Every section cites its sources
How the machines changed
How these machines got the way they are, written as far as possible from what the makers themselves published. Every section names the sources it rests on, and every article states what it could not read.
This is the machines, not the racing. For the sport itself read How the sport got here; for a plain list of what launched when, Model timelines; for who built the first one, Where the sport came from.
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The 30hp problem that shaped the first hull
Yamaha wanted fifty horsepower for its first sit-down craft and could only get thirty. The double-chine hull almost every runabout still uses is what the engineers did about it. This is Yamaha's own account of the years before the first machine shipped, and it is the part of the story that the model lists leave out.
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Jetpilot: one logo, two companies
A stand-up racing apparel brand founded in California in 1986, sold to Japan in 1999, run from the Gold Coast for two decades before it legally owned itself, and today split into two separate companies sharing one logo. What its own about pages say is graded here against the registers, and what they leave out is the larger part of the story.
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Marine Jet, Yamaha's name for the same ski
In Japan these are not WaveRunners. They are Marine Jets, sold under codes rather than names, and the gap between the two vocabularies means owners of the same hull cannot find each other's parts.
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Yamaha on its own machines, 2003 to 2009
Yamaha published a dealer magazine for decades, and the personal watercraft sections of it are a primary record of how the four-stroke changeover actually happened. This is what those issues say, and what they cannot tell us.
What shipped, and when. These articles say how the changes happened. For the year-by-year list of what each company actually launched, the Yamaha model timeline runs off a different source on a different calendar, and does not decide fitment either.
Where this comes from
The source index for the Yamaha material is the Yamaha News PWC index, which lists every issue whose index names a personal watercraft and links to Yamaha's own archive. Model-year tables live at Model Reference.
- How the sport got here: the sport as organised competition, from racing sources graded for reliability, with the claims nobody could source listed as held back.
- How the machines changed, this page: the machines and the companies behind them, every section naming its source.
- Model timelines: which machines each company made, year by year, from one named publication per make.
- Where the sport came from: who built the first one, from milestones graded one by one, including the two the sources contest.
4 articles · 33 sources cited