Engine faults force Lupton brothers to skip Madison after tough Brockville opener

Two consecutive washouts had already tested the patience of everyone who made the trip before a single hull touched competitive water. When the season finally opened at the 1000 Islands Regatta in Brockville, Ontario, the Lupton contingent from New Zealand had been waiting longer than most, and the first weekend back on the water delivered both encouraging glimpses and sobering mechanical realities.

Ken Lupton arrived as the defending HRL Grand Prix champion, a title he had claimed in back-to-back seasons, steering the GP-577 Lucas Oil machine. His brother Jack brought something that had never raced before: a Henderson Grand Prix hull, purpose-built and shipped across the Pacific after months of preparation by a large, committed crew. The GP-33 JLM Motorsport entry represented an enormous investment of time and effort, all of it pointed at this moment.

Time trials gave the field its first honest look at the running order. Brandon Kennedy set the pace in the GP-35 TMSpecial, recording a 31.476-second run to claim the benchmark. Ken posted 47.443 seconds, while Jack, putting the new Henderson hull into competition for the very first time, came seventh with a 38.387-second run. Neither Lupton time was flattering, but both reflected the straightforward truth of running machinery that had barely seen competitive water before that weekend.

The qualifying heats made for harder reading in the JLM Motorsport camp. Q-1B produced a DNS for the GP-33, the new boat not yet in a position to complete a heat. Q-2B brought the identical result, another blank recorded against Jack's entry. For a team that had surrendered a New Zealand summer preparing a brand-new hull, loaded it onto a freighter, and reassembled it on the other side of the world, those two empty lines in the results sheet were genuinely painful.

Ken's qualifying was a study in contrast. He won Q-1B outright, posting 147.326 seconds and finishing nearly three seconds clear of Kent Henderson's Canada Boy, precisely the kind of margin a back-to-back champion is expected to produce. Q-2A then brought mechanical failure, and Lucas Oil returned no time. When Ken lined up for the final, the GP-577 retired before completing the race.

The full picture emerged in a statement the team released after the event. Three engines across the two boats were found to share a common fault, a finding that immediately shaped the decisions ahead. The team withdrew from the following weekend's Madison event, a difficult but entirely logical call given there was no realistic time to rebuild the engines and make the drive. Attention turns now to Valleyfield on 10-11-12 July.

Jack's message to his supporters in the aftermath was generous and forward-looking. Despite the DNS entries and the amount of work still ahead, he described it as the best weekend his team had ever had, giving full credit to the people around him.

"Brand new boat, heaps of little issues," Jack wrote. "Upside: we have the best team ever. We will work super hard to get on top of it."

While the Lupton camp worked through adversity, Kennedy was doing the opposite at the front of the field. He swept time trials, both qualifying heats, and the final to take a flawless Grand Prix victory. Andrew Tate brought the GP-71 The Wild One across the line in second, with Eric Langevin completing the podium in the GP-212 Sylco.

The Quebec round at Valleyfield now takes on considerable importance for both crews. Ken carries established pace at this level of competition, and with the shared engine fault addressed, that weekend figures to look very different. Jack and the JLM Motorsport team arrive with a clearer picture of what the Henderson hull needs and a crew that has already shown it can hold together when things go wrong.

Grand Prix class — 1000 Islands Regatta, Brockville

Hydroplane Racing League | 26–28 June 2026