Wellcraft Scarab 38 KV History and Classic Buyer's Guide

The Wellcraft Scarab 38 KV in one paragraph

The Wellcraft Scarab 38 KV is a 38-foot offshore V-bottom from the 1980s, built by Wellcraft under license from a raceboat design, and it is the boat most people mean when they say Miami Vice Scarab. In the show's first season Don Johnson's Sonny Crockett drove a Chris-Craft Stinger 390 X; from the second season, after the production ran into trouble getting free boats from Chris-Craft, it switched to the Wellcraft 38 Scarab KV. Contemporary reporting put the boat at twin 440-hp engines and about $130,000 in 1986.

Wellcraft itself dates to 1955, when it began building wooden runabouts. It is now part of Groupe Beneteau and builds fishing boats, while the Scarab name lives on separately as a line of jet boats. Neither company builds anything like the 38 KV today, which is why a clean example has become a collector item.

Before television, a Betty Cook raceboat

The 38-foot Scarab hull started on the racecourse. KAAMA Marine's history says the design was engineered by throttleman and crew chief John Connor as a replacement for the team's 36-foot Cigarette, and the first Scarab hull was built by Larry Smith for KAAMA Racing. Betty Cook, the only woman to win national and world championships in offshore powerboat racing, drove it with Connor in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was called KAAMA and later Michelob Light.

In 1978 Cook, Connor and British racer Mike Mantle won the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes race in KAAMA, a 38-foot Scarab V-bottom with twin MerCruiser engines. Wellcraft then licensed the design and produced several variants of what KAAMA calls the record-breaking hull, and offered a limited KAAMA Special Edition with KAAMA's 425 engines and surface drives as competition-type upgrades.

The original KAAMA raceboat survives. Tom Jewsbury of Rochester, New York, spent about 15 years restoring it, and in 2023 the Saris family's Performance Marine finished the job with period-correct 575-cubic-inch engines making about 700 hp per side, Speedmaster No. 3 drives and a recreated single-row, three-person stand-up bolster.

The Miami Vice Scarab effect on Wellcraft

Television did what racing never could. Motor Boating and Sailing reported in June 1986 that the attention the 38 KV received on Miami Vice brought Wellcraft an onslaught of orders and raised sales by 21 percent in one year. Wellcraft gave Don Johnson an exact duplicate of the show boat, and he was often seen arriving at work in it.

Wellcraft built 100 copies of the boat as the Scarab 38KV Miami Vice Edition, according to Forbes in April 1986 (a Miami Vice fan wiki puts the number at only 33, so treat the total with care), and Popular Mechanics noted that the show's turquoise, aqua and orchid graphics could be ordered on any Scarab from 20 to 38 feet. That last detail matters for buyers today: plenty of smaller Scarabs wear Miami Vice colors without being Miami Vice Editions.

Johnson's involvement went further. He helped design the Scarab Excel 43 Don Johnson Signature Series, a $300,000 boat powered by twin 650-hp Lamborghini V12s, raced offshore with his own team and won the Offshore World Cup in 1988.

Specifications we can and cannot verify

Factory brochures for the 38 KV are hard to find, and we could not confirm beam, weight, tankage or a published top speed from a source we trust, so those fields are blank rather than guessed. What is documented: the boat is 38 feet long, it was offered with twin 440-hp gasoline engines in the Miami Vice era, and the hull descends from the Larry Smith KAAMA design. A German classic dealer's catalog of a 1990-registered Wellcraft Scarab 38 in original Miami Vice colors listed twin V8 engines.

Wellcraft kept using the 38-foot Scarab name into the 1990s; owners still run a 1993 model-year 38 Scarab Thunder V-bottom with Mercury Racing 540 Bulldog engines, for example. Later boats differ in deck, interior and power, so make sure you know which 38 Scarab you are looking at.

Owning a 1980s offshore V-bottom today

A 38 KV is a 40-year-old performance boat with big gasoline V8s, stern drives or surface drives, and wiring and fuel systems designed long before ethanol blends. Expect to replace or rebuild almost everything that moves. Restorers routinely change fuel tanks, rewire, rebuild drives and either refresh or replace the engines; Jewsbury's earlier restoration of the second-season Miami Vice 38 took three years of nut-and-bolt work.

Running costs are modest compared with a modern triple-outboard console, perhaps $8,000 to $25,000 a year for fuel, service, storage and insurance, but a single engine or drive rebuild can exceed that. Insurance companies may require a recent survey and proof of engine work.

The payoff is presence. Few boats draw a crowd at a poker run like a well-restored 38 Scarab, and Boating's David Seidman summed up a generation when he wrote that those special Wellcraft 38 Scarab KVs occasionally come up for sale and he always goes to look.

Miami Vice boat for sale listings, a reality check

Listings advertising a Miami Vice boat for sale fall into three groups. Most are standard Scarabs of various sizes painted in Miami Vice colors. A smaller number are genuine 38 KVs in need of work. A handful are documented Miami Vice Editions or boats with direct links to the show, such as the 38-foot Scarab built for Don Johnson that Sam Tamburino brought to a 2021 vintage event.

Be aware that the production used several boats: a Miami Vice fan wiki identifies two near-identical boats in the early seasons, a third from season four and a fourth seen for seconds, and a German classic dealer that sold a 38 in 2006 described its boat as the original with twin 8.2-liter Mercury engines, a double bed and a chemical toilet. More than one boat can therefore be honestly linked to the show, and paperwork decides which. Price the first two groups as project or restored classics. Price the third as collectibles, where documentation can double the value of an identical-looking boat. Whatever you buy, budget for a survey by someone who knows 1980s offshore construction.