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Who Killed Copperhead?
Jun. 11, 2009
By Justin
WATERMARKS ONLINE:
Who Killed Copperhead?
Tracing the Demise of Personal Watercraft Illustrated's Offshore/Endurance Project Ultra 250X
Text and Photography by Kevin Shaw
OK, for you loyal Personal Watercraft Illustrated readers, this might be a sad bit of truth; Copperhead is no more. Yeah, sorry kids. We had to put her down. But we had some
good times, right? Just try to think of those times when you start to
miss her. She's in a better place, after all.Well, OK, not
really. In fact, she's probably sitting at the bottom of Kawasaki's
dumpster with her nose Sawzall'ed off. But, I'll go over that a bit
later.To understand this project, it's worth going back to the birth of the idea. Stemmed from the long-lasting project builds of Hot Rod and Car Craft magazines, Copperhead was designed to be a fluid, ever-changing machine, similar to what Popular Hot Rodding's "Project X" 1955 Chevy is. In that light, Copperhead was intended to be a testing platform for a vast array of aftermarket
components, a test mule, more or less, but a vehicle that would be
intrinsically tied to Personal Watercraft Illustrated.Beginning
as a "media consignment" (basically a loaned unit for riding and
testing), this ruby-red '07 Ultra 250X Kawasaki was a meant to be
solely a "ride and write" loaner. But, as the Kawasaki lingered around
in our garage and the aftermarket kept building new and cool bits and
pieces for the ski, the wheels in my head started to spin.Unfortunately,
this same 250X was a "pre-production unit," meaning it could never be
sold to the general public and would eventually need to be parted out
and crushed. While this might sound barbaric, it happens so often that
OEMs across all types of motorsport have become used to it. As an
example, when I used to work with Corvette Fever magazine years ago, I was handed the keys to a gorgeous '07 convertible
400-plus-horsepower C6 Corvette, with the stipulation, "Take your girl
out for a spin and have some fun!"That evening we did and I
think we racked up an unnecessary 250 miles on the odometer - 250 of
some of the hardest miles a Corvette has earned in such a short amount
of time. When I returned the convertible the next morning, my publisher
explained that our offices would be the last media outlet to be loaned
the car and that afterward, GM was going to crush it. Imagine that!
Crushing a beautiful convertible Corvette!
--This is an exerpt from Kevin Shaw's Watermarks Online editorial. For the full story and photos, simply click here to access the PWI forums.
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Personal Watercraft Illustrated Privacy Statement Copyright Personal Watercraft Illustrated 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this service maybe be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher of Personal Watercraft Illustrated.
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