NHRA Pro Stock star Larry Morgan said his mother talked him into becoming a race driver. “I had a ’68 Z-28 when I was 16 or 17 years old and I kind of hot rodded it around a bit until one day I took my mother to the TV repair shop,” the veteran Mopar team owner and driver recently recalled at Atlanta Dragway. “I gave her a little ride and she figured I’d better be on the race track. She told me there was a place for what I was doing and it definitely wasn’t on the street with her in the car.”
Morgan started competing in some serious Mopar muscle in the late-‘70s with the famed Rod Shop team out of Columbus, Ohio. Racing full time since 1984, his first Pro Stock start came at Pomona in 1987 and he’s entered 410 events since, winning nine times and twice finishing as high as third in year-end points (1989, 1991). In addition to building his own engines, Morgan provides the motive power for Pro Stock rivals V. Gaines and Max Naylor, as well as to Rick Jones on the IHRA side of things.
Morgan established his current relationship with Mopar nearly a decade ago and presently campaigns the Lucas Oil-backed Dodge Stratus on NHRA’s national-event trail with associate sponsorship from Cleary Buildings and Summit Racing Equipment.
Known as a racer who speaks his mind, Morgan ran afoul of NHRA brass last season with his “You can’t fix stupid” comment and subsequent T-shirts featuring the same phrase in response to the sanctioning body’s handling of timing issues at certain tracks. Though his relationship with the NHRA’s powers that be has since smoothed over, that didn’t mean Morgan was ready to pull any punches when MoparMax caught up with the 52-year-old driver late in April.
How did your current relationship begin with Mopar?
Larry Morgan: Well, I was racing for Chevrolet, but I had heard they (Chrysler) were going to build a Hemi program for Pro Stock and (Chrysler motorsports director) Lou Patane came to me at the Houston race at the end of the 1998 season and asked if I’d be interested in working with them on the Hemi project. So I told him what I thought they should do and that I’d only be interested if they would work that way, if it was going to be a program where they weren’t going to be afraid to spend the money. So he made a deal with me and that’s how it started.
What kind of support do you receive from Mopar?
Morgan: We’ve got an agreement, but I don’t have a deal like Allen Johnson by far—and I don’t think his deal is as good as it used to be—but our relationship is good with them (Mopar). We get parts, wind tunnel, all the technical support, but it’s not like it used to be for anybody. I mean, their engineering group, we have all the access we need to them, all the aero and all the engines, so really, we’ve got a pretty good deal with them.
Is that access just as important, or even more so, than physical parts to your team?
Morgan: The knowledge, yes. But they learn a lot from us as well. I mean we test the parts and make them work and I think it eventually trickles down to the cars they have on the street nowadays.
Any Mopars in the garage at home?
Morgan: Yeah, I’ve got a Dodge diesel pick-up truck. Actually, I’ve got two new ones there now.
What about when you were younger, were you into Mopars as a teenager?
Morgan: Oh yeah, I always liked them. I mean, absolutely, they made the trickest parts back in the day. When I was growing up it was all about the Hemi cars, then the 340s and
the 360s. Actually, when I started racing with the Rod Shop I ran a 360 Super Stocker, a Challenger, it was one of Dave Boertman’s old cars. Then I had a Hemi Dart there and a ’64 Dodge with a Hemi in it, all aluminum.
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You look back on those days and think, ‘My gosh, those cars would be worth millions now,’ and I was out running them around, doing burnouts behind my house. I had access to a whole lot of historical cars, so to speak now, but back then they were just racecars. The Rod Shop (Columbus, OH), they had the Mopar deal and they had everything. It was amazing, really, that I was able to grow up in that group and got to see it all.
