EC Enterprises unveils present for valley

EC Enterprises Motorsports Park on Albright Grade outside Lewiston has been home to a great variety of events over the past few years.

Motocross, supercross, demolition derbies, monster truck rallies and even a “horsepower vs. horse power” motorcycle-versus-equine racing event have been among the attractions featured at the park’s FreedomNorthwest Arena. Still, few might have anticipated what has now been revealed as the next planned addition to the venue’s repertoire:

Currently under construction at the motorsports park is a sprint boat racing course.

What is sprint boat racing?

Also known as “jetsprint racing,” the sport originated in New Zealand in the 1980s. It features jet-powered motorboats negotiating predetermined courses at speeds that can approach 90 miles per hour on straightaways. The races call for two-person crews: a driver who directly operates the boat and a navigator who gives directions.

“It’s pretty exciting,” EC Enterprises founder and owner Eric Christiansen said. “They’re high-speed. They’ve got lots of horsepower — anywhere from 500 to 2,000 horsepower for a 13-to-14-foot boat.”

Christiansen plans to divide the racing up into three classes based on the size and power modifications of the engines. Boats will navigate the course one at a time, each trying to outdo the opposition on the clock.

Fitting it all in

A park nestled along the side of a steep uphill grade might seem an unlikely site for boating of any kind, but the course will occupy the flattened space traditionally home to the motocross track, where Christiansen reports that there is “kind of a natural bowl” and holding water is “not going to be a problem at all.”

“The boats run in these channels, and the channels are roughly 20 feet wide by 3 feet deep,” he said. “It’s a dug course and has lots of corners.”

Christiansen emphasized that this area has strong historical ties to sprint boat racing; for example, it produced a world-elite competitor in Ryan Rogers (now best-known as the owner Lewiston’s Rogers Toyota), whose son River Rogers is currently active in the sport.

“There used to be sprint boat racing in the valley back in the ‘90s, but it was over in Swallow’s Nest by the boat ramp in the lagoon,” Christiansen said. “It worked because it was all they had, but it wasn’t optimum.”

Christiansen hopes to hold his first public sprint boat racing events by mid-2025.

“We don’t have an actual date nailed down, but it would probably be late spring to early summer for the first one and later in the summer for the second one,” he said.

He also noted that the addition of sprint boat racing does not spell an end to any of the park’s traditional events.

“We will fit it all in somehow,” he said. “We’re building a new motocross track on a different part of the property. A lot of people were bummed out, thinking we were getting rid of the motocross.”

A northwest specialty

According to Christiansen, this will be one of only three such courses currently operating in the United States. Of the others, one exists in Port Angeles, Wash., and one relatively nearby in St. John, Wash., while there is talk of what would be a fourth being established in Yakima sometime in the near future. He hopes to start something like a running sprint boat series in which racers can accumulate points across events at the different sites through the year, similar to what he and other organizers have done with the Gold Cup Dealer Challenger series in motocross.

“It’s kind of (in its) infancy stage right now,” Christiansen said. “Not a lot of particulars, but we’re hoping in ‘25 to kind of implement that series, a point series, and crown a champion.”

Describing it as a “spectator-friendly sport” in which there has “always been good interest,” Christiansen holds that the incorporation of this new novelty will mean a rising tide for the valley in more ways than one.

“I think it’s going to be really good for our local economy,” he said. “Bring hopefully thousands of people that rent hotels and buy gas and groceries, restaurants, shopping — I think it’s going to be a good deal for our area.”

Wendt may be contacted at (208) 848-2268, or cwendt@lmtribune.com.