Every venue and area of entertainment the world over has its share of famous duos: Starsky and Hutch, Bonnie and Clyde, Sonny and Cher, Laurel and Hardy, Batman and Robin. The sport of  drag racing, too, has its tag teams that run roughshod over the competition, achieving success that is nothing short of legendary. And smack dab in the middle of that list you’ll find the intimidating tandem of Tim Lynch and Steve Petty. Petty, who founded Proline Race Engines, now serves as tuner and engine consultant for not only his own car, but his competitors as well. Lynch, meanwhile, plys his trade as a machinist and engine builder at the shop and terrorizes the competition as the team’s wheelman by weekend.

Their names are virtually synonymous with Outlaw 10.5 racing, and if there is a record to be set, this pair has either blown its doors off or is poised to do so in the future. They were the first team to break into the sixes on 10.5W tires, and have been the first to achieve every mark since that point. Their chemistry as a driver and tuner is unmatched in the arena of small tire, doorslammer racing, making them the most feared, renowned, and fan favorite team in the pits anywhere they show up. After years of stomping the competition with their infamous Mustang, the pair debuted their brand spankin’ new Corvette ZR1 this spring to much fanfare. With the combined talents of these two gentlemen and armed with a new chariot, the sky truly is the limit. Steve and Tim sat down with DRAGZINE to share the stories and insider look at their success that many in the stands – and even behind the keyboards – may not have known.

DRAGZINE: Steve and Tim, tell us about your beginnings and background in the sport.

Steve Petty: “I’ve raced all my life, I guess. I started when I was 15 or 16 years old with my dad, who had a bunch of old Mopars, believe it or not. I kind of went street racing back in the early 90’s, did a little bit of local heads-up, then we started doing the NMCA stuff and then the NMRA, and it just kind of took off from there.”

Tim Lynch: “I had a Mustang in high school and started modifying the thing. We took it to the track – and you find out how humble you are when your car is slower than you think it is – and so it becomes an addiction. We’d break stuff every weekend, and realized the car wasn’t very reliable, so we turned it into a race car. In 1994 or 1995, we started traveling around to some of the races, and built the new Mustang.”

DZ: Steve, how and when did Proline begin?

Petty: “I had a car wreck about seven years ago. I worked at an automotive dealership, and it was a pretty bad car wreck that put me out of work for about eight months. I went to go back to work and I’d been doing race motors on the side for probably 10 years, and I just thought what the hell – get the machine shop and hired Tim [Lynch], [Eric] Dillard, and Doug [Patton], and it just kind of took off from there. I started doing it as more of a job than just a hobby.”

DZ: Steve, what was your engine building background before founding Proline?

Petty: “Basically, just a bunch of buddies of mine. I’d do their motors on the side. By day I was an automotive mechanic at a Dodge dealership and by night I just did motors out of the house. Doug, who actually works at Proline did all my machine work back then, and when we got Proline up and going, I actually hired Doug away from the company he was with to do my machine work.”

DZ: Steve, it seems the sky is the limit with these engines today. What can we expect to see in the near future as far as technology and performance?

Petty: “You’re definitely going to see a lot more billet stuff. People are going to start getting away from the cast blocks and cast heads and going to the billet stuff. Valvetrain innovations and tricker things in the valvetrain. Right now, we’re pretty much making kind of the sky-is-the-limit on power as we’re sitting right now. We’re spending more time working on drivetrain, torque converters, and suspension to utilize the power that we’ve got right now. There’s still a whole lot left on the table.”

DZ: Share with us the story of how you two teamed up and went racing.

Petty: “There’s probably two different stories: his story and my story [laughs]. The best that I can remember, we just kind of met out street racing and I remember one night telling him “hey, give me a ride in that Mustang.” So I went for a ride with him and we went up the road a little and that thing had a lot of power and street tires – it wasn’t really set up for drag racing. I talked him into making a few changes and we went to the dragstrip a couple weeks later, broke the transmission in it, and I fixed the transmission the next week. And we’ve pretty much been racing together ever since.”

“We started off with a street car that ran 8.30’s in the eighth mile, and then we transitioned to mid sevens, to high sixes, and then we decided to take it off the street and put a big supercharger on it and ran mid sixes. Then we went back to nitrous and built a bigger nitrous motor and started running some of the NMRA Street Outlaw stuff. We went like 8.86 with that car on stock suspension – we were the first car to go 8’s on stock suspension. Sometime around 1998, we got tired of the nitrous and put our first turbo on it and raced that for about a year and half. Then down in Phenix City [Alabama] we had a wreck – T-boned a lightpole with the old Mustang, and that’s when we started on the new 2000-bodied car that Jimmy Blackmon built for us. It’s been a slow progression the whole time. We worked our way the whole way up. We’ve kind of done it all and seen it all, I guess you could say.”

Lynch: “I met Steve at a local spot in town where everybody hung out doing the street car stuff.  That was probably around 1993. We were kind of rivals at first and then, it was one of those things where you’re talking one night and going to the track together the next. That was right out of high school when I met Steve.”

DZ: Steve, you tune for many of your competitors. Has there ever been an issue with conflicting interests on the track?

Petty: “No, not at all. Because I’ll give them everything we’ve got. We don’t hold back anything. I’ve never had a customer even question that. We’ve had quite a few of them outrun us, and we’ve outrun quite a few ourselves. We’ll give you the same motor that’s in our car, and if you want, you can have the motor that’s in our car.”

DZ: Guys, you’ve essentially been the benchmark in Outlaw 10.5 for years. What’s been the key to your overwhelming success?

Petty: “Part of it is having the shop, and all the customers I work with. I probably see ten time more runs in Outlaw 10.5 than anybody else in the class in the course of a year. The learning curve just gets sped up seeing so many different cars, and a lot of the customers are just really open to testing stuff. I learn a lot from them and they learn a lot from me.”

Lynch: “I would have to say that Steve Petty is the majority of it. With his tuning ability, and he knows these race cars inside and out. He knows what the track will take. Obviously, the turbo technology has helped us a bunch. We switched to turbos on the Fox body car around 2000, and I wish we’d done it sooner. We definitely enjoy racing – it’s an addiction.”

DZ: You made the long-awaited switch to the new Corvette, how has that gone thus far and what are your expectations going forward with the new piece?

Petty: “I’m really happy with what I’m seeing with it. The Mustang was built to run mid to low sevens, and it was never really designed to run 6.40’s like it did. Now we’ve got a state-of-the-art car. It’s basically a Pro Modified-style car, and it should be able to handle a lot more power. We could’ve gone faster last year, but we were just running out of race car.”

Lynch: “It’s not that I’m a diehard Ford, or Chevy, or whatever guy. We want to go faster, and this car seems like it should be a faster and more aerodynamic than the newer-body Mustang. That’s why we swapped the body styles. It’s the same powerplant from the Mustang – a 670ci Proline – so the motor and all is identical. We’ve basically run it one time since the car has been out, so we really haven’t seen the full potential or had the conditions to go fast yet. We’re hoping to go 6.20’s at 240 with it later this year.”

DZ: Tim, describe the sensation of driving that rocketship with the front end hanging in the air.

Lynch: “Well that’s not necessarily a good thing. I’ve lost a lot of rounds because of that; not being able to keep the front end of the ground. It’s definitely a wild ride when the wheels are off the ground – you lose visibility of the track. I don’t want to say that you get used to it, but once you do it so many times, it’s just like second nature to me now. Hopefully this newer car keeps the front end on the ground; that’s part of the idea behind it. But these things are a rush – they are never straight as an arrow. They’re centerline to guardrail most of the time, because you’re limited on your tire size. I don’t want to say that you have unlimited horsepower, but you’ve got plenty there for the tire size.”

DZ: Is your own car a test bed of sorts for Proline and your customers?

Petty: “You’ve got it. Just about every motor combo we sell through the shop has been through one of our cars. I don’t like selling things if I don’t know that its going work or not. You’re pretty well getting an ironed-out combo when you get a motor from us.”

Lynch: “I would definitely say so. We like to race what we sell, and we want to make sure that it’s proven. But our cars have definitely been a tested bed for new turbos, converters, transmissions, engine combinations, you name it.”

DZ: Just how fast CAN you guys go in Outlaw 10.5 trim?

Petty: “My goal this winter is to go 4.12 to 4.15 in the eighth and somewhere around 6.25 in the quarter. We’ve lowered the Outlaw 10.5 record about a tenth every year. I believe in four years, unless they do something radical with the rules, you’ll see an Outlaw 10.5 car at 3000 pounds go 5.99. I’m sure we’ll hit a pretty serious roadblock here shortly, but we haven’t really found it yet.”

Lynch: “In the next year or so I think we can go 6.20’s, but it’s going to have to be pretty good conditions to do it.”

DZ: The future of Outlaw 10.5 seems to be back on the upswing. Tell us your thoughts.

Petty: “A lot of that has to do with rule changes. That thing kind of started dwindling the last couple years when the turbo combination started to get figured out, and the nitrous racers started throwing in the towel. Now they are coming out with some weight breaks that are making the nitrous cars competitive again, and you’re seeing a lot of those guys come back. This economy has really hurt it too. Thing looks to be steadying out. I think people aren’t as afraid to spend their money right now as they were a year or two ago.”

DZ: Did or have you had any thoughts of tackling Extreme 10.5?

Petty: “No. I think it’s a really cool class, but being a business, Outlaw 10.5 is a lot more lucrative. There are ten times more Outlaw 10.5 races a year than there are Extreme 10.5 races, which means a lot more potential clients and customers. Tim and I will race 25 times a year at least, and if you build an Extreme 10.5 car, that’s really the only place you can run it. I don’t want to limit myself to the few number of races that they [ADRL] have. I really, really, really enjoy races like the Shakedown, Orlando, the StreetCar Super Nationals in Vegas. If Extreme 10.5 took off and there were a lot more people carrying it and some bigger races, I’d think more about it. But to me, Outlaw 10.5 is a lot more fun right now.”

Lynch: “No. I don’t think that class is going to be around in a couple years. Besides, you’re building a car for one class only. There’s Outlaw 10.5, and you’ve got Shakedown, 1320X, Orlando – there’s a lot of stuff that these cars fit in. An Extreme 10.5 car only fits in that class, so it just didn’t make sense financially to build a car for that deal there.”