Steve,
This is a great thread.

I'm noticing the hull steps on the cheetah cat. From the pics they seem to have a steep longtitudal down angle running to the stern, It also appears that the trailing edge of the forward bottom, the trailing edge of the step and at the transom are all on the same line. Just curious as to your thinking on this step design. Most of the newer cats have 0 degrees on the last running surface. I've played around with several step configurations on V-hulls (adding inserts in the molds as well as adding and removing material later on the actual hull bottom) and have found that that on lighter race boats (Single I/O and outboards), turning both running surfaces down a bit have led to a boat that runs faster than it's non-stepped counterpart and will fly absolutely level in the rough with positive trim with the running surfaces acting as a 'hook'. Built the same boat again but added a full cabin and the results were not near as good as the boat wouldn't carry the bow that well. After raising the aft end of the rear step insert to near 0 degrees on the next boat it carried the bow much better but lost in the rough water handling charactoristics even though it was 500 pounds heavier. I watched the video of the cat running and it looked to run awesome. So I guess I'm asking, did this bottom design on this particular cat come from much on water testing and R&D or was it figured out during the design process?