By Matt Trulio

Regardless of our personal opinions on the competition—yes, we know there are other performance-boating magazines—we take all of it seriously. We are competitive by nature. We want to be the first in print with every story, and we want every story to be the best.

Save the live-and-let-live stuff for society at large. When it comes to the competition, we want to crush it. We want to win big with every issue.

Sound familiar? I'll bet I could replace "we" with "you" and you'd have no trouble with it.

There is one thing we always know we can deliver that our competition cannot—hands-on testing of the most exotic, high-end performance boats in creation. The key words here are "hands-on" and I sure don't mean my hands. (Those are far better suited to a laptop than to a throttle.) I'm talking about the hands of Bob Teague and John Tomlinson, our test drivers.

"There are a lot of magazines out there doing stories, but they don't have Bob Teague and John Tomlinson doing their evaluations," says Randy Scism, owner of Marine Technology Inc., a top-notch catamaran builder. "A performance evaluation is only as good as the guy doing the evaluating. And Bob and Johnny are the best."

The issue, says Scism, goes beyond competence, in which Teague and Tomlinson are unmatched. It extends to trust—trust that boats often worth more than $1 million will come back in one piece, and trust that the subsequent reviews of those boats will be fair and complete.

"Most of the equipment that goes to the Powerboat tests is already owned by customers, and they are very picky about who they let in, much less drive, their boats," Scism says. "They might have the houses and the cars and the airplanes, but the boats are their babies. They have to be comfortable with whoever is going to drive them. Because they've grown up around Powerboat, none of them has had an issue with Bob or John running their boats. I'll bet there's nobody else in the world who gets to drive $10 million worth of (high-performance) product in a week.

"The professionalism at the Powerboat Trials and the reviews—they're at another level," Scism adds. "People read the magazine, and they look at every word. It's the bible for offshore boats. It's the benchmark."

Cynics take note: MTI did not win an award this year. Scism admits he was disappointed with the lukewarm review of his catamaran, but he also acknowledges that the boat he sent was not his company's strongest effort. He plans to send a catamaran that will dazzle the Test Team for the 2008 Trials.

What he doesn't plan to do is send that cat anywhere else.

"At the high end of the high-performance market, there are very few people qualified to run boats like these," Scism says. "I've had other magazine people in a boat who really didn't know how to run it, and I'd rather just not do that."

Scism isn't alone in being discerning when it comes to which magazines he'll actually hand the keys to one of his boats. Mike Fiore, founder and owner of Outerlimits Powerboats, has the same take, as does Skip Braver of Cigarette Racing and Peter Hledin of Skater. Like Scism, they've been less than pleased with a Powerboat review in the past, yet they continue to send boats to the magazine—and nowhere else.

In this "Speed and Technology" issue, we pushed some of the most exotic hardware on the market to its limits. We realize that privilege is afforded to us primarily because of our test drivers and the magazine's history. We also realize that the same privilege is not generally given to our competition.

We take our competitors seriously. Especially when it comes to beating them.