When Marc Granet wandered into the Maryland speed shop of legendary boat racer Art Lilly, the teenager had no idea the chance encounter would lead to his life’s passion.

“I looked around and saw all these engines and boats,” he said. “It blew my mind. I knew I had to be a racer.”
Nobody thought, including Granet and Lilly that 20 years later the teenager would pilot the fastest, most powerful catamaran ever to tear up an offshore race course.

“The first time I sat in the cockpit I said to myself this is going to be like driving the space shuttle,” said the driver of jet-turbine powered Miss GEICO boat. “I knew we had our work cut out for us.”

Like most offshore powerboat racers, Granet started off in an off-the-shelf, vee-bottom performance boat.
“Then one day a buddy of mine came by in a cat and took me for a ride,” Granet recalled. “We took the boat out in the Gulf of Mexico and hit about 90. That was it for vee-bottoms.”

Granet bought a 36-foot Spectre, the choice of several world and national champions on the offshore tour.
“We were just a bunch of guys doing poker runs, 100 miles out in the morning, and 100 miles back at night.” Granet said. “It was great, but I knew there was more.”

In 2005, Dan Lawrence, one of Granet’s “go fast” guys, approached him with a proposition. The two should get a cat, rig it for racing and run the American Power Boat Association/Super Boat International racing circuit.

At the time, the hottest, most competitive class was one of the oldest in powerboat racing. The outboard catamarans, though smaller and less expensive than their high-profile “super” cat cousins, had a strong, dedicated following.
With 10 races a season, it was not unusual to see 10 different winners. The top finishers usually closed the race within seconds of each other – leaving every race up for grabs.

Granet and Lawrence jumped right into the melee, taking their Loan Shark cat to an infamous big-water race in Fort Lauderdale for their rookie debut.

“We came out of the inlet and hit eight-foot seas,” Granet said. “A wave broke over us and the water dumped inside and knocked out our electronics. Somehow we finished the race.”

Undeterred, the Loan Shark crew persevered and earned the respect of their competitors and fellow racers in other classes. That’s when Granet got a call from Palm Beach businessman John Haggin.

“He wanted to put together a race team unlike anything anyone had ever seen before,” Granet said. Haggin didn’t go after the biggest names in the sport for this venture; instead, he recruited players with potential, like a baseball manager building an expansion team from the ground up.

In 2006, Haggin unveiled his Platinum Princess, a 40-foot catamaran powered by twin Gulf War-era helicopter engines. This “extreme cat” quickly became a crowd favorite, but Granet and teammate Scott Begovich knew it would take at least a year for the boat to realize its full potential.

The following year, Haggin added another boat to his arsenal, a 44-foot MTI that cranked out an astonishing 3700 horsepower. With a new sponsor, insurance giant GEICO, Haggin painted a “lady gecko” on the deck, adding to the boat’s mystique.

From the shore, however, Miss GEICO, goes by in a blur, when it hits a top speed of 190 mph. With that kind of power, Granet and Begovich had no problem setting the world speed record between Annapolis and Baltimore in spring 2007 with a time of 14 minutes and seven seconds. The pair followed up a few months later with a “Chattanooga Mile” speed record of a blistering two way average of 188 mph.

In 2008, Granet will be behind the wheel of a new, 50-foot Mystic, powered by twin, 2000-horsepower Cobra attack helicopter engines.

“Nobody is quite sure what it will do,” Granet said. “But I guarantee it is going to fly.”