02/10/2026
To our Offshore Racing Family,
In light of recent public statements regarding SSR Safety & Rescue and its leadership, we are publishing the following response to set the factual record straight. This response reflects our position and the issues we raised privately over several months. We encourage readers to review it in full and share. (SEE BELOW)
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Rebuttal to Leah Martin’s Open Letter to Racers
From: Michael D. Allweiss, Attorney & Spokesperson for Shawn Steinert, JR Anderson, and the Entire SSR Rescue Team
Date: February 9, 2026
Statement of Perspective
As a former offshore racer, former Chairman of the APBA Offshore Racing Commission, and legal counsel for the families of racers who lost their lives, and competitors who were gravely injured due to documented medical and safety failures at sanctioned events, I do not approach offshore safety as a talking point or branding exercise.
I have seen what happens when command authority is unclear, when credentials are misunderstood or misused, and when responsibility is separated from control. I have read the transcripts. I have litigated the consequences. My involvement here is driven by those experiences—not by optics, politics, or personal loyalty.
Those experiences, and my shared commitment for protecting racers, are precisely why Shawn Steinert and JR Anderson sought my assistance in addressing issues raised in discussions with IHRA leadership, including President Leah Martin, Director of Offshore Powerboating Tommy Thomassie, and newly appointed Director of IHRA Safety, Justin Martin.
To be clear, my involvement here reflects professional judgment shaped by direct experience with offshore racing governance failures—not automated drafting tools, public relations strategies, or secondhand narratives.
I. Why This Response Exists.
IHRA President Leah Martin’s recent “Open Letter” to race teams is not a clarification of safety policy. It is a public communication that targets Shawn Steinert, personally, and SSR Safety & Rescue while framing disputed governance issues as credential failures.
It contains:
• demonstrably false factual assertions,
• misleading legal conclusions,
• selective disclosure of information,
• and a clear effort to shift blame and justify a pre-determined outcome.
This response exists to set the record straight, identify material misrepresentations, and explain why SSR could not—and would not—participate in the structure IHRA attempted to impose.
II. The Public Criticism of Shawn Steinert Was Unwarranted and Unsupported.
Shawn Steinert did not refuse safety standards, insurance, training, or collaboration.
What he did do, consistently and professionally, was ask basic governance questions that any responsible rescue provider must ask:
• Who has authority during an on-water emergency?
• Who controls staffing and team composition?
• How is responsibility aligned with accountability if something goes wrong?
Instead of answering those questions, IHRA escalated to a public attack on Shawn’s professional credentials.
That choice raises an obvious question: Why was it necessary to attack Shawn personally at all? The answer appears self-evident: because Shawn would not endorse a structure that stripped SSR of authority while leaving it exposed to responsibility, and racers to the very real risk of injury and death.
III. IHRA Suddenly and Inexplicably Reversed their Narrative After Racers and Respected Offshore Rescue Veterans Questioned its Help Wanted Ad Approach to Safety.
Only days before issuing her “Open Letter,” Ms. Martin and Mr. Thomassie publicly praised Shawn, expressed hope that SSR would join IHRA Offshore, and invited Shawn and JR to apply for diver positions. This followed months of discussions purportedly aimed at integrating SSR into IHRA’s offshore program.
Yet immediately after respected offshore rescue veterans and racers publicly raised concerns about IHRA’s approach, that tone reversed entirely, culminating in a public letter attacking Shawn’s competence, compliance, and integrity.
The obvious question is: what changed?
Nothing about SSR’s conduct changed. Nothing about Shawn’s qualifications changed. What changed was that experienced voices from within the offshore racing and rescue community publicly articulated legitimate concerns IHRA did not want to answer. Indeed, many of these questions are the same ones Shawn has been asking IHRA to answer for weeks, all to no avail.
IV. The EMT Allegation is Factually Wrong and Professionally Damaging.
IHRA’s letter asserts that the EMT certification of the individual serving as Safety Director at recent events “expired in 2022,” and implies this created an insurance and liability crisis.
This assertion is materially misleading.
Under the offshore rules framework governing SSR’s prior operations (APBA and WPRA), “EMT certification” refers to completion of EMT training, not active state medical licensure. EMT training certificates do not expire. State EMT licenses expire but are required only when an individual is practicing medicine under a medical director.
Shawn Steinert was not practicing medicine. He was performing rescue coordination, extraction, stabilization, and transfer to licensed medical professionals.
Conflating training certification with medical licensure and then invoking that conflation to suggest regulatory violations and insurance exposure, is not supported by the governing rules. It constitutes a material misrepresentation that directly harms professional reputation.
Moreover, by all objective accounts, Shawn and his 50+ qualified and experienced SSR teammates have repeatedly performed effective, timely rescues that have saved lives. For more than a decade, SSR’s safety program has been widely regarded within offshore racing as reliable and effective.
Which raises an unavoidable question: why the abrupt shift from public praise to public disparagement?
V. IHRA’s Insurance Narrative is a Smokescreen.
SSR never refused to carry insurance. SSR accurately explained that offshore racing has historically operated under promoter-held event policies covering racers, officials, and safety personnel—a structure well understood by experienced offshore promoters and sanctioning bodies, including individuals within IHRA leadership.
When IHRA asserted additional insurance requirements, SSR asked:
• who required them,
• under what policy,
• and whether SSR could speak with the insurer or broker.
IHRA never provided that information.
Despite this, IHRA’s letter claims the sport “narrowly avoided a litigation and insurance time bomb.” No insurer, policy provision, underwriting letter, or coverage determination has ever been produced to support that claim. And again, it belies the truth.
Speculation is not evidence. When presented as fact in a public letter, it creates reputational harm without factual support.
VI. Offshore Rescue Is Not Land-Based Safety.
As the racers and rescue community know, offshore safety and rescue is a distinct, highly specialized discipline. It cannot be assembled through “help wanted ads” on Facebook, open job postings, generic certifications, or centralized staffing divorced from offshore operational experience. Approaches that ignore this reality have previously resulted in catastrophic failures and repeating them places racers at unacceptable risk.
As veteran rescue diver Tony Fitzgerald articulated, offshore rescue competence is built through:
• repeated exposure,
• institutional knowledge of boats and systems,
• familiarity with racers under stress,
• and apprenticeship within a small global fraternity.
This is not elitism. It is reality.
VII. The SFI “Motorsports Rescue” Certification Does Not Resolve Offshore Safety Concerns.
SSR does not dispute SFI’s credibility in equipment certification, particularly in automotive racing disciplines.
Shawn and JR, along with leadership within APBA’s safety structure, have raised concerns not with SFI generally, but with the application of an SFI-administered Motorsports Rescue certification as a “minimum and controlling standard” for offshore powerboat rescue operations. In other words, SSR does dispute the legitimacy of an SFI-administered offshore rescue certification that lacks:
• The Motorsports Rescue curriculum or training standards.
• Information regarding who developed the program and their offshore racing or marine rescue experience.
• The offshore incidents, risk models, or operational protocols on which the program is based; or
• An explanation of how this certification meaningfully supplements or supersedes established offshore rescue training and experience.
As has been explained to IHRA on numerous occasions, absent that information, SSR cannot assess the program’s offshore applicability or responsibly treat it as a controlling qualification. To that end, safety experts have tried to secure this information directly from SFI, to no avail.
Simply put, offshore rescue is fundamentally different from equipment certification or land-based motorsports safety, and the basis for extending this program into that environment has not been articulated.
The involvement of individuals associated with prior offshore safety failures, most notably David Harshfeld (who was directly implicated in the Joey Gratton tragedy) in creating and quite possible receiving compensation for this phantom program raises serious ethical and professional concerns. Elevating such a program while attacking SSR’s proven track record defies logic and undermines trust.
VIII. Selective Transparency and Nepotism Concerns Should Matter.
IHRA publicly announced the hirings of:
• Gary Stray,
• Bob Teague,
• and Tommy Thomassie.
Yet IHRA did not disclose—until forced by public scrutiny—that Leah Martin’s husband, Justin, was privately installed as Safety Director.
That omission matters. Why? Because, the two sets of draft Safety Rules IHRA sent to Shawn reduced SSR from an integrated safety organization to a pool of individual hires under centralized control.
And that control is vested exclusively in the Safety Director. In point of fact, under that model the IHRA Safety Director:
• selects the divers,
• controls staffing,
• defines roles,
• but the Lead Diver (the position IHRA invited Shawn and JR to apply for) bears operational risk.
The publicly available record raises serious questions about whether Mr. Martin possesses the offshore rescue experience typically required for such authority. IHRA has invited the public to assess that record for itself through recent interviews and statements.
IX. SSR raised numerous other concerns with IHRA that it never answered.
1. Governance, accountability, and personnel remain undefined. The initial rules draft established new roles with significant authority but did not identify who will actually fill them. Before SSR could assume any operational responsibility, Shawn asked for clarity on the following:
• Who is designated as the Safety Director, Medical Director, and Risk Manager for IHRA offshore events? We found out officially about the Safety Director only today by virtue of the video. We still have no idea who the Medical Director and Risk Manager are.
• Who are the approved alternates for those roles, and what offshore, marine rescue, and dive-operations experience do they have? Still no answer.
• What authority do these individuals have to direct or override on-water rescue operations in real time? Still no answer.
2. Chain of command on race day – The draft rules assign operational coordination to the Rescue & Safety Director, while prior communications impose additional supervisory reporting structures. Dual or undefined chains of command during rescue operations are not workable and create unacceptable safety risk.
3. Diver staffing minimums – The draft replaces the objective minimum diver staffing standards used by APBA and WPRA with the subjective term “sufficient.” That change materially affects safety planning and enforceability and was not addressed in response to Shawn’s proposal.
4. The command structure remains unworkable for offshore rescue.
Although the Lead Diver is described as having “primary operational authority” over in-water response, that authority is expressly subordinate to a Safety Director who, under the rules, may only be required to meet an EMT minimum standard and may have no offshore or dive-rescue background. This creates a dual-command structure that is incompatible with offshore emergency response and invites real-time conflict during critical incidents.
In fact, under the revised draft rules, the Safety Director, not the rescue provider, controls diver staffing and team selection. This would require SSR to operate with divers selected and staffed by Mr. Martin, while the Lead Diver bears operational responsibility for underwater outcomes. That is an untenable structure: it places responsibility and risk on SSR personnel without corresponding authority or program control, thus endangering the racers.
X. The Draft Rules Themselves Are Deeply Flawed.
IHRA’s draft offshore rules:
• contain typographical errors,
• include cut-and-paste remnants from unrelated rulebooks,
• introduce undefined roles,
• reduce minimum diver and rescue boat requirements,
• and shift safety baselines to discretionary determinations.
These are not “world-class standards.” They are rushed drafts used to justify staffing decisions already made., i.e. Justin Martin and David Harshfield
XI. Responsibility Without Authority: The Core Issue
IHRA’s proposed structure stripped SSR of staffing control and program authority while leaving operational risk with individual divers. That is responsibility without authority—the most dangerous possible model.
This ad hoc approach to offshore rescue staffing mirrors practices that, according to sworn testimony and litigation records, directly contributed to the Joey Gratton tragedy—namely, placing individuals without offshore rescue training, without emergency medical qualifications, and without prior offshore race experience into primary rescue roles at one of the most dangerous points in all of offshore racing, Turn 1 in Key West.
Rather than creating a world class safety and rescue program, IHRA seems to be heading down this same perilous path.
XII. Conclusion
SSR Safety & Rescue has saved lives in offshore racing through:
• integrated teams,
• clear command structures,
• staffing control,
• and deep familiarity with boats, courses, and systems.
This did not need to become a public dispute. Shawn Steinert was criticized not because he was unsafe, but because he declined to legitimize a structure that compromised safety governance.
Multiple respected rescue professionals reached the same conclusion. That avoidable and unnecessary outcome is the real tragedy here.
