A few years ago, competitors in offshore racing’s Supercat class voted to conduct their own internal points championship. It was agreed which races would be included in this championship, the races spanning across various organizations (OPA, Race World Offshore, etc.) they raced under. Now racers finally know exactly what they’ll be competing for: a state-of-the art trophy assembled by Tyson Garvin designed to expand with each new champion’s victory.

Garvin described the trophy as a “tangible, durable reminder of a specific achievement, and serves as recognition or evidence of merit. It is something that will let our achievement be recognized for a long period of time beyond the next racing season.”

Thus, a “perpetual trophy” was fabricated—one that will accommodate the name of each season’s high point champions as they are added to it. The trophy will then be passed on to each season’s winner, with their name displayed on another layer to the bottom of the trophy.

Garvin emphasizes that the Supercat championship, and the award, are not strictly associated with any specific sanctioning body. Rather, Supercat competitors will determine which specific races would become part of the championship. “It’s not about OPA or RWO or SBI,” he says—the Supercat competitors will determine which races will count toward the overall points in the championship.

When he first embarked on the construction of the trophy, Garvin realized it was going to be a big undertaking. For months, his engineers at his company, Apex Manufacturing and Design, modeled hundreds of designs before striking upon the final one. From there, several more months were spent tweaking the design and engineering how it would be built and assembled.

Garvin wanted no external bolts or screws in the final design, which would improve the look of the trophy while making it decidedly more difficult to design and machine. The resulting trophy not only features triple chrome-plated billet aircraft aluminum pieces, but two extra “wow” factors: internally lighted red-and-blue light elements and the addition of a motorized hub that turns a real, CNC’d Mercury racing propeller at 2 rpm.

The first name on the trophy will be the 2019 championship team of NZ-11 Pro Floors: owner/driver Wayne Valder and throttleman Grant Bruggemann. “They happened to be the first ones with their names on it, and their names will always be on the top of it,” he Garvin says. “As we add more winners, it will just keep getting bigger.”

So what happens after the passing of several years? Won’t the trophy become prohibitively large?

“What we have determined is that after we get 10 years’ worth of winners on it, we will need to modify the layers,” Garvin explains. “As soon as it starts getting too big, we will change the layers. So I will actually need to refabricate it so that each layer has three names on it, and that will create more room.

Unfortunately, just as the Covid-19 virus has proved to be an impairment to every aspect of human life, so has it negatively impacted the way Garvin hoped to reveal the trophy to the general public.

“It’s a real bummer,” he sighs, “because I’d always hoped that the first time that someone saw it, I would be handing it to them. But, of course, it’s just not going to work out like that.”