Luis Martins and Nick Imprescia’s title hopes at the Key West World Championship in Florida have been dashed after picking up a costly penalty in the opening race on Wednesday.

The pair won the shortened race in their 32ft catamaran Nuff Said, but were hit with a severe lap penalty for colliding with a course buoy approaching turn one on the second lap that dropped them down to fifteenth in the standings.

“The world championship is too far for us to reach now and obviously the mood is all dampened by the mistake,” driver Martins told The Royal Gazette.

“We can probably get a win on the day, but we won’t win the worlds. They scored us with a lap penalty that put us to fifteenth because we hadn’t lapped anybody yet.

“The points for fifteenth means even if we get first place tomorrow or on Sunday it’s still not enough with the total points from Wednesday to realistically get on the podium.

“It will be very difficult to come back from that far down to get on the podium. We all thought it was a 30-second penalty, but it was a lap penalty so here we are.”

The race was red flagged after rivals Cameron Turk and Owen Bois flipped their boat on the fifth lap approaching the final turn on the backstretch.

Prior to their misfortune, Martins and throttle man Imprescia had been gunning for a second straight podium finish at the championship after finishing runner-up last year.

They are now hoping to bounce back and restore some morale in the camp heading into the second race of the three-race series on Friday.

“We are just going to try to win a race and have some fun,” Martins said.

Also flying Bermuda’s flag in Key West this week is driver David Selley and throttle man Steven Bridges, who placed seventh in their boat Team Bermuda in the opening race.

“It’s not too bad and obviously not what we wanted, but starting fifteenth in Key West it’s hard to come through the field,” Bridges said.

“It’s a hard track and there are boats everywhere. You have to go around their wake, around the boats and it’s hard to see. You’re going into the sun late afternoon and you can’t see much. It’s hard to keep in front of the buoys, you got spray all in front of you, so all in all seventh is not bad.

“We’ve still got to work hard to get up to the front if we really want to win this thing. We’re not out of it, but we’ve got some work to do for sure.”

Bridges and Selley also endured their share of setbacks after experiencing engine problems in the opening race.

“We’ve been having a little issue with overheating and changed our thermostats,” Bridges said.

“It helped a lot but I think we’ve been a little too hard on the motors, so just to be on the safe side we are going to bring them down a little bit.

“We didn’t go into guardian mode yesterday but we did get a warning. We lost power and dropped down to about 80mph on the first lap and when you do that you have to pull the throttles back and everything resets itself and then you can go again.

“If you don’t do that then you are going to go into guardian mode and there’s no way of fixing that unless you completely stop and restart.

“Average speed is what we are going to want, so we just figured if we come down it might give us a little bit of speed, but overall we’re going to be more consistent and hopefully not have an overheating problem.”