Fun fact: the reason that a lot of the fastest airplanes from the early 30s were floatplanes is because you had a longer takeoff area as a floatplane, so you could afford to pitch the propeller to optimize for high speed at the cost of a longer takeoff run. Land-based aircraft, on the other hand, had to have good enough takeoff performance because they had to take off of a runway, which meant that their propellers were not pitched to optimize high speed.