Don Johnson’s Team USA: The Boat He Built After Winning the World Championship Is For Sale

A 50-foot catamaran is sitting in New Hampshire with faded stars-and-stripes livery, an intact plexiglass canopy and no engines. It is listed for sale, no reserve, on Bring a Trailer. Stencilled on the trailer in red: FASTEST LAP RECORD HOLDER 127.3 MPH. This is Team USA, the boat Don Johnson commissioned after winning the 1988 APBA Superboat Class World Championship in someone else’s hull.

A Cinderella season

The championship that prompted its creation was, by Johnson’s own reckoning, something that should not have happened. He had been filming in Calgary for most of the 1988 season and could only make the minimum three races required to qualify for the Key West finale. He arrived at the World Championships with one meager offshore race behind him.

The boat was the Gentry Turbo Eagle, a 46-foot Wellcraft Scarab on loan from Hawaiian developer and offshore racing champion Tom Gentry. Johnson drove, with throttleman Bill Sirois and navigator Gus Anastasi alongside him. The title came down to the final two laps of the last race. Running third behind Al Copeland’s Popeye’s Fried Chicken/diet Coke entry, the crew made a tight turn to close the gap and accelerated hard to take second. On accumulated points from a first and two seconds across the series, that was enough.

Bill Sirois noted later what had struck him about Johnson’s concentration during the season.

In our second race in Grand Haven, which was kind of a nasty race with the slop and the fog, I motioned to Don to change his course a few degrees. He was in such concentration on the compass that he wouldn’t move. He stayed right on course. Oddly enough, we came out right on the money at every mark.

Johnson himself was direct about what the result meant.

No one was more surprised than me. It was a Cinderella season.

His racing path to that point had been built on the set of Miami Vice. Wellcraft had been supplying boats for the series since 1985, and Johnson had grown close to Anastasi and Wellcraft president Bob Long through the stunt driving work. He made his racing debut in the summer of 1987 when he and Anastasi set a new record in the Mississippi River Race Challenge. That November, he competed in his first offshore race as navigator at the World Championships. The 1988 Superboat season followed, with his Hollywood commitments limiting him to three starts.

Interesting ideas up their sleeves

Winning the world title in a borrowed Wellcraft V-bottom only sharpened what came next. By April 1989, when the sport’s press was asking whether a V-hull could deliver the national championship he now wanted, Johnson was careful with his answer. Wellcraft did not build catamarans, and the catamarans were faster.

We’ve got some interesting ideas up our sleeves and we’re going to toy around with some different things.

Those plans took shape with Jonathan Sadowsky, a boat builder who would later go on to found Revenge Yachts. Together they commissioned a 50-foot racing catamaran for the 1989 season. The hull was named Team USA.

The boat

Four big-block Chevrolet V8 engines, each producing around 1,000bhp, drove through Kiekhaefer Aeromarine surface drives. The drives were notable in their own right, having been first shown privately, by appointment only, in a hotel suite near the 1988 Miami International Boat Show rather than on the floor of the show itself.

Johnson, speaking to Seth Meyers in spring 2025, singled out one construction detail.

I designed it out of carbon fiber. No one was doing this back then.

He added that he never saved the patents.

The crew Johnson assembled around Team USA was not modest. Kurt Russell, a regular companion from his racing years, served as navigator. On the throttle was Richie Powers, one of the most celebrated figures in offshore racing history. Powers had won four consecutive UIM Open Class World Championships between 1973 and 1976 – getting him into the cockpit of Team USA was not a minor detail. Sadowsky himself navigated at the boat’s competitive debut at the 1989 APBA World Championships in Atlantic City.

The record

Team USA’s highest moment came at the 1990 Bud Dry Marathon Offshore Challenge on the Hudson River in New York, where it set a one-lap speed record of 127.3mph. The trailer still carries that number in red paint on its sides.

Melanie made him sell it

Engine failures curtailed the racing programme before it could build on the Hudson result. But the reason Team USA ultimately left Johnson’s hands was more straightforward. Melanie Griffith, the American actress and Johnson’s wife at the time, had seen enough of what offshore racing did to people.

Don Johnson, speaking to Seth Meyers in spring 2025.

Melanie made me sell it.

The reason, he said, was the accidents and injuries in the sport. Johnson and Griffith divorced in 1996. The boat had already been sold by then, sacrificed to concerns that did not, in the end, save the marriage. That is the reading that gives the line he delivered next its full weight.

She could have just saved me the trouble.

On the championship year, Johnson cited 1989 in the same interview. Official records place the title at the 1988 Key West World Championships.

What remains

The fibreglass hull retains much of its white finish, with the original Team USA livery surviving in fragments: stars-and-stripes accents at the bow, faded Jennings Firearms sponsor lettering across the top deck, blue fender graphics flanking the cockpit. The tandem-axle trailer, converted from its original gooseneck to a pintle-hitch setup, is included. The boat carries no title or registration and is sold by bill of sale only.

The Bring a Trailer listing is no reserve, offered out of New Hampshire. For a world champion’s own boat, built in carbon fibre when nobody else was doing it, it is a more modest ending than the Hudson record suggested.