John D. D’Elia, who won national and world offshore powerboat championships alongside his son and made a 30-foot Chris-Craft catamaran one of the most consistent boats on the American circuit in the 1980s, died on April 22, 2026. He was 90. The racing story is worth telling.
Marathon, Florida. April 25, 1987. The Bud Light Offshore Challenge was already generating headlines before a boat had turned a lap. Six Open class entries had arrived from the shops with F-16 fighter plane canopies bolted over their cockpits and five-point harnesses inside, the sport’s belated answer to a run of fatal accidents. Spectators called them Martian ships. The APBA’s chief paramedic watched from a helicopter overhead.
Down in Modified class, none of that applied. John D’Elia and his throttleman Digger Dirgins climbed into Auto Armor Special Edition, a 30-foot Chris-Craft catamaran running twin 550hp MerCruiser engines on surface drives, and went racing. The boat had nine wins from thirteen Modified class starts since the beginning of the 1986 season. D’Elia, who had already collected one US and two world titles, was not particularly interested in the space capsules.
When the Open class drama played out above them, with Spirit of America winning at 100.4 mph before a protest and penalty changed the outcome, D’Elia and Dirgins had already posted their number: 98.1 mph over the 149-mile course. The Powerboat magazine correspondent covering the race noted they had averaged 2.9 mph faster than the eventual Open class winner. In the Modified, it was another entry in the win column for the team the writer described as one of racing’s most exciting.
His son John Jr., racing separately in the 24-foot Skater catamaran Breakaway in Stock A, won his class at 76.5 mph, more than ten miles per hour clear of the next boat. Father and son each stood on top of the podium on the same afternoon in Marathon. Both had been described by that point as former world champions.
D’Elia had come to offshore racing in 1980 after watching the Walsh Offshore Grand Prix at Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey as a spectator. He was already a former amateur car racer and a substantial automotive business operator, running Honda, Acura and Isuzu dealerships across Connecticut and New York, a portfolio his father had founded as a Dodge and Pontiac dealership and which D’Elia had expanded into one of the larger groups in the Northeast. He had run competitively through school and university and, by all accounts, applied the same unhurried, calculating approach to race preparation that he did to business.
One early boat sank in 75 feet of water at Grand Haven, Michigan in 1985. He came back with better equipment.
After the Chris-Craft years, D’Elia moved to a 35-foot Jaguar catamaran, also called Special Edition, and won back-to-back APBA National Championships in 1988 and 1989 in Open class, often racing alongside his son. The Jaguar became one of the recognised cats of that era in vintage offshore circles. Both D’Elias were nominated to the National Powerboat Association Hall of Fame in 2009, John for Special Edition, his son John Jr. for Breakaway.
D’Elia was a lifelong Greenwich, Connecticut, resident, a Notre Dame graduate and a US Air Force veteran. He was deeply involved with the Greenwich Boys and Girls Club. His grandson John D. D’Elia III later joined the family in racing, and at his death he was survived by a great-grandson, John D. D’Elia IV.
A memorial gathering was held on May 7 at Fred D. Knapp Funeral Home in Greenwich, followed by a funeral Mass on May 8 at St. Mary’s Church. The family suggested donations to the Greenwich Boys and Girls Club in lieu of flowers.
