I'm not sure the industry or the sport would have been much different, as a whole. Feels like a lot had run its course by the late '80s. Don's latest company had already produced cats. Drug interdiction was starting to get pretty advanced--running loads by fast boats was probably making less sense every day. Weren't the old, true offshore races already disappearing by then? Engineering was going to drive toward cats and stepped hulls, especially as the races became less offshore. Part of what drove the heyday was that it was all new, and the boats were advancing really rapidly.
I would like like to see one big race come back. Maybe Miami-Nassau or something. Tied in with some other events to make the pie larger, such that even the non-boating crowd would be exposed to it and perhaps pay attention. If there were a Super Bowl in FL, perhaps that would do it, at least for a year.
"I don't have time to get into it, but he went through a lot." -Pulp Fiction