Years ago (as in almost 2 decades now) When I was in the Navy I got to witness a rather interesting race. We were deployed aboard USS Nimitz on something called a Tiger cruise. That’s the last part of the deployment where the ship would invite family members aboard for the final leg between Hawaii and our home port on the West Coast. The cruise was very popular, and many family members came aboard. I want to remember over a thousand and lot of the crew were asked to start their leave early to make room for the “Tigers”.

Anyway, during the weeklong cruise, the ship performed many shows for the tigers, including airshows, mock gun battles, firefighting and damage control drills, and finally near the end, this sort of quarter mile drag race between us and the other ships in our group.

Well, drag race, I guess if you replace sports cars with warships, and the quarter mile is actually more like a few miles, and we all had a slow running start so the ships wouldn’t drift into each other. Most of the ships in our group participated.

With everyone on the flight deck watching, someone said “go” and the cruiser took off fast. That was impressive. I suppose if the race was only a quarter mile, the cruiser would win every time. The cruisers being light and fast, powered basically by *four* modified jet engines (similar to the ones fitted to DC-10s back in the day (remember those?). Rather than using the thrust, they gear it to the shafts to turn their screws. But anyway, they get the best proverbial “0–60” quarter mile win, hands down. And this was an older Ticonderoga class. I Imagine the newer Burkes might be even faster, but feel free to comment your knowledge.

However, after a couple minutes we could see that even though we were behind them, we were at least keeping up, if not slowly catching up with the other ships and *sub safely behind us in the wake. Unfortunately for us, the race ended before we could catch them, so we took second place. But now the plot twist.

The captain then over the 1mc (intercom loudspeaker) revealed that only 3 of our 4 shafts were running, those of us who didn’t already know then learned that number 4, had been offline for much of the deployment. I guess revealing something like that when the deployment only a few days had left, wasn’t really a big deal and helped explain our second-place finish to those were expecting us to win. (Nimitz was scheduled for a major drydock overhaul once we got back and that was already pretty well publicized)

Anyway, we nearly won that race on 75% power. I think if the race was longer, we would have certainly won. In the worst case after couple days(ish?) at flank speed, the cruiser would burn all its gas and loose its advantage while it slowed to refuel (feel free to comment if you know better), while us being nuclear could have just kept going. Looking back months before the show, I think what is impressive was seeing us do regular operations, flight ops and so on at regular operating speeds on only 3 of the 4 screws for most of our deployment. As pointed out in the comments, If any other ship lost an entire shaft, it would be limping, while Nimitz kind of just shrugged off like an Olympic sprinter can shrug off a mildly sore ankle, and still claim a medal.

So sorry, I Couldn’t tell you if an aircraft carrier is the fastest ship (the actual top speed is classified anyway), but if it’s in a race anything longer than a quarter mile, I’m not betting against it.

Below, completely irrelevant photo I took while on a later cruise. being on such a fast ship, sadly we still couldn’t make it home in time for Christmas.