Forecast 2015: Todd Goodwin—Goodwin Competition
A serious household name in the automotive racing world, Goodwin Competition of Omro, Wis., has expanded its recognition among performance boat buyers and builders in a big way this year with its upcoming delivery of two custom 1,800-plus-hp supercharged EFI engines for the next-generation Pure Platinum Skater 388 catamaran. Kept tightly under wraps, the eagerly anticipated 38-foot cat will be unveiled at the 2015 Miami International Boat Show in February.
Said Todd Goodwin on his latest 1,800-plus-hp engine (shown here at the 2014 PRI Trade Show earlier this month): “There’s not one part on it from any other engine.” Photo courtesy Whipple Superchargers
But the fact is Goodwin Competition has been custom building innovative high-performance engines for the marine world for the past “15 to 20 years,” according to Todd Goodwin, the 50-year-old principal of the company. Goodwin’s marine engines have typically ranged from naturally aspirated 650-hp models to supercharged 1,200-hp beasts, but the current all-aluminum engines he’s developed for the Pure Platinum project produce more than 1,800 hp “on pump gas,” he said. And there’s more to come.
What can the high-performance marine engine world expect to see from Goodwin Competition in 2015?
Right now, we’re working on a 2,000-hp version of the engines we built (for Pure Platinum). It’s our own engine, something we developed completely in house for marine. It’s a purpose-built engine—we designed it 100 percent, and there’s not one part on it from any other engine. Everything has been crafted and machined out of billet aluminum, even the engine block—it’s not a casting. It’s an open-cooled engine—we have two in the field in an Outerlimits—and we have been working on a proprietary coating (for protection in the marine environment). We have painstakingly manufactured the water-jacketed cooling system and we spent a lot of time developing our valvetrain system. This is not just a modern engine designed to address issues of durability, reliability and performance. It’s artistry. We designed it to address the issues everything else in the world has. We have developed this engine to “go where no one else has gone before.”
Right now, we can produce 10 to 12 a year, but we’ve added more CNC equipment. We will develop lower power packages from it. We do development for every form of motorsports. All we do is the exotic stuff. That’s all we do.
and then