Just 18 months old, Potter Performance Engines could become a strong player in the high-performance marine engine game.

By Matt Trulio

With rare exceptions, there's no such thing as an overnight success. The band you just heard for the first time on the radio has been on the bar circuit for 10 years. The 21-year-old stunner in the movie you saw last week was once a 12-year-old actor on a Disney Channel show that—mercifully—you never had to endure.

And so it goes with Potter Performance Engines, the new kid on the big block, if you will. Sure, the Sarasota, Fla., marine engine builder has been in business for all of 18 months and has built just 20 new engines, but Ron Potter, the founder of the company, has been building engines for most of his adult life.

Potter, 47, is from Syracuse, N.Y. As a kid, he boated on the St. Lawrence River, and by age 10 he had his own wooden kneel-down hydroplane with a 40-horsepower outboard engine. He was hooked.

"Buddies of mine back then had Cigarettes and Donzis, and that was when Don Aronow was still alive," Potter said. "So that's how I got into bigger boats."

But engines, rather than the boats they powered, captured Potter's imagination. Mechanically inclined, he went to a Moto-Tech trade school for engine building, and after school he worked as a mechanic for a Chevrolet dealership. He regularly attended General Motors-hosted continuing education classes.

More interested in marine-engine applications than automotive, he left the dealership and eventually started a marine engine business in a 1,600-square-foot shop adjacent to his house. He built engines for 24 years, most of which ended up in Scarab, Baja and Formula boats.

In 1996, Potter and his wife, Liz, moved to Sarasota. For the next 3 1/2 years, he worked for Innovation Marine, primarily in military and racing engine building. Pivotal to that experience was his exposure to Innovation Marine's Rick LaMore Sr.

"If you don't learn something every day, you might as well not get up," Potter said. "Working for Rick before he passed away—the guy was just a master at his trade. I learned a lot from him.

"With Rick, durability and endurance were everything," he continued. "That's part of my philosophy now, it's why I build engines way overkill. I have learned what these motors go through and what breaks. When something breaks, you don't just replace it. You step back and say, 'Why did the part go bad? What can we do to make sure it doesn't fail next time?'"

When an opportunity arose for Potter to develop an in-house engine program for Nor-Tech, based in Cape Coral, Fla., in 2000, he jumped at it. Potter had to start from scratch. That meant doing everything from developing an engine line to designing and building rooms in the company's engine facility. He established relationships with parts vendors and custom-designed parts for the engines.

For the first two years, Potter was on his own building Nor-Tech's engines. He made a quick and favorable impression on the company's clients, including Bob Christie, the owner of Typhoon Performance Marine in Toms River, N.J., who had a pair of 1,200-hp engines in his well-known 36-foot Nor-Tech, Perfect Storm.

Potter hired three engine builders. He worked for Nor-Tech for almost seven years before striking out on his own.

He set up shop near his home in Sarasota. In addition to the 20 new engines he has built since he started the company, he has done approximately 35 rebuilds.

The Potter engine line ranges from 500 to 1,400 hp in naturally aspirated and supercharged form. The company offers carbureted and fuel-injected models. To date, an engine tagged the "777" has been Potter's best seller.

"It makes 750-plus horsepower and 770 foot-pounds of torque, is naturally aspirated and fuel injected, and runs on pump gas," he said. "That seems to be what a lot of people are looking for nowadays—it's very durable and modern looking."

Potter said he also hopes to develop a custom parts business. He designs many of his parts such as oil pans and gaskets, and outsources their fabrication. High-quality parts, he maintains, are integral and often overlooked when it comes to the marine-engine reliability equation.

"So many people from different forms of engine building like drag racing try to get into the marine engine business because they see the dollars being spent," Potter explained. "The reality is that most off-the-shelf automotive parts can't hold up in a marine environment. We've gone to incredible lengths over the years, for example, to figure out which valve springs to run. I work with the chief engineer at JE to design the pistons we use. You can't just order them out of the catalog.

"Now, with the ethanol in fuel, we're seeing a lot of motors eat up valve seats," he added. "Ours are built with nickel-cobalt, which seems to be the only material that will hold up."

Wiring harnesses for Potter's engines are single-piece, military-grade products. Before each engine is "dressed" with accessories, it is washed and coated in two layers of epoxy and finished with either Imron or Nason epoxy paint.

At present, Potter said his priority is adding machining capability to his shop, and that translates to a significant investment in equipment. But he also said that he's happy with his company's growth in less than two years.

"One of our biggest goals in the next few years is to be in a new facility with a full machine shop, and we're buying the machines one at a time to make that happen," he said. "We have a lot of plans. We are definitely developing a new EFI, naturally aspirated engine in the 800-hp range.

Not all of Potter's efforts in the coming years will be targeted at new product. He believes that rebuilding Mercury Racing engines will become a vital part of his business.

"Mercury Racing has done such a good job of building and merchandising its engines like the 600 and the 850 that they can't possibly rebuild all the engines they have in the field," Potter said. "They are a new-engine factory, not a rebuild operation."

Prices for the new Potter engines range from $26,000 to $80,000. Delivery from order time reportedly takes six to eight weeks.

Contact Information

Potter Performance Engines Inc., 2121 A Whitfield Park Drive, Sarasota, FL 34243, 941-758-5942, www.potterperformance.com