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Turbo Longtail Riverboat in Thailand – 60 PSI of Boost!

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Thailand’s canals hide a drag-racing scene where wooden boats hit triple-digit speeds with no brakes, no rudder, and no helmet.

In “Turbo Longtail Riverboat in Thailand – 60 PSI of Boost!”, automotive creator Chad Bee heads to Chang Bird Garage in Samut Sakhon province to document a version of the traditional rua hang yao, or longtail boat, that has nothing to do with ferrying tourists down the Chao Phraya. These are purpose-built racing hulls, stripped to the essentials and powered by automotive diesel engines pushed far beyond factory spec. The video trades postcard river scenery for a shop floor covered in turbo piping and a pilot whose only safety gear is his own balance.

• Mechanics at Chang Bird Garage mount modified Isuzu turbodiesel truck engines onto minimalist wooden longtail hulls, running aftermarket turbo setups pushing up to 60 PSI of boost for 400-500 horsepower.
• The boats skip rudders, gearboxes, and brakes entirely — the engine sits on a swiveling rear fulcrum tied straight to an extended shaft and surface-piercing propeller.
• Pilots run without helmets or harnesses, steering and fighting the engine’s torque by hand on the pivoting arm while topping 100 mph (160 km/h) on narrow waterways.

Inside Chang Bird Garage

Chad Bee’s visit centers on the fabrication side most viewers never see: a garage where the traditional Thai longtail design gets reengineered around a diesel truck engine instead of the small outboard-style motors used on typical passenger boats. The build philosophy is blunt — take a heavy-duty Isuzu diesel block, bolt on an oversized aftermarket turbocharger, and tune it to run at boost levels that would destroy a stock engine, all in pursuit of raw acceleration on water. It’s the kind of garage-built extremity that shows up elsewhere in the extreme-machine world, the same instinct that drives projects like the Jetson One personal aircraft — take a familiar platform and push it somewhere it was never designed to go.

The Engineering Behind 60 PSI

Sixty PSI of boost is an extreme figure for any diesel application, automotive or marine — it’s the kind of number that separates a mild performance upgrade from a purpose-built race motor. Combined with the turbo setup, the modified Isuzu engines in these hulls are putting out 400 to 500 horsepower, all of it running through a driveline with none of the safety redundancy found in a conventional boat. There’s no gearbox to modulate power delivery and no rudder to correct a bad line — just a direct shaft connection from engine to propeller.

No Brakes, No Rudder, No Helmet

The defining feature of the longtail racing configuration is the swiveling rear fulcrum: the engine itself pivots, with the driveshaft and propeller extending out behind the boat. Steering happens by physically shifting the angle of that engine arm, and slowing down means backing off the throttle, not applying brakes, because there aren’t any. Riders counteract the torque of a 500-horsepower diesel with body weight alone, at speeds exceeding 100 mph on waterways barely wide enough for the boat itself.

Up to 60 PSI of boost, 400 to 500 horsepower, no rudder, no brakes, no helmet — just a pilot, a swiveling engine arm, and a canal.

A Different Kind of Riverboat Culture

What Chad Bee’s footage makes clear is how far this scene sits from Thailand’s tourist-facing riverboat industry. Where a typical longtail carries passengers at a leisurely clip past temples and floating markets, the Samut Sakhon builds exist purely to go fast in a straight line, built by mechanics working the same way custom shops elsewhere obsess over land-speed builds or oversized luxury motor yachts — except here the goal is minimalism and raw power-to-weight, not comfort.

Chang Bird Garage isn’t publicly racing on a schedule Chad Bee’s video lays out — the piece is a shop visit and a demonstration run, not a tournament recap. But the build itself is the story: a wooden hull, a truck engine tuned to the edge of its own destruction, and a pilot willing to ride it with nothing but his grip on the throttle arm standing between him and the canal wall.