Ken and Jack Lupton arrived at the Hydroplane Racing League’s Grand Prix finale chasing a result their season had rarely delivered. They leave with one podium, one more retirement, and a championship still waiting on confirmation.
The Régates de Beauharnois has never been short on occasion for the Lupton family. It was here, in 2025, that Warwick Lupton climbed into his Jack Lupton’s Lucas Oil, and secured the points that carried the team to a second consecutive HRL Grand Prix title. Twelve months on, the family returned to Lake Saint-Louis for the 2026 finale hoping for something cleaner. What they got instead was a season’s worth of misfortune compressed into one final weekend, followed by a Sunday the weather refused to let finish properly.
A season that wouldn’t settle
Ken Lupton’s year had been defined by reliability trouble long before Beauharnois. At Brockville in late June, both Lupton boats were found to share a common engine fault. Neither finished among the points; Ken did not start the final. The team withdrew from the following round at Madison rather than race compromised machinery, a decision that cost points but bought time. It showed at Valleyfield in July, where Jack topped every qualifying session in GP-33 JLM Motorsport and locked out the front row alongside his brother, only for Ken’s Lucas Oil to retire from the final without scoring and Jack to finish fifth. The pace was there all year. The results, more often than not, were not.
By the time the fleet gathered at Beauharnois, Kent Henderson’s GP-757 Canada Boy held a 50-point lead at the top of the standings, with Andrew Tate’s GP-71 The Wild One his nearest challenger. Ken Lupton sat sixth in the table, Jack seventh. The championship, realistically, was no longer theirs to win. What remained was the chance to finish the year with something to show for it.
Jack’s finest weekend
If nothing else, Beauharnois gave Jack Lupton the result his season had been building toward. He set the fastest time in Saturday’s time trials, 29.45 seconds, with barely half a second covering the top four boats. He won a qualifying heat outright and followed it with second place in Sunday’s Q-3B, behind only Tate. It was, by some distance, his strongest weekend of the year.
Ken’s weekend told a different story. An oil filter fault forced an engine change after Q-2. A broken propeller shaft ended his Q-3B run before turn one. It was the third consecutive HRL round undone by mechanical trouble, following Brockville’s shared fault and the Valleyfield retirement, a pattern the team will need to address before next season.
The finale itself
Sunday brought little relief. Kent Henderson’s Canada Boy had already capsized during Saturday qualifying, landing upright with Henderson unhurt but the hull badly damaged. Team principal Mario Blais described the damage afterwards as well beyond a straightforward repair, and confirmed the team had approached the Lupton camp about running a boat under the 757 entry, an approach the Luptons declined. Whether an alternative arrangement, potentially involving Ghislain Marcoux’s team, would be found in time remained unresolved.
Jimmy Shane’s return to Grand Prix competition, his first start in the class since 2019, ended in similar circumstances. A steering cable failure sent GP-50 Freedom out of control during qualifying. Shane is understood to be recovering well, though his team did not return to the water that day.
With two of the field’s leading contenders sidelined and heavy rain closing in, HRL cancelled Sunday’s Grand Prix final outright. The result was instead decided on points accumulated across time trials and qualifying: Andrew Tate’s The Wild One took the event, ahead of Brandon Kennedy’s GP-35 TMSpecial and Jack Lupton’s GP-33. It rounded out a notable weekend for Tate, who also won the Hydro 350 class in a separate boat, H-300 Penzoil.
An unresolved season
HRL has confirmed only the Beauharnois result itself. The 2026 season champions across every class, Grand Prix included, await official confirmation “in the coming days” once post-event inspections are complete. For Kent Henderson, that leaves a painful uncertainty hanging over what had been a commanding championship campaign. For the Luptons, it closes a season in which the pace was rarely in question and the finishing rarely followed. Jack ends the year with form to carry into 2027. Ken ends it looking for answers in the workshop.
