In 1983, my brother, Mike, went to IMTEC (a trade show no longer held) in Chicago, and he met this guy with this crazy little catamaran he said was really fast. The guy was Peter Hledin and the boat was a 24-foot Skater. I think it was like the second one he'd ever made.

Mike bought the boat from him, it had two outboard motors, and I hated it. I was like, "It's 24 feet, has two egg-beaters and it only goes 100 mph. Are you nuts?" I was used to going 160 mph in hydros. He made me go for a ride in it, and I was like, "Man, this thing is fun to drive."

Then we found out they have classes where can we enter this thing and so we entered our first race on Lake Erie. But the only thing I had done was run on a closed course where you ran around buoys. I hadn't navigated. So we entered this race with a bunch of V-bottoms that ran like 80, 90 mph, and the cat was running 100 mph. We had to wait for them at the checkpoints because we didn't know where we were going.

When I moved to Florida, Bud LaRue (of Cigarette) taught me how to navigate. We ran the Skater first in Sportsmen class, then in Modified. I ran with my brother, Mike, and my other brother, Peanuts. We switched off driving and throttling.

My brothers wanted to stay with the cat, but I wanted to run one of the bigger open boats really bad. Finally, in 1985, I met a guy named Ramesh Murjani, and he bought a 38 Cigarette that we shipped to Hong Kong for the Pedro Blanco 120 race. The race was in the Red China SeaÑthey wouldn't even let Americans in there. Murjani told them I was British. We won, but it was crazy. It was like 12- to 14-foot seas. The turn boat, which was a 40-footer, capsized.

When I got back from Hong Kong, this crazy guy came into Doller Marine. The guys at Cigarette had blown him off. They thought he was nuts. They were always a little standoffish there unless they knew who you were.

Anyway, this guy was an Olympic sailor. His name was Lorne Libel, and he'd said he always wanted to race offshore. He had heard of Don Aronow. I said, 'Dude, are you lucky. The baddest Cigarette in the whole world is in Hong Kong, and I can get it back for you.' He bought it sight unseen.

He was going to throttle and I was going to drive, but we switched. We pleasure-boated like crazy in that Cigarette. At the last minute, I got fired and he hired Keith Hazel to throttle it. I was mad about that for several years.

That must have been discouraging.

Well, I finally got my chance when Ben Kramer got arrested and Bobby Moore had one of his last 41-foot Apaches. Jack Herrick bought it, and I got Richie (Zul) to build the motors. We won the Battle of the Seas in 1989, racing against boats from all over the world. Then we took that boat to Trinidad and won the Trinidad-to-Tobago race. We were the only Americans ever to win it.

In 1997, we went to the Key West worlds in the 41-foot Apache. I almost didn't want to race in that boat, because all the fast boats had stepped-bottoms. In the first, which had kind of calm water, we took second. In the second race, it got rough and we won the whole deal.

But you ended up back in Cigarette race boats.

Yeah. I started running Factory 2 boats in 1998 and 1999. I didn't want to because I had run Super V for so many years, but Factory 2 came on so strong and those were the kind of boats my customers were running.

Around that time, Reggie Fountain wanted me to race for him so badly, and he made me a really flattering offer. But I was a Cigarette guy, and I really wanted to build and race a stepped Cigarette. The owner of Cigarette at the time said I'll build and sponsor a stepped-boat if you race it, so we had Michael Peters do some design work and Peter Hledin at Skater build the first stepped 46-foot Cigarette. Another guy was going to own it.

Well, the owner of Cigarette sold the company and Jack Herrick, who was going to own the race boat had to bail out, so I ended up with it in my lap. I was terrified. I had all my money in it. I called my good friend John Tomlinson at TNT Custom Marine in Miami to help me rig it, and Richie Zul helped me tremendously with some engines.

I even got Neill Hernandez from Cigarette to help—he's a really good electrician. I called in favors from everywhere. The boat was nowhere near what it was supposed to be.

Finally, I met this guy named Ton Srandis and he agreed to sponsor it. He used to race boats back in the 1970s, and he wanted to get involved. He couldn't race anymore because he'd gotten too old, but we hit it off. Raul Boesel, the Indy car racer, became my driver, and I throttled.

By 2000, all the competitive teams in Super V were professional. Here I come with this nice boat, but I had no extra motors, no spare propellers. But I did have Raul Boesel.

The first season, we ran conservatively. He'd never run offshore before, and I didn't want him getting hurt. But right away I could see he was an extremely aggressive driver. This guy had been on the pole for the Indianapolis 500, won the 24 Hours of Daytona. It was pressure, but he was such a cool guy. That was the highlight of my career to have a real guy like that in the boat with me, a guy who is known throughout the world as being one of the best drivers.

He once took me into the drivers' room right before the Indianapolis 500. I met Paul Tracy, Eddie Cheever. These guys were about to get into their cars, and the only things they wanted to talk about were race boats.

The last race we did was the 2001 Worlds in Key West. We had to beat Peter Myers and Joe Sgro, who were sponsored by Fountain, to win the Super V title. If they beat us, they won the title. They broke, but we ended up flipping the boat and losing the whole thing.

But it was still an accomplishment. It was just us. We ran the entire season with one set of 1,000-hp Zul blower motors. Here I was, this guy from Cigarette, with two guys who worked for me, my ex-wife and my Craftsman toolbox. And we almost did it.

What do you think Don Aronow would make of offshore racing now?

Probably about what I make of it.

Which is?

You go to a race and there so many classes that everybody either wins or gets second or third. It's not too good.