It’s been expected for many years, but in the year 2011, it’s safe to say that the turbo-powered Pro Modified has officially arrived. At the recent NHRA Gatornationals in Florida, Brad Personett’s previously lone turbo entry had gained four counterparts, and with others on the way, it signified the beginning of a whole new era for the ultimate in doorslammer racing. There was a time, however, when turbochargers weren’t the proverbial holy grail of engine combinations. In fact, until 2005, there wasn’t even a major sanctioned venue to run one. But veteran engine builder and racer Mike Moran took it upon himself to change all that, and in doing so, changed the face of Pro Modified forever.

Moran first burst onto the drag racing scene at the very first HOT ROD Magazine Fastest Street Car Shootout with an eight-second Pinto station wagon, and in 1994 debuted his “Casper” 1994 Camaro that would come one of the most iconic cars in street legal drag racing history. After a stint with nitrous oxide that aided him in waging battle with the likes of Pat Musi and Tony Christian and earning the title of first Pro Street car run in the sixes and over 200 MPH, Moran switched to turbochargers for good in 1999. His business, Moran Motorsports in Taylor, MI, had been building turbocharged engines for years, and the swap was motivated by business as much as horsepower.

In 1994 Moran debuted his "Casper" 1994 Camaro that would come one of the most iconic cars in street legal drag racing history.

After having his infamous quad-turbo big block and subsequent twin turbo big block engine combinations banned from competition right off the bat, Moran embarked on a new mission to reach the five-second zone with a new twin turbocharged ’99 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. After several hard fought years of single-handedly leading the turbo revolution, including lobbying for the inclusion of turbos in NHRA and IHRA Pro Modified, Moran achieved the landmark goal on March 12, 2009 with a 5.97 at 251 MPH in Valdosta, GA.

At the conclusion of the 2009 season, Moran placed his record-setting Monte Carlo for sale to focus on the development of a new race car and engine combination, and with those plans inching closer to fruition, DRAGZINE sat down with the turbo wiz to learn more about the race to the five-second zone and what the future holds for his business and his racing career.

DRAGZINE: What would you consider to be your greatest achievement in the sport?

Mike Moran: It’s a close race between bring the first turbo car to break the five-second barrier in Pro Modified and six-seconds in Pro Street. Both are milestones, and they’re certainly at the top of the list. With the five-second achievement, I was trying a lot harder and it took a lot more time – around four years – and it was certainly harder fought to accomplish.

DZ: What were some of your greatest challenges in reaching the five-second zone?

Moran: With the six-second street car effort, I had a lot of people that I could go to for advice. With the five-second goal, there had been plenty of blower cars to do it, but with the turbo car, there was no one to ask. You’re the one leading the path, and there’s no one to ask “am I doing this right?”. There was a lot of trial and error, plus we were doing it with an old nitrous motor that was less than optimal.  The chassis consisted of an old Pro Stock car that was pissed off having to cope with that much power. The car kept breaking everything under the sun because it just wasn’t designed for it, so it was a fight – a hell of a struggle.

DZ: So you’d really just stretched the limits of the Monte Carlo?

Moran: That car had no business doing what it did, because it just wasn’t designed for that much power. The car never made a full throttle pass; there was always pedaling involved. It tore up three different rear ends and snapped an axle one time at Rockingham, where I almost crashed the car. We’d tear up one part, fix it and then it would break something else. The Monte Carlo just wasn’t meant for power like that. But I couldn’t afford to go build a Pro Modified car, I had to make what I had work.

DZ: You essentially pioneered turbo Pro Mod racing. Did you expect it to take off the way it has?

Moran: No, I didn’t think it’d happen this quick. I told everyone that it’d be ten years before you would see a lot of cars with turbos, and we’re not quite at ten years yet and already half of them are there. It was a long and arduous process paving the way for turbos in Pro Modified and I know many others have followed in my footsteps. Originally, I sat down with a clean slate with [Kenny] Nowling and we made the rules. We were the only car involved in the class; the first turbo car to run in Pro Modified, period. There wasn’t even another one being built. A year later, it was Annette Summer and I, in which neither one of us could run well. Then again, look at what we were working with; we had cars that weren’t meant for what they were doing.

There were a couple of achievements that I set for myself. First was becoming the first turbo car in the fives because, in my driving career. Secondly, and I said mark my words – and I told this to the guys at IHRA and Kenny Nowling [with the NHRA AMS Pro Modified series] – that in ten years time, that turbos will be the power adder of choice. And we’re on our way; we’re about 40% of the way there.

DZ: Even when you were fighting tooth and nail with your combination, you were still confident that this was the way of the future?

Moran: Most of my struggles were with the car, and there are some shortcomings on the turbo cars as far as short times, but with some of the new technology out there, I knew it would come to it. If enough people are doing it and it’s fast enough, people will start building parts for what you’re doing.

These cars still can’t be beaten on the back half of the track – turbocharged Pro Modifieds run about as fast as a Top Fuel car in the back half. They pick up around 57 [MPH] out the back, and that’s a statistic that most people don’t know. Those cars cross the finish line at 330 miles per hour, but they run 275 to the eighth mile. They always pick up around 55 in the back, but it’s nothing for a strong car to make up 50 or more. The first time that someone ever told me that statistic, it was Tony Christian. Most race cars pick up 40-47 in the back half, but turbo cars are the exception to the rule.

DZ: Would you say that your “dirty work”, so to speak, made it possible for other turbo racers to come in and run well?

Moran: I’d rather refer to it as the trickle down effect, because that’s how it was put to me. People send me links to forums all the time and that’s exactly what people are saying. All of these guys now are running pretty fast, but they had the trickle down effect from what we were doing when nobody was doing it. They didn’t have six year learning curve like me; they had a year at best because they were able to take advantage of the prior six years. We didn’t hide it from anybody, and they knew what we were doing. They got to watch, and when they knew it was close enough, they jumped in.

DZ: Tell us a little about your new racing effort.

Moran: The first car is being built by Jerry Bickel and it is going to belong to a customer. It’s going to be a situation where I’ll drive the car for the first season to get it worked out for them, and then I’ll look at building a car of my own. I’ve got another car being built right behind that one, and honestly, as long as these guys let me build their cars and supervise them and figure out what needs to be done for the combination, I don’t know that I’ll ever build a car. As much as I’d love to build another one, these guys are giving me the artistic freedom to do whatever I want, and that’s what I like. The only reason I built my own car was because no one was letting me use my ideas on their car. But I don’t have that problem right now, so really, I’m living a dream.

DZ: Do you enjoy the driving aspect, or would you be perfectly content standing behind the race car?

Moran: I do enjoy the driving end of it, but I like tuning as well. If I were just to work on making them fast, I could do a lot better job then doing both. It’s definitely an ego thing; I mean you like to go fast, but I’ll be okay if its one of my customers, as long as its my stuff. I’m happy with that.

Do I like driving and the the thrill of it all? Hell yes, I’m an adrenaline junkie. I’ve had a lot of fun doing what I’ve done, and I’ve got to be realistic about it. I just don’t have the money to run in a series for a whole season, so I’d usually go hit two or three races with my car and that was about it. I enjoy my business and getting to tune for other guys and get paid for what I’m doing.

In a perfect world, if I had a big sponsor paying all the bills and I had the money, I’d race a full season anywhere. But the reality is that I have a business that I love that allows me to think outside the box, and then use this knowledge to make my customers succeed in their racing program. And of course, I have to pay the bills, so I have to drive on a part-time basis.

DZ: Was the five-second chase hard on you financially?

Moran: It was very tough, because we were always chasing so many different things. We spent a lot of money on theories, because we couldn’t just call someone up for advice. We had to explore theories and see what worked and what didn’t.

If I had to go out and build a five second car tomorrow, I could do it for a third of the money I had in the Monte Carlo, because two-thirds of the money was spent on development that we didn’t know would work or not, and they didn’t. Now that it’s been done and there’s a template, it’s no problem.

The Monte Carlo was rebuilt and changed in different ways three different times, and we spent that money three times when it could’ve been spent once. We even lengthened the wheelbase. Most people don’t cut the front of the car off unless they wreck it, but we cut it off to lengthen the wheelbase because it wasn’t stable enough. There was a lot of wasted time and money in it.

DZ: Despite the tribulations of that car and the high costs of reaching your goal, what motivated you to keep tirelessly forging ahead?

Moran: When we got it to the point of running in the 6.0’s and teens, I was very close to a breakthrough, and if I took six months to a year break building a car, I’d have been last into the fives. So I was forced to push a limited car. We had to make it work, even though it was really past the point of being safe. We just had to push on, because someone else would’ve beat us to it. By the time we got to the low sixes, everyone had taken notice and started to say “hey, we know what he’s doing; he’s doing this and that and we know what he’s using for a rear gear and everything.” Well all they had to do was build it once rather than three times. We just knew that we couldn’t take a break.

DZ: Why did you opt for the Mustang body, and what are some of the design cues that you’ve incorporated into this version?

Moran: To be honest, it was mostly my partner, Bart Lemieux. He kept suggesting that we go with the Ford and I told him that we’d have to do a lot of work to get a body where we wanted it. We could do a Chevrolet body and I could have an aerodynamic body the way I wanted it, right away. He convinced me to talk to Joe King and Jesse Kershaw at Ford Racing and because they’re right here by the shop, they’d stop by every two weeks and ask “are you ready yet?” I told them if they were serious we’d sit down and talk, and we did. I told them I was going to run my own powerplant and it wasn’t going to be a Chevy, Chrysler or a Ford. I was going to design my own motor, but we’d put the Ford name on everything. We were going to have completely reshape the body and so they were going to have to supply a couple Pro Stock bodies and work with me on some parts.

It was a Pro Stock body that they were offering, but I needed a Pro Modified body, so we were going to have a year just in the development of a body. When we came to that agreement, I said okay, and that’s why we ended up going with Ford. They’re friendly guys and would stop by and talk to me on a regular basis and it seemed like a natural fit.

DZ: So tell us about this new engine you are designing?

Moran: We’re building a new HEMI-based engine that has a lot of our own ideas incorporated into it. I’ve been working with Danny Jesel and Charlie Weston to develop a whole new block platform that uses, what we feel, is some pretty innovative thinking. It’s been designed strictly for turbocharged alcohol, so it’s going to be really easy to maintain. We basically created the best of a Ford, a Chevy, a Chrysler, and everything I’ve learned in my 25-plus years of building engines.

I left myself a wide open platform with it; I can go as large as 770 cubic inches and as small as 500 and still have a nice package. I kept it at a reasonable deck height; not too tall, not too short, and by doing this, we have a platform that can really fit anyones needs.

The customer receiving the first car already owns the engine that was in the Monte Carlo and so we’re going to run that until the new engine is complete. We actually already have the first three MRE HEMI motors that will be built sold, so I wouldn’t even have one of my own until next year.

DZ: When do you expect to be back on the racetrack?

Moran: We’re tentatively saying July, and we’re comfortable saying that unless things take longer than expected, which everyone knows can happen when starting a new program.

The nose of the Moran-designed Mustang body at right, features a much smaller frontal area than the Pro Stock nose at left.

DZ: Where do you plan on racing?

Moran: We’re targeting the ADRL. That’s why my engine combination is the way it is. We don’t have any visions of being super competitive from the get-go, we just want to go out there and work on developing the low end performance that we lack against the blower cars.

We’re looking at it as a new challenge, and I really like the ADRL from the standpoint that they’re just outside-the-box thinkers. You can do whatever you want, just bring it and I like that. That’s what got me off the streets and into the NMCA. It was bring your car to Memphis and let’s see who’s got the baddest car, and it was heads-up racing. That was 1992 and I’d never seen it before. With class racing where there’s all kinds of specified engine regulations, weights, and things like that, no one is rewarded for any sort of outside thinking.

DZ: Although you’d sold it and moved on, was it tough to see the Monte Carlo torn up in the crash last fall?

Moran: Yeah, I felt really bad when I saw it. I’d been through a lot of hairy moments with that car at 250 miles per hour. That car was only designed to run 205, and I ran 252 with it. Everytime I pulled the chutes, it’d lift the rear wheels three feet of the ground because the location of the pull point was great for Pro Stock racing, but it was too low for Pro Modified. It’d dance around on its nose guardrail to guardrail, but I always able to get it under control.

Ric Fleck purchased Moran's record-setting Monte Carlo last season and went for a wild ride in Orlando during qualifying at the annual World Streetnationals last fall.

I thought to myself, “I don’t know how many times I’d been close to crashing that car and saved it somehow.” I guess it was a lot of luck and the grace of God, and some good driving. And then to see it go out and get balled up into the wall 300 feet out, I was just sick. But the guy was okay, Larry [Larson] did a great job building the car, and it did what it was meant to do it; it saved the driver.

DZ: At present, the ADRL Pro Extreme class doesn’t contain a single turbo car. Is it possible for these cars to compete, or does the nature of the turbo simply rule you out in the eighth mile?

Moran: There are ways around the current disadvantage. The ADRL doesn’t limit you within reason, and because we can do whatever we want, I’ve got a couple ideas that I don’t want to let out of the bag that I think exist that someone just needs to go out there and try. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Initially we won’t be competitive, but I’d like to think after a full year under our belt, we can be. Conservatively, I think we can run 3.70’s and then we’ll see where we go from there.

DZ: In Outlaw competition, would or could the quad turbo setup be viable today?

Moran: I think John Meaney [of BigStuff3] and I learned a lot from that whole program, and if anything, you’d be at a disadvantage with more turbos. The pulses per turbo aren’t enough to get the wheel speed that you need. The more pulses you have, the quicker you can get turbine speed, and when we cut it down to two pulses, we had a hard time getting it to make boost.

Back then, I built a really killer big block with a short stroke and we were spinning 9,200 RPM on the chip, just to get it to make the boost we needed before it left the starting line. That’s higher than most people shift. So we learned that with two turbos instead of four, the energy from the other two pipes could be put into one and now its easy to get it to build boost.

We definitely learned a lot from it back then, but I don’t think that’d be the way to go now.

DZ: What challenges do you face trying to run a business, build a new race car, and campaign a race season?

Moran: The biggest challenge is getting any sleep. There’s no time for sleep when you’ve got all of that on your ticket. I’d sleep two or three hours tops, and when I wasn’t doing one of the three, I might sleep for five or six hours. But when you’ve got everything going at once, there’s just no way that you can be a normal person.

The racing has always taken a backseat. I put all of my customers first and the racing has always been the thing that faltered. I could be mad at myself, but at least I didn’t have anyone else mad at me.

For Mike and his team, the road to the five-second zone was a long and arduous task, but in the end, their tireless efforts paid off with a place in the history books that no one can ever take away from them. And along the way, they opened the floodgates for turbocharging in Pro Modified and ushered in a whole new era for the Pro Modified category. And now, armed with a blank slate to carve out on an entirely new racing program from the ground-up, the future has never looked brighter for Mike Moran and his Moran Motorsports business.