The wildest race in powerboating: Inside the 1972 London to Monte-Carlo challenge

Princesses, aristocrats, hippies, adventurers and offshore racing legends all set out on the Port Richborough International Offshore Powerboat Race, a 2,540-nautical-mile dash from London to Monte-Carlo from 10-24 June 1972. More than 50 years on from the extraordinary 1972 contest, which remains one of the most colourful chapters in yachting history...

The Swinging 60s took a little while to land in Shoreham-by-Sea, but when the locals eventually embraced the Age of Aquarius, they did so with some gusto. By all accounts, the sleepy coastal town in West Sussex was the scene of many a wild party, not least at Edward Chater’s house, over on Shoreham Beach. 

Chater was a London dentist, something of a bon viveur and a keen powerboat enthusiast who would regularly go out for a spin on the nearby River Adur.

It was at one of these parties that Chater met Ralph Hilton, owner of a fleet of lorries in South London. Hilton was, as Chater now remembers, “a bit of a scoundrel”, but the two hit it off, sharing a love of circuit racing (competing in closed, often man-made, inshore circuits) in boats on lakes and reservoirs dotted across the country. 

Hilton owned a powerboat, an absolute beast forced to retire early in the 1969 Round Britain race with engine trouble. Hilton mentioned to his new friend how keen he was to enter it in the upcoming London to Monte-Carlo race. It was set to be the longest of its kind ever to be held, clocking in at 2,540 nautical miles and one of the great glamour events of the still-nascent, jet-setting 1970s.

It was the perfect avatar for a time of great optimism, a sweet spot between the moon landings and the energy crisis (triggered by a Middle East oil embargo), between the blissed-out, sun-kissed era of hippiedom and the snarling anger of punk.

However, after his company, HTS (Hilton Transport Services) went public, Hilton got a touch of cold feet. Flaunting a powerboat about the place wasn’t a good look when the accountants and auditors were keeping a watchful eye. 

And so, over a few drinks, cutting through the endless fug of pipe smoke, Chater agreed to drive the boat, forming a team with Mike Bellamy, a former school friend of Chater’s and owner of a burgeoning boat business, and Jim Brooker, a mechanic who worked for Hilton with a handy knowledge of all things diesel.

This mixing of classes and backgrounds felt very much of its time. “It was all the Lord Lucans and reprobates and this, that and the other,” remembers Laura Levi, whose mother, Lady Violet Aitken, was an experienced racer, finishing fifth in the Round Britain, joining  her fellow Ford teams in a formation V-shape, as the boats marked a dominant first-to-fifth placing in the race.

Now, with the Port Richborough International Offshore Powerboat Race, London to Monte-Carlo, running from 10 to 24 June 1972, all talk was of another Ford clean sweep. 

The 14 legs began at Barking Reach (though the ceremonial stuff happened upriver at the more salubrious surrounds of Westminster Bridge, in the presence of Princess Margaret) to Cowes, finishing at La Grande-Motte to Monte-Carlo (with stops in Brest, La Rochelle, Bilbao, La Coruña, Porto, Lisbon, Portimão, Marbella, Almería, Alicante and Barcelona).

There was a total of 75 trophies on offer and £17,000 in cash prizes (around £200,000 today), with £5,000 for the winner, as well as a Gold Challenge Trophy and a gold Rolex (more on this later). Eighteen of the entries were British and there was one each from Sweden, Germany and Monaco.

With the sponsors having decided that Levi, then an eager 17-year-old already with some decent nautical miles under her Biba belt, was too young to take part, Lady Vi teamed up with Lady Fiona Arran (“two old bags in a boat” in Levis’s words), another Round Britain veteran, in Ford Express.

Meanwhile, Colonel John Douglas Slim, 2nd Viscount Slim, a just-retired commanding officer of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, was in charge of Who Dares Wins. Much to the Viscount’s chagrin, there was also a German entrant, Miss WD-40, headed by Oscar Trost, who made his money as a distributor of the rust-prevention solvent.

And then there was John Caulcutt, a former musician and hippy T-shirt seller on Petticoat Lane in the East End, who traded his velvet loon pants in for pinstripes and became a successful stockbroker, only to swap them back again after getting chummy with a young Richard Branson and discovering the joys of powerboating. 

Caulcutt entered the Round Britain with Psychedelic Surfer, an inflatable that was to provide a template for the RNLI’s inshore rescue boats and, despite the countercultural grooviness, was no slouch, becoming the first man ever to navigate around Britain in a RIB. For the Monte-Carlo race, he skippered Monty Surfers Flying Tyre, another rubber inflatable.

Twenty-one boats started, but only six finished. Problems began almost immediately, with driftwood causing grief at Barking, combined with lousy weather, prompting a number of retirements, including early leader and pre-race favourite Canadian Moppie, running too close to Selsey Bill. 

“The weather was pretty lousy, but it wasn’t that bad,” says Levi. “It was just that everyone was so over-excited that they thought a quick turn around Brighton would be OK. They took their stern drives off and never made it to Cowes.”

Mike Bellamy’s son Laurence, who took over his father’s Lancing Marine operation in 2023 following Mike’s passing, paints a rather grim picture. “Racing down the estuary is flat water, but there’s always stuff in that water, be it telegraph poles, cement bags, bodies... Anyway, you end up going around north of Kent, across the Goodwin Sands, which are somewhat treacherous, across Dungeness, which is pretty horrible weather-wise, and then all the way to Southampton.”

By the end of the third stage, at La Rochelle, just 13 boats were left. Ford Express had started taking on water five kilometres off the coast of Brest. Things weren’t helped by Lady Vi and Lady Fiona arguing over who got to issue the “Mayday, Mayday” communication. 

Both wanted to be the one to say it, and both tried to keep the other away from the radio. “Ford Express was badly made, they’d already had problems coming into Cowes the night before and they were sinking,” says Levi. “Luckily they could see lights on the shore and managed to beach the boat.

“We were waiting in La Rochelle with, funnily enough, Johnny Caulcutt. Anyway, they got off on the beach and locals – it was a fishing town as far as I remember – they’d never seen a powerboat like this, they managed to… I don’t know what they managed actually, but they never made it to La Rochelle. We were stuck there for a while. With Caulcutt, I don’t think he could go on in his rubber boat. Called the Flying Tyre or something. And by this time there were only about three people left in the race.”

Chater suggests that Trost and his Miss WD-40 crew may well have been the near-victims of sabotage. “Slim came up to me and said, ‘Ed, you must beat the Hun!’ I said, ‘John, that finished  30 years ago…’ 

He said, ‘Not for me. Beat the effing Hun!’ He said, ‘We’re going to fix them.’ I said, ‘Christ’s sake John, what are you talking about?’ ‘You watch,’ he said.” At La Coruña the unfortunate Trost fell in his boat, cracking two of his ribs. Was the Colonel really responsible for the mishap? “I looked over at Slim, and he gave me a sideways glance,” says Chater. Undeterred, Trost and his team continued to race. (Slim’s Who Dares Wins retired at La Grande-Motte.)

Caulcutt’s inflatable rejoined the race at  Bilbao, only to hit problems off Santander. “It just split up and sank,” he says, 53 years later. “We had a rather long swim to land, we could see from the wave pattern the direction for south-west, so we could see where south was and land. And we arrived all roped together in our wetsuits and lifejackets, with a whole load of people on the beach, sunbathing.”

It was starting to look like a straight race between HTS and Richard Lawson’s Jaffa Orange Juice, only for Bellamy to correctly judge the depth of water going through a gap among rocks and Lawson to get his sums terribly wrong. 

“He smashed off some of his motor drives, and that effectively ended the race for him,” Bellamy Jr explains, with no small amount of filial pride. By the stop at Porto, HTS had a lead of nearly four hours.

With Jaffa Orange Juice now sidelined for three days following damage and two blown engines, disaster for HTS came close on the penultimate leg, when a mistral wind suddenly hit off the coast of Barcelona. 

“We caught a Force 9,” Chater says. “We were offshore and had to get straight back in. We had no sat nav, no radar, it was all dead reckoning. You had three compasses on board and that was it.”

Bellamy takes up the tale: “The boat was standing vertically, and a number of times they thought they were going to perish. They were running low on fuel when Mike remembered that tabacs also sell diesel and oil, so they found a tabac, filled the boat up, and were able to carry on, otherwise they’d been out.”

With engines overheating, a 24-hour rest period just past the Strait of Gibraltar came as a blessed relief. It also allowed Jaffa Orange Juice to get back in the race and new challenger Super Aquarama Zoom, with future offshore world champion Gianfranco Rossi at the wheel, to resume battle in fine fettle. 

Not that it mattered too much, with HTS securing a lead of nearly nine hours, clocking an average speed of 57.5 kilometres per hour across the two weeks. Zoom was second overall while Trost’s Miss WD-40, despite the alleged best efforts of his arch nemesis Viscount Slim, came third.

“As a family we flew down to Monaco, and we all had HTS t-shirts on and stood in line,” remembers Bellamy. “Eventually the boats came in and they won the overall. It was exciting times.”

Chater remembers Princess Grace giving the prizes. “She was just a really good-looking chick, I mean amazing,” he enthuses. “And at her height in ’72, when she’d just married Rainier. I think the party had 3,000 sitting down. Just imagine the catering.”

Levi as well recalls meeting Princess Grace (though in rather different terms to Chater). “We drove down to Monaco, we had a house down there, a place in Cap-d’Ail. Those were the days.” Looking back now, she views the race with fondness, albeit tinged with regret. “It wasn’t exciting for me, because I wasn’t on the bloody boat. But no, it was thrilling, the thought of it.  But it all just fell apart.”

The prizes ended up back in the hotel bedroom that young Bellamy was sharing with his sister. “We woke up in the morning and saw all of these trophies, including this gold one, which Princess Grace had given to the team.” 

There was also the gold Rolex. “Ralph (Hilton) demanded the watch from Mike, who had to take it back to Ralph without question. He did that, and I think that’s when he started to lose contact really.”

Hilton’s haulage and distribution empire collapsed in 1976, following a damning Department of Trade report that quoted a nameless employee describing the company as being “like Gestapo headquarters”. 

Caulcutt, surely a Matthew Macfadyen mini-series biopic in the making, went on to become a bobsleighing Olympian, appearing at the 1976 Innsbruck games, before designing the red nose concept for British charity Comic Relief.

Levi, a former journalist and keen racer, is club secretary of the British Powerboat Racing Club. Her mother, Lady Vi, passed away in 2021. Chater, now blissfully retired, continues to blow endless puffs of pipe smoke across the increasingly chichi environs of Shoreham Beach. 

After winning Monte-Carlo he was offered races with numerous teams, opting to join Penthouse, where he won the Miami National, among others.

“Penthouse was great of course, because it was all the bloody girls. Loads of them. It was good fun.” He chuckles. “But yeah, Monte-Carlo was something. We were all pals, really. I still see some of them…”

First published in the February 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.