‘It Felt Like Forever’: Driver Describes 120-MPH Boat Crash At Lake Of The Ozarks

It was Hampton Langston and Ryan Beckley's first time to race at Lake of the Ozarks, and it was a race they'll not soon forget.

“The event was great,” Langston, a South Carolinian, said. “That was our first time.”

But the weekend took a frightening turn when the HBS Motorsports boat went airborne and overturned during the Shootout Offshore races on Sunday, June 14. 

Langston is the driver for HBS Motorsports. He says they were running roughly 120 miles per hour, with and Beckley at the throttles, before their boat flipped during the weekend's racing action.

The crash happened as the team was coming around the course and heading into what would have been their second lap. Several boats were close together, including Luke Wiley Racing and Say Less, as they came through a turn near the dam.

“We had passed them on down on the straightaway, and we had Say Less on our left-hand side,” Langston said. “I think all three of us were kind of coming around that turn of the dam together.”

Langston said his team slowed slightly to make sure the boats got around the turn safely, but the other boats gained ground coming out of the turn.

“We were running probably around 120 miles an hour when it happened,” he said.

According to Langston, the conditions and the positioning of the boats created a difficult situation. He said there was a crosswind as they approached a dogleg in the course, and the wakes from the other boats appeared to come together.

“Both of their wakes were kind of V-ing together, and we were trying to stay in the clear water right between the two boats,” Langston said.

After reviewing video of the crash, Langston said he believes the team now knows what went wrong.

“We had the boat trimmed up too fast and we had it trimmed up too high,” he said. “Not enough control of the boat.”

Langston said the tunnel tab should not have been down, and the motors should have been farther down in the water to give the boat more control.

When the starboard side of the boat caught the edge of another boat’s wake, Langston said the boat hooked and flipped almost instantly.

“It basically bit and just sent us,” he said. “There was nothing we could do. It happened so fast.”

Langston was blunt about the cause.

“That was just 100% our fault,” he said. “User error, I guess you could say.”

He said the team may have been too aggressive in the moment and should have allowed the boats to settle into line before trying to work forward again.

“You only have a few seconds to avoid stuff like that,” Langston said. “We were, I guess, too 'in the moment' and being a little too aggressive. We should’ve let things kind of settle down and everybody get in line, then work our way forward.”

Once the boat flipped, Langston said his focus immediately went to survival training.

“The first thing I thought about was remembering our training,” he said. “Put your oxygen in first, then make sure you’re breathing on that, pull your safety harness, and then work on finding your way out.”

He said he also wanted to make sure Beckley was okay and that they could get the hatch open to escape.

Although rescue crews arrived quickly, Langston said time moved slowly inside the overturned boat.

“It felt like forever,” he said. “Looking back at the video, I think they were there within 15 or 18 seconds. It felt like several minutes to us inside of the boat.”

Langston said he and Beckley were shaken up and disoriented, but avoided serious injuries.

“Our bodies were fine,” he said. “Just scuffed up a little bit crawling through everything.”

Beckley’s arm was swollen after hitting something during the crash, Langston said, but it was not broken.

The boat did sustain significant damage, mostly to the sides, but Langston said the motors were okay and have already been started again. The boat has since been stripped down so it can be sent for fiberglass repair.

“They’ve already stripped all the rigging and the motors off of it so we can get it back to fiberglass,” Langston said.

He said the boat is expected to be repaired and sent back through MTI’s glass shop so it can be checked and repaired properly.

“They’re going to go through it and make sure everything’s put back together the right way,” he said.

Despite the crash, Langston said he was grateful the outcome was not worse — and that the safety response came as fast as it did.