Highs and Lows from 2013: Mike D’Anniballe
Thanks to a bounty of marine engine rebuild work, Mike D’Anniballe and the rest of this team at Sterling Performance Engines in Milford, Mich., haven’t had much time to bask in the glow of the successful debut of their turbocharged 1,700-hp engines at the 2013 Lake of the Ozarks Shootout. (To read the complete story on the project, download the latest issue of Speed On The Water Digital Magazine at no charge by clicking here.) But that hasn’t stopped them from working on the next generation of 1700s, which will be set up with a single turbocharger instead of the dual turbos on the first set. A pair of reconfigured Sterling 1700s may even end up in Game Changer, a coming 40-foot Mystic Powerboats catamaran owned by Tom Borisch, who currently owns a turbine-powered 50-foot Mystic cat called Low Altitude.
For Mike D’Anniballe (far right, shown here with John Tomlinson and Myrick Coil) the 195-mph run posted by a Skater catamaran with his 1,700-hp engines was the highpoint of 2013.
High: Well, obviously for me it was the showing of our 1700s at (Lake of the Ozarks) Shootout. That project took a lot longer than we initially planned, but we were really happy with the results. There are a lot of engine builders out there advertising big horsepower numbers, but those numbers weren’t necessarily reflected in the top speeds of the boats at the Shootout. We advertised a horsepower number and we delivered on that horsepower, and the top speed of our boat reflected it.
Low: Without question, for me the low of the year for me was the accident at the Lake Cumberland Poker Run that took the lives of Jeffrey Asbell and Brad Smith. The conditions and environment for that kind of high-speed running just weren’t right—they were poor. Two people died, and that just didn’t need to happen.
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