Dave Warby knows "cowboys" willing to strap themselves to jet boats, hoping to eclipse his father as the fastest person on water, are likely to be obliterated while travelling at hundreds of kilometres per hour.
Bravery and willpower are required to attempt the record, but those traits alone can prove as dangerous as any mechanical malfunction.
Warby himself is hoping a team of slow and thorough nitpickers will help him comfortably break his father Ken's record in the coming weeks or months.
The Warby Motorsport team will conduct trial runs on NSW's Blowering Dam this weekend.
Ken Warby became a household name in 1977 when the boat he built in his backyard, the Spirit of Australia, reached 464 kilometres per hour on the dam in the NSW Snowy Mountains.
The mechanical engineer bested that feat the following year, smashing through the 500km/h barrier.
He still holds the water speed record of 511km/h but the title has attracted plenty of people willing to enter the history books at any cost.
"There have been many challengers," Dave Warby told AAP.
"Anyone can buy a jet engine and post online that they're going for the water speed record but how many get to a running boat dwindles to a handful."
For those that do get on the water, death is a real possibility. In 1967 one of the world's most famous speed seekers, Don Campbell, became the highest-profile casualty.
His hydroplane, the Bluebird K7, was travelling close to the current record when it took off from Britain's Coniston Water, spun in the air and smashed back into the lake's surface, killing Campbell instantly.
Ken snatched the record from American Lee Taylor a decade after Campbell died but, while Taylor was trying to retake the crown in 1980, he too lost his life.
His rocket-powered boat hit a shifting current on Lake Tahoe and disintegrated as his family watched aghast from the shore.
The heir to a legendary record-breaking family, Craig Arfons, also died when his Rain X Challenger lifted off the surface of a Florida lake, somersaulted and blew apart in 1989.
Warby thinks his father's eye for detail was critical.
"People from other countries thought 'If a guy can build one in his backyard in Sydney I can (too) with a few million dollars' - but they've really overlooked a lot of the basics."
Like his father, Warby has built his own boat - the Spirit of Australia II - on a shoestring budget in suburban NSW.
His workshop is in a corner of a hangar-like shed wedged between a rail line and a pub in Newcastle. He works as a disability case manager and spends his spare time in the shed.
Tools, lights and workbenches line one wall and piles of scrap and spare parts - including a Rolls Royce Orpheus engine with 5000 pounds of thrust salvaged from an Italian jet fighter plane - are heaped alongside the other.
But while other challengers have put money into afterburners, Warby has invested in a team that keeps meticulous log books and conducts safety checks with military-like obsession.
"I don't think you can buy the team we've got," Warby said while rattling off the names of people who've helped do everything from wind-tunnel testing to corralling traffic at Blowering Dam.
His dad is among them. As are retired RAAF elite Wing Commander Dave Applebee - who was in charge of a team of apprentices when Ken achieved his record - and Squadron Leader Phil Frawley who's a veteran pilot trainer.
"We want to break the record three or four times unofficially before the (official) attempt," Frawley said.
Warby adds: "We want it to be easy."
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