Rollin Transport’s Vinnie and Danielle Diorio are in Super Cat
for the long haul.
By Gregg Mansfield
It was an unbearably hot Fourth of July in Wisconsin, and Vince Diorio was driving home with friends after a day of riding ATVs. Caked in dust and sweat, they passed Lake Mendota looking longingly at the boats on the water.
“We all looked and we’re like, ‘Damn, Vinnie, what are we doing? We should be on a boat,’” said Diorio’s best friend Kevin Pascavis. “We shouldn’t be driving through the woods on these dusty trails, eating dust all day. We should be out on a boat like all these guys and having a good time.”
By that spring, Diorio had bought his first boat, a used twin-engine 32’ Fountain Fever, trading dusty trails for lake mist. More than a decade later, Diorio and his wife Danielle own an offshore race team competing in Super Cat, boat racing’s premier class.
Diorio built his reputation in the trucking industry, and with Danielle, is applying the same blueprint to the offshore team. Competing against veteran offshore racers and better-financed teams, Rollin Transport is holding its own in its third year at boat racing’s top echelon.
As fellow offshore racers have learned, Diorio will not be outworked as the team tries to finish consistently on the podium.
Truck-Loving Kid
Diorio doesn’t know when he developed a passion for boating but does remember as a child taking naps on the floor of the family’s Donzi on Lake Michigan.
Diorio’s parents divorced when he was in grade school, he moved with his mom and sister to the family’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. His family struggled financially but Diorio learned the value of hard work watching his mom, uncle and grandfather.
On the last day of high school Diorio turned 18, he got his commercial driver’s license and started driving a new Peterbilt 357 quad-axle dump truck. Two years later Diorio bought his own truck and started hauling gravel and stone before moving to longer-haul work. He was getting so much work, he started loading his friend’s trucks to keep up with business.
Adjacent to the family’s dairy farm was a gravel pit and Diorio would watch the steady stream of trucks while growing up. He purchased a CB radio to talk to a friend on a nearby farm and would occasionally chat with the truck drivers traveling to and from the gravel pit.
“I just always liked trucks and knew I didn’t want to be a dairy farmer the rest of my life,” he said.
“I had built a pretty decent reputation already where we were pretty on the ball. I was never late and always showed up on time,” Diorio said. “My equipment was always shiny and clean. The image was there for sure.”
That was the start of Rollin Transport in 1999, which today has eight trucks and 22 owner-operators. Based in Richfield, Wis., the company specializes in high-value cargo and machinery, operating primarily in the Midwest. Rollin Transport has been around for more than 20 years and that’s rare in the trucking industry, Pascavis said.
“The problem with a lot of these other trucking companies nowadays is they’re here for one month, and they’re gone the next year,” Pascavis said. “It’s pretty hard to find a company that’s been in trucking more than 20 years.”
Setting the Standard
Within the trucking industry Diorio is well known for the company’s clean and well-maintained trucks. While the attention to detail might border on obsessive, it’s helped Rollin Transport navigate the highs and lows of the trucking industry.
“People are like, “Your trucks are so nice, do they ever get dirty?’” Pascavis said. “They get dirty every day, they get dirty every week, but they don’t stay that way because we clean them, wash them and polish them.”
The trucks and trailers never have dings or scratches, which reflects on Rollin Transport’s professional and high standards.
“Our company is only as good as the guys that are driving for it,” Diorio said. “I can brag as much as I want to a customer to get work or explain why they’re paying a little bit more than the average guy, but it’s really my guys that are showing them why.”
Attention to detail starts out at the top with Diorio and before turning his attention to boat racing, his rigs earned awards and graced magazine covers on the truck show circuit. Diorio customized new trucks from modifying the body to custom paint and cabins that have the feel of a high-end steak house.
“People say that we have set the bar as far as tricked out stuff and cool trucks,” Diorio said about his days of showing trucks. “I think a lot of guys have tried to do their trucks up like ours.”
As Rollin Transport grew more successful, Diorio got more into boating and eventually racing.
Loyal to Outerlimits
After owning a Fountain as his first performance boat, Diorio has been a loyal Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats customer ever since. Diorio owned two used 39’ Outerlimits V-bottoms before buying a new 41’ Outerlimits with twin 700-hp engines.
Diorio had Outerlimits build him a 43-foot V-bottom with Mercury Racing 1,350-hp engines. His recreational boat is a 2022 Outerlimits 37’ catamaran with outboards. The engines just turned 80 hours, a reflection of how much time they’ve spent offshore racing.
Ever since Diorio owned a Fountain, he always had eyes on an Outerlimits.
“An Outerlimits was so far out of my league that I didn’t think that would ever happen,” Diorio said, “and then I just slowly started working my way up.”
Diorio was active on the poker run scene and met Danielle at a dinner after the Kingston Poker Run in Canada. Vince knew Danielle’s parents well as they owned an Outerlimits and would frequent the same poker runs.
“They didn’t even tell me they had a daughter,” Vince said with a laugh.
Both Vinnie and Danielle started dating and a year later started a blended family with daughters Francesca, 12, and Charlee, 11, and son Vincenzo, 6. Their son races Snocross in the winter, which keeps the family busy during the Super Cat offseason.
Going Offshore Racing
Diorio became friendly with the late Outerlimits founder Mike Fiore and is close friends with Dan Kleitz, Outerlimits’ general manager. It was from this friendship with the Outerlimits crew that started Diorio on a path to offshore racing.
Diorio partnered with Brian Forehand to run a 29’ Outerlimits in Mod V, learning about the racing experience. Diorio started as the throttleman and has continued into the Super Cat ranks.
“I don’t think I had enough experience in that boat to even steer that boat in a race,” Diorio said. “It worked out, but I’ve always throttled a boat.”
Moving into the Super Cat ranks in 2022, Diorio stayed loyal to Outerlimits Powerboats by running a new 39’ catamaran. Like any new team, Rollin Transport had some growing pains and after the first season the team switched to driver Matt Jamniczky and replaced the power plants with a pair of 750-hp Sterling Performance Engines.
Rollin Transport is running the only Outerlimits catamaran in Super Cat.
“All that’s been in that class is either a 40 Skater or a 388 Skater,” Diorio said. “All of our data we have is stuff that nobody else had any data on it. We had to do it on our own because we didn’t have any other boat to go off.”
While the team has a data-driven focus with six cameras onboard the Outerlimits catamaran, it’s been seat time that has been the difference maker.
“It’s night and day difference this year just because of our experience together,” Jamniczky said. “I would say it was pretty challenging when we got together because we knew each other as friends but not as teammates in the cockpit. It took a while for us to kind of get on the same page and know how to communicate with each other.”
Jamniczky had a welcome to Super Cat racing moment during Race World Offshore’s 2024 Ocean City Grand Prix in Maryland. The catamaran caught a wake and looked like it was going flip before the duo regained control.
Photo by Ryan Walker
“We took a pretty good flyer and when it came down, it just hooked really hard left, and we kind of stood it up on the starboard side and rode it home until it landed and then we put it on the side,” Diorio said. “I’ve been in enough of those situations where I knew we had a pretty good handle on it. I think Matt had a pretty good pucker factor.”
Diorio said the biggest change to offshore racing in the last decade are the speeds catamarans are taking into the turns. The M CON/Monster Energy team of Tyler Miller and Myrick Coil perfected it and now the other Super Cat teams are catching up.
“I think the boats are maybe a skosh faster down the straights,” Diorio said. “Where everybody has gotten faster in Super Cat from two, three years ago is 100 percent in the corners. These guys are going around these corners in a Super Cat at 100 mph where I bet you it’s 10 to 15 mph faster than where they were two or three years ago.”
Working with crew chief Greg Hillmer of Performance Boat Center, the driver and throttleman must maximize testing with the 750-hp engines requiring a refresh every 15 hours.
“You can figure at the end of the fifth race you need to change engines out,” Hillmer said. “We try to keep our test time down and have a plan. Our biggest thing right now is working on acceleration, turning and other stuff. We’ll just do some pulls real quick and try different props and drive heights. We’re trying not to put hours on.”
Family-style Racing
The Rollin Transport team sees itself as a big family and when at the races, the team rents a large house and have family-style dinners together. The Diorios will bring their children to the races, as do other team members.
“We have to do it as a family or we’re not doing it,” Danielle said.
Danielle arranges travel for 10 to 12 people, with the team and boat arriving Wednesday or Thursday before a weekend race. At the race site, Danielle oversees merchandise sales for the team, which is one of the more popular Super Cat teams.
The race team takes the same approach to cleanliness and maintenance as Diorio’s trucking company. While the Outerlimits catamaran has a few seasons on it, Hillmer and his crew keep the boat in top shape.
“One of my biggest things is I want the boat to be clean,” Hillmer said. “The guys kind of get mad at me when I tell them to go clean the sponsons, but it’s because it needs to be done.”
Social Media Star
When Diorio was competing in truck competitions, he built up a sizable social media following for Rollin Transport. Between Facebook and Instagram accounts, his company has more than 70,000 followers. Views on YouTube of Diorio’s trucks have racked up millions of views over the years.
Social media has been a great recruiting tool to attract drivers to Rollin Transport, though the company is hardly lacking qualified applicants. Diorio’s drivers earn well above the industry pay, noting his drivers are responsible for transporting high-value cargo.
“They don’t really understand how hard my guys work and how hard they work themselves to keep their trucks clean and keep them nice,” Diorio said. “The drivers appreciate the tools that I give them and they’re responsible for keeping them up but that comes with a price with working their ass off.”
When it comes to the race team, social media hasn’t brought in a big sponsor for the team. Diorio has someone to help with social media, but it’s not a primary focus for the 44-year-old throttleman.
“I don’t know if it has any huge direct impact,” he said. “I’d like to think it’s trying to help us with gaining a sponsorship, but it hasn’t yet but I’m optimistic.”
Diorio enjoys the competition that Super Cat provides, and he plans to race Super Cat if it’s still fun and the family and budget allow it.
“We’re making it fun,” Diorio said. “It ain’t for the money, that’s for sure.”
