The Saris Boys Jam In Harmony

Created: September 26, 2025

When Johnny Saris turned 16 years old, his father Jason, a former multi-time world and national champion in offshore powerboat racing, discovered that he and his son could compete together. “I asked Johnny if he wanted to go racing and he said, ‘Yeah!!,’” said Jason. “We only had a couple months to put a boat together so we made our family pleasureboat, a 27-foot Avanti, into a Bracket 500 class raceboat.”

Whether they’re racing offshore at 80 mph, building new engines for a customer or jamming to some classic rock, Jason and Johnny Saris are always in tune with each other.

The duo raced that boat for two seasons in the Offshore Powerboat Association until the Saris’ found a 27-foot Kryptonite to replace the Avanti. Currently, they campaign a 33-foot Cobra in the Bracket 400 class. They always run under the name Saris Racing and the duo has been together for 16 years with Johnny now 32 and Jason is 68.

“The best thing about racing with Johnny has been the opportunity to watch him grow,” said Jason. “He’s one of the best drivers out there and he’s a damn good throttleman, too.”

Johnny said that what he has learned from his dad on and off the racecourse is, “Patience. It’s something I don’t naturally have, but the older I get, I realize there’s usually a reason why he’s doing something or did something a certain way.”

The Saris team competed in the Bracket 400-class ranks during the Offshore Powerboat Association Bimini Grand Prix. Photo by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

Johnny has also learned the value of running as conservatively possible to take the win and preserve the equipment. “We’d go to a race and I’d see photos of a Phantom and it would be dead level but it would be 10 feet out of the water,” said Johnny. “Then I’d see a photo of our boat and it was glued to the water and I was annoyed even though we won. Part of the reason we won is that Jason is very good at keeping the boat in the water. He’s one of the most consistent throttlemen I know and I think that comes from the days of racing for 200 miles.”

Today, the father and son are equal partners in Performance Marine located in Bolton Landing, N.Y., on the shores of Lake George. Some people know the company as Team Saris, too and the company has built a loyal following for its Saris Racing engines, many of which feature Holley EFI and Whipple superchargers, plus premium quality rigging and full setup capabilities. Beyond Lake George, customers come from as fast away as New Jersey, Michigan and Delaware.

Summer School
Jason grew up in Manhattan, N.Y., but spent summers working at marinas on Lake George, mostly in the Bolton Landing area. An offshore racer named Bobby Sheer from Fort Lauderdale had a summer place on the lake and after he would run the boat at the annual race in Point Pleasant, N.J., he would bring the boat to Bolton Landing to blast around the lake. “That was the first raceboat I rode in and after that, I was hooked,” said Jason who went for his first ride when he was 18.

“I didn’t go to daycare, I went to the shop.”—Johnny Saris. Photo by Eric Colby

When Jason graduated college with a business degree, Sheer asked him what his plans were. “He said, ‘If you want to work on boats, I’ll get you a job at the marina where they take care of my raceboat down in Florida,” said Jason. “I said, ‘I’m in.’” He joined the team at Harbor 1 Marine working under the tutelage of Keith Hazell, one of the top throttlemen in offshore racing at the time.

The crew built a Flight Marine cat for Sheer called Sheer Terror. It was the first raceboat Jason drove and with Sheer throttling, the team won Jason’s debut race, the Popeye’s Offshore Grand Prix. That year, the pair won the national championship in the Modified class.

A successful car dealer who boated on Lake George, Jim DeNooyer, was friends with Sheer. He purchased a boat dealership and service facility in Bolton Landing called Performance Marine and asked Jason to come work for him.

Jason didn’t want to leave Harbor 1, so he told DeNooyer, “If you want to sell me the service business, I’ll buy it from you.”

DeNooyer declined, but a year later, he called Jason and the two agreed that the latter would buy out the former. “I parted company with Keith on the best terms,” said Jason. “I stay in touch with Marilyn and his kids. I learned an awful lot down there and it wasn’t just boat racing.”

A New Beginning
Jason moved to Bolton Landing in 1987 and took over Performance Marine. The business used to be a Formula boats dealer, but he wasn’t interested in selling boats so he focused on service and rigging performance boats. When he was helping Marilyn Hazell liquidate Harbor 1’s assets, he purchased what would become a key to Performance Marine’s future success, a dynamometer.

Jason had met a girl who also worked during the summer in Bolton Landing and the two were married in 1988. He and Annette are still married and she is recently retired from Bolton Landing town government.

As Performance Marine grew, Jason continued racing offshore, throttling a 24-foot Skater, Killer Bee, and a 27-foot Eliminator Daytona, Performance Marine. Then he teamed up with car dealer Al Rullo in a 32-foot Skater, Stylin’, in Pro-Stock class. In the first season, they ran triple Mercury Racing 2.4 EFI outboards and the engines were reliable. When the class switched to the 2.5 EFI motors, the gearcases had to be rebuilt between races and the powerheads needed the same after three races.

Jason Saris (right) and Bobby Sheer won the New Orleans race Lake Pontchartrain in 1982. Archival images courtesy Johnny Saris.

The duo decided to build a 36-foot Spectre with an enclosed cockpit for the Offshore C class under the U.S. Offshore sanction. Saris Racing built what Jason called some “pretty slick motors,” explaining, “Everyone was doing a bored-out 454. We took a 454 and de-stroked it. The engines had the best parts including billet crankshafts and cast-iron heads done by Sonny’s Automotive Racing. “We would run them at 7,400 rpm for an hour at a time,” said Jason. “When the rest of the class was running 110, we were running 118 mph.”

After a few successful years in that boat, Jason stepped out of the cockpit when Johnny was born. Performance Marine still built raceboats for other competitors with one of the best known being Wit’s End, a 32-foot Skater campaigned by Bobby Witko. Johnny started going to the races with his dad when he was young and was immersed in the family business from a young age.

“I didn’t go to daycare, I went to the shop,” said Johnny, who grew up working alongside his dad, learning the craft of building high-performance engines and rigging boats.

Truly Custom

Today, the Saris’ and their two full-time employees, Tyler Woolston and Shawn Fisher, have a reputation up and down the eastern United States and into The Great Lakes for building reliable, fuel-injected high-performance boat engines. Woolston, 24, joined the company in May, while Fisher has been with Performance Marine for 25 years.

For Johnny Saris (in his father’s arms) exposure to offshore powerboat racing started early.

It’s not often that you find a four-person business in the go-fast world with its own dyno. Performance Marine covers 5,760 square feet in downtown Bolton Landing in two buildings. The main shop was built in 1929 as a movie theater.

To keep things down to a dull road when Jason or Johnny is running an engine, the dyno is connected to a large concrete muffler. “The locals have gotten used to the roar, but sometimes it catches tourists off guard,” said Johnny.

“We have one of the few dynos set up for marine use,” said Jason. “We put the motors on here exactly the way they would go in a boat. “We have a Mercury input shaft on our dyno and we run the engine with wet marine headers, not dyno headers.” The company has Stellings, CMI E Top and other headers and will equip an engine with them before a dyno pull.

“When you do it with dry, car dyno headers, then you put a set of marine headers on it, everything changes,” said Jason. “Many guys go out and buy sophisticated Super Flow dynos and they’re all computer controlled. Our dyno is mostly manually controlled. The data acquisition is computerized, but we find that for making fuel maps, I can load a motor in ways that the automated dynos can’t. I don’t know how we could do what we do without the dyno. It’s such an important tool.” It also lets the company continue to build engines and run them during cold upstate New York winters.

The main shop at Performance Marine was originally a movie theatre build in the 1920s. Photos by Eric Colby.

Because Performance Marine builds custom for a given application, Jason and Johnny can tailor an engine package for a specific boat. Bill Grannis has a 36-foot Skater that he wanted to cruise at 100 mph and top out at about 140 mph. The Saris’ developed a pair of engines that did exactly what he wanted.

“We designed a motor that met his requirements and at the same time by not going past that we saved him some money and increased the durability and lengthened the intervals of the maintenance schedule,” said Jason.

Many re-power jobs at Performance Marine come from a maintenance relationship with a customer. The most popular Saris Engine is in the 900-hp to 1,000-hp range. “People are looking for a next step up from a Mercury Racing 700 and they’re looking for more durability than to just turn up a 700 to 1,000,” said Jason. “To their credit, Mercury Racing offers a very nice 1,100-hp motor, but you can buy two 700s for the price of one 1,100 hp.”

The 27-foot Avanti (left) and 27-foot Kryptonite that the Saris’ used to race in Bracket 500 are now Jason’s and Johnny’s pleasureboats.

It used to be that an owner of a 42-foot Fountain had twin Mercury Racing HP700 SCis that are getting tired. Instead of re-powering, that owner has turned rebuilding the engines, which presents Performance Marine with an opportunity. “Rebuilding it isn’t fun,” said Jason. “Let’s see if we can make it more fun.”

Chevrolet says that the block on which the HP700 SCi is built for 750 hp. “Can you make 850 or 900 hp with it yes,” said Jason. “Should you? That depends. If that motor is going into a 22-foot Donzi that you’re going to hang onto for 50 seconds a time, that’s fine.”

He continued, “If it’s going into that 42-foot Fountain and you’re going from Miami to Key West at wide open throttle, it’s not going to work.”

While the HP700 SCi is built on a 502-cid block, a Saris 900’s foundation is a 572-cid tall-deck block with the best internal parts in the high-performance game and CNC’d heads and a more docile cam profile that let the engine breathe easier and live longer.

A sister to this engine was installed in a Chevy Nova hot rod that recently took top honors at a local car show

A good year for Saris Engines is about custom projects, many of which are scheduled during the winter to keep the team busy year round. But engines are only one service the company offers.

“You can bring us a bare hull and deck and we’ll rig it from scratch,” said Jason. “The boats we’ve rigged have won world championships. I learned rigging in Florida, where Bobby Moore was the gold standard.”

It can save problems by having one shop do as much of the work as possible because it eliminates variables. If the Saris team builds the engines, rigs the boat and dials it in, the crew knows every aspect of the boat.

“If you’re one of those people who has all the pieces of the puzzle covered and you just need us for one small piece, that’s fine,” said Jason. “We’re happy to do the one small piece. If you don’t get all the pieces right, it’s not going to go well. We can be all the pieces.”

The Performance Marine dyno is a key component to the company’s success

The one thing Performance Marine won’t do is rent out or let someone borrow the dyno.

A growing niche for the company is restoring old raceboats. In 2024, the owner of the famous 38-foot Scarab, Kaama, brought the boat to Team Saris. The boat was gutted and restored. One of the company’s projects for the balance of 2025 and 2026 is restoring an old 38-foot Bertram that race offshore.

Performance Marine doesn’t do fiberglass work, but could soon have an upholstery division. Johnny’s wife of a little more than a year, Caitlyn, took advantage of a National Marine Manufacturers Association education opportunity and attended a sponsored school for marine upholstery. She took over the garage at their home and is going into business.

A Fine-Tuned Escape
Jason started playing guitar when he was in high school and growing up in New York City gave him the chance to see many legendary performers in person. “I was lucky,” he said. “I grew up where I could see everybody.”

That included many acts that were big in the 1950s like Wilson Picket, Muddy Waters and Freddy King in local bars. On a larger scale, Jason said, “I saw Pink Floyd introduce Dark Side of the Moon at Radio City Music Hall at midnight and that blew my mind. I had never heard anything like that before.”

In addition to growing up at the Performance Marine shop, Johnny was immersed in music and the first concert he went to was Santana. When Johnny went to the University of Albany, he got a degree in music.

Today, Jason plays in Blue Moon Band, which performs on the weekends near Bolton Landing and offers an eclectic mix of music ranging from the B52s to The Who to the Black Crows.

Johnny founded his own band, The Switch, which consists of three members who graduated from Bolton Landing High School together. Johnny and the bass player used to play with the Blue Moon Band before they were old enough to play in bars on their own. Their time spent playing music explains their similar signature hairstyles that extend just past the collars in the back and include long sideburns.

A Personal Connection
The Saris’ are proponents of bracket-class racing and their current boat is one that Jason had a personal connection to. When he was working at Harbor 1 in 1982, Jason rigged a 33-foot Cobra for an offshore racing named Dominic Santarelli, who drove for boatowner Dan Weinstein in a wooden catamaran called Powerplay.

Weinstein told Santarelli that running the Cobra would result in him losing his seat in Powerplay, so Santarelli never raced the boat.

Weinstein recognized a good boat when he saw the Cobra run and bought the molds. The boat became the famous 33-foot Powerplay that was popular in offshore racing and as a recreational boat.

The original 33-foot Cobra wound up down at MDG Performance in Maryland. Johnny saw it online and told his dad. Dave Govatos, the owner of MDG, had bought it to race with his son Jason.

During the 2018 Offshore Powerboat Association awards banquet, (from left) Jason Saris, Johnny Saris, Paul Chambers and Vern French received the Godfather Award. Photo by Tim Sharkey copyright Sharkey Images.

That never panned out and Jason Saris bought the boat, restored it and put in a pair of 700-hp hp engines. Running in the Bracket 400 class, Saris Racing has been one of the most consistent winners in the bracket classes.

“We get most of the benefit from racing,” said Jason. “The thing I like about the bracket racing is after doing the other forms, when you got done racing, you had to start tearing down stuff for tech inspections. Now we wash it, flush it and go to the bar. There’s a certain relaxed approach to the bracket classes that I truly enjoy.”

He also has enjoyed seeing his son mature into a respected competitor, engine builder and rigger.

“In the boats and out of the boats, we’re able to have a mutual respect for each other because we’re good at what we do,” said Jason.

Sounds like a harmonious father-son relationship.