Lake Hollingsworth, Lakeland: The Octagon Walter Engle Laid Out in Buoys

The first powerboat course on Lake Hollingsworth was an octagon. Walter Engle set it out in buoys, a mile and two-thirds around, and by his son Gene's account the boats of the 1930s ran it on the edge. The course got too fast. The drivers were getting afraid of it, Gene Engle told The Ledger in 2013, so the Orange Cup Regatta went to a one-mile oval instead, which is safer and makes a better race because the boats run tighter on it.

Walter Engle started the race on the lake his family lived beside, on the southwest shore. The founding year is not settled: The Ledger has reported 1933, while The Lakelander and LkldNow both date it to 1934. It is old enough either way that The Ledger calls the Orange Cup the nation's second-oldest powerboat race, behind only the APBA Gold Cup on the Detroit River, which began in 1904. Gene Engle has said his first childhood memories of the regatta are of working in the race pit as a boy.

Where the name came from, he has said he does not know. His guess is the orange groves that surrounded Lake Hollingsworth at the time, and the Grapefruit Circuit the race belonged to, which also ran on Lake Maggiore in St. Petersburg and Lake Eustis near Leesburg. His father and the committee named it at the beginning, and it has been called that ever since.

Racers know the water as the Lake of Records. "There have probably been more records broken on this race course than any other venue in the world," Engle told The Ledger. The mile course is surveyed, so that a world record set on it will stand up, and Engle has put the records down to the conditions here — clear weather, very little wind, a weekend when he expects at least a couple of records to fall. In 2021 he moved the regatta out of March, where it had sat for most of its decades, and into October, when the rainy season and the high humidity are going out of central Florida.

Walter Engle handed off to Dub Palmore, then to Bill and Katie Billiter, before Gene took it over as president of the Central Florida Racing Club; at the 75th running, the junior drivers raced for an award given in Katie Billiter's memory. Gene Engle went into the Polk County Sports Hall of Fame with the class of 2018.

Rob DiNicolantonio of Lakeland, who by 2013 held national and world titles and two Orange Cup trophies in Formula 2 tunnel hulls that reach 120 mph, told the paper that crashing is not a question of whether but of when. One lap into the first championship race of the 81st regatta, in March 2019, Chris Rinker's outboard capsule boat went light in a turn, became airborne and rolled over; his 1,050-pound boat cleared Jeff Shepherd's without touching it, and he came down upright with the engine still running. Shepherd lost a cowling enclosure, got it back, and finished third. Paul Reid, who had been racing since 1959, won all four of his heats that weekend at age 74.

Five years had been lost by the time of the 75th. Walter canceled two during World War II. Gene canceled two more while the lake was dredged and the water taken out of it, and one in 2010 over money. In October 2024 the committee called the race off the Friday before, after Hurricane Milton: the EMS crew that works the lake comes from St. Petersburg, 57 miles away, and was still occupied with the storm, Lakeland's parks department was on cleanup, and the hotel rooms the racers had booked had gone to evacuees and to FEMA.

Gene's grandson Will Engle decided in March 2021 to film the race, and spent a year making a documentary out of it. "Lake of Records" catches Bobby King setting a world record that year, and the rest of the field taking another one, an average speed of 94 mph.

The 88th running was set for Oct. 16-18, 2026, with Gene Engle organizing and his son Walt and Will both in it. Saturday's racing was scheduled on a course of a mile and a quarter and Sunday's on the mile, which gives a team two chances at a record in one weekend. Twelve classes enter, ten of them closed-capsule, and every driver practices escaping the capsule in a dunk test before any boat runs. The fastest are the Grand National Hydroplanes at 150 mph.