X2 matty, the car turned out great

Considering the snow, I'd say a LONG time, LOL!

ouch

Car turned out great Matty!!!

And yeah I'm on mymonte alot, there aren't to many custom 5th gens on there, but those that are came out awesome believe it or not...they can really be made to look cool, but not many people put time and effort into that generation of montes, which is obvious by the lackluster turnout of that generation at every meet there is...

Maybe one day there'll be a bigger 5th gen turnout...

Joe

Tim that green one is the v8 rwd one gm did for a mag right.
dave i had those pics on my site for 2 years now

Some how I missed them Tony, or I just don't remember them

John Moss did that car for GM years ago, He used the whole drivetrain out of a Camaro. I have the article someplace around here. I think the only things that were not GM were the custom paint [Moss Greene] and the wheels.

I don't remember the article saying anything about the motor being a 402, I think it was a GM Performance parts LT1.

Damn it, Now I'll have to tear my room apart and find that magazine!!!

Let's see someone say "that's not a real Monte" (Sarcasim)

Joe

I stand corrected! I knew it was an LT1, just didn't remember the build up part, LOL!

1999 Chevy Monte Carlo

Owned by Mike Moran





1999 Chevy Monte Carlo - I Will Run 5s
Former Street Racer Mike Moran Has Come A Long Way Since The First Hot Rod Fastest Street Car Shootout.
His Turbo 540ci Monte Carlo Is The World's Fastest Doorslammer. Now It Needs To Be The Quickest.
By Matt King
Photography by Randy Lorentzen/Planet R, The Hot Rod Archives


After a succession of fast street-legal race cars that put him at the forefront of drag-race turbocharger technology,
Fastest Street Car pioneer Mike Moran is now driving the world's fastest doorslammer, a Pro Street Monte Carlo
that's knocking on the door of the 5-second/240-mph zone.
In 1992, a Detroit street racer showed up at HOT ROD's very first Fastest Street Car Shootout in a memorable
8-second Pinto station wagon, but what the staff remembered most was the guy literally beating a piston back into
the engine block with a ball-peen hammer in the hotel parking lot. Today, the same Mike Moran holds the
distinction of having the world's fastest doorslammer, a successful racing engine business, and a reputation as
one of the country's top EFI and turbo experts. We could never have guessed.

The legend around our offices actually had Mike pounding the piston back into his own engine, but when we asked
him about it, Moran set us straight. "I definitely hurt a piston [at the first Shootout], but I looked at it and
thought about it for a long time and realized there was no way I was going to be able to pull the heads off in
the car. So I just ran it that way the next day and I spent the rest of the night drinking beer and working on
Kenny Anderson's motor." Anderson had melted all eight holes in his '78 Malibu, and those were the slugs Moran
coaxed with the hammer.

His own tubbed '79 Pinto ran 8.60s with a fuel-injected and nitrous'd Cleveland-headed Ford SVO block that was
competitive with big-block cars in the early days of the street-legal drag racing scene. So competitive, in fact,
that his roof-racked Ford was quicker than all but 6 of the 26 cars at our first Memphis showdown, even though it
was his first race on a sanctioned track. You read that right: "Back then I was a street racer. I'd never actually
raced on a dragstrip," Moran says. "But after Memphis, I never raced on the street again." His rookie effort was
even more impressive considering the near-perfect reaction times he cut pass after pass.



With his old car and two previous engine combinations banned by other sanctioning bodies, Moran will try his luck
with his new Redline Oil Monte Carlo in the PRO-Edelbrock Fastest Street Car racing series' Pro Street class this year.
It was that uncanny ability at the Tree that prompted the owner of the winning car, John Carter, to hire Moran to
drive his '67 Chevy II for the next two seasons while Moran built a new car. Together they won the first Orlando
World Street Nationals in 1993 and took Second at Memphis in 1993.

During his stint as a hired shoe, Moran sold the Pinto to a racer in Cleveland who still campaigns it in virtually
unaltered form. He then began work on a '94 Camaro that would become a Pro Street legend. Nicknamed Casper after the
friendly TV ghost, Moran's fourth-gen Camaro started as a salvage-titled street car with a custom Jerry Haas-built
chassis and a 632ci naturally aspirated big-block that ran 7.90s out of the gate at its debut in 1994. By 1995,
Fastest Street Car racing was in full stride under the auspices of the National Muscle Car Association, and heavy
hitters like former NHRA Pro Stock racers Tony Christian and Pat Musi had joined the fray. Competition at the top
of the Pro Street heap jumped a notch in early 1996 when Musi's Popeye, a nitrous-injected '69 Camaro flew into
the 7.40s and right past Moran and Christian's naturally aspirated combos, forcing both of them to step up to keep up.

"We took that abuse for two races before Tony and I both put on nitrous-reluctantly. We didn't want to because, you
know, it's hard on parts," Moran says. Not only did the juiced combination burn through more hardware, it was harder
on Moran's fledgling racing engine business, which he started part-time in 1994 before going full time in 1999. But
despite the extra time and expense, after the nitrous switchover, Casper leap-frogged past Musi into the 7.20s,
eventually posting an all-time best 6.77. Adding to its glory, at an exhibition at the 1996 NHRA U.S. Nationals,
Casper was the first Pro Street car to exceed 200 mph, with a 6.96 at 201.

Moran still relishes his rivalry with Musi, making a point of setting the record straight about his heads-up matches
with the New Jersey-based engine builder and racer. "I was usually just behind Tony in the points and just ahead of
Pat. Pat likes to talk about how he beat up on me, but in all the times we raced, he only beat me twice, and those
were stupid mistakes I made," Moran says. "But we don't have to get into that."

Moran ran a nitrous combination consisting of a pair of NOS dry-flow fogger systems-400 hp on the first stage and
300 hp on the second-through 1999 when he switched to turbochargers, a decision that was motivated by competition
as well as business. Moran had been building highly competitive turbocharged engines for customers for years, and
it was almost getting to the point of embarrassment that he wasn't running one in his own race car. "As a guy still
running nitrous I was a pretty poor spokesperson for turbos," he admits. "And I looked at it from another business
angle too. I needed my time to work on other people's stuff, but every single time you went out with a nitrous
motor, you were working on it all the next week because you had to tear it apart. I needed something that I could
put together as one good combo and have it be there all year, that I didn't have to take out of the trailer every week."



Moran's success in Memphis led to a two-year gig driving for 1992 Memphis winner John Carter, whose '67 Chevy II won
the first Orlando World Street Nationals with Moran at the helm.
Moran was actually a proponent of turbochargers from as far back as the days of his '87 Buick Grand National daily
driver, which he still owns. He was also a pioneer in the use of EFI in drag cars, teaming with John Meaney-the
godfather of aftermarket EFI who developed ACCEL's Digital Fuel Injection and now markets his own system under the
Big Stuff III label-to develop and tune electronic fuel management for his race engines, all of which have run EFI,
including the Pinto. "Everything I've done has been with EFI-I don't even know what to do with a carburetor," Moran
says.

But Moran's well-publicized first stab at a turbocharged race car was ultimately stillborn. His quad-turbo 442ci
big-block laid down a staggering 2,200 hp on the dyno and was featured in several magazines, but according to Moran,
"It got banned [by the NMCA] before I even got it done, and then I didn't really have any incentive to finish it.
We ran it at one race in Orlando and couldn't get it down the track."

After burning a valve in testing and not really having a place to race it, Moran sold the engine to fellow Pro Street
racer Mike Bowman, whose car he maintains and tunes at his Taylor, Michigan, shop. Detuned with just two turbos, it
recently ran 226 mph in Bowman's Camaro at Martin, Michigan, where it was faster than an entire field of IHRA alcohol
Funny Cars that were also in attendance. "Mike shook the tires and pedaled it and it still went 6.70 at 226, so it
definitely has some potential," Moran said.



With his old car and two previous engine combinations banned by other sanctioning bodies, Moran will try his luck
with his new Redline Oil Monte Carlo in the PRO-Edelbrock Fastest Street Car racing series' Pro Street class this year.
Meanwhile, Moran put together a twin-turbo 540ci Chevy for his Casper Camaro that was subsequently banned by the
National Street Car Association, which disallowed the heads, turbos, and cubic inches. "They did everything to make
sure it wasn't going to happen," Moran says. "They said, 'Nobody else's turbo stuff runs that fast.' Well, everybody's
different. That's what makes [street-car racing] unique. They're worried about parity, but you could give 10 guys the
same car, and one of them could go faster than the other nine just because he's racer-savvy."

Despite his poor record in convincing sanctioning bodies to let his cutting-edge turbo combinations in on the action,
Moran is trying again, and this time he'll be gunning for the ranks of the PRO-Edelbrock Fastest Street Car series'
Pro Street class with an all-new engine and chassis, a '99 Monte Carlo-bodied former IHRA Pro Stock chassis that made
history earlier this year when a succession of 230-plus-mile-per-hour passes during an exhibition at Virginia
Motorsports Park, capped by a 6.25-second, 239.70-mph blast, cemented Moran's claim to the title of world's fastest
mile-per-hour doorslammer.

"There's some guy in Australia who claims he's run 241 or 245 mph, but you ask what he ran on the next pass, and he
says 228 or something like that. I think he got a hot-dog-wrapper pass with that 245," Moran says mockingly. Moran's
backed-up 239 mph run was about 8 mph faster than Mitch Stott's IHRA Pro Mod Corvette, which ran a 5.985 at 231.42 mph
in 2003 (see "First in the 5s!" July '03) and holds the distinction of being the first and only doorslammer to run an
elapsed time in the 5s, a mark that Moran has his eye set on as well.

"I think it'll happen here in the fall or next spring, as soon as we get into the better air," Moran says confidently,
noting that the 548ci twin-turbo big-block in his new car, which he estimates puts out around 3,000 hp, makes too much
power to run for a record under anything other than top-notch track conditions. "We detuned 1,000 hp out of it and still
couldn't get it down the track" at a recent exhibition in Wichita, Kansas, Moran says. "I was lifting at the eighth-mile
and running 6.70s at about 150 mph."

But Moran has no intention of stopping there. He already has an even wilder 700ci engine in the works, which he hopes to
debut in a Pro Mod exhibition at the NHRA's 50th Annual U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis this year. Considering the NHRA's
long history of holding out against turbocharger technology, that's a victory in and of itself for Moran. It says a lot
about just how far this ex-street racer has come since we saw him swinging that hammer in Memphis.

Quick Inspection: '99 Chevy Monte Carlo
Mike Moran
Taylor, MI



Custom-built 4.5-inch Wilson Manifolds throttle-body is plumbed in the ****pit between the engine and the massive
air-to-water intercooler by several yards of fabricated stainless tubing.
Powertrain
Engine: It's hard to condense an engine like Moran's twin-turbo 548 Chevy into digestible form because the hardware
ultimately tells just a small fraction of the story. But to get the basics out of the way, the foundation is a Dart
iron block with 4.670-inch bores, a Bryant 4.00-inch-stroke crankshaft, GRP aluminum rods, and JE spherically dished
pistons with Speed-Pro rings. Dart 14-degree Oldsmobile heads ported by Carl Foltz Engineering flow through a
fabricated sheetmetal intake designed by Moran and built by Wilson Manifolds, which also built the custom 4.5-inch
throttle-body mounted inside the ****pit near the fabricated water-to-air intercooler that features an external pump
to keep ice-cold water flowing through the core from a remote-mounted tank. A secret Crane solid-roller cam runs on
Jesel lifters with a Jesel beltdrive and shaft-rocker setup with LSM valvesprings. To manage the forced induction
generated by a pair of prototype 94mm Garrett turbochargers built by Precision Turbo and exhaust-driven off the Larsen
Race Cars headers through stainless ducting, Moran uses a Big Stuff III controller developed by EFI guru John Meaney.
An MSD 10AL Plus ignition and crank trigger provide spark, and Bosch 160 lb/hr injectors supply the fuel from a Weldon
electric fuel pump. A Moroso dry-sump oiling system helps sustain the forces of 1.04-second 60-foot launches.
Power: Estimated at 3,000 hp
Transmission: A Liberty five-speed clutchless manual with a 2.66:1 First gear spins an AFT clutch and flywheel inside
a Trick Titanium bellhousing. Moran solved a recurring driveshaft-breakage problem by switching to 1480-series U-joints
from a heavy-duty dump truck.
Rearend: A fabricated housing built by Larson Race Cars contains Richmond 4.57:1 Pro Gears and Strange 40-spline axles
with a spool and billet housing ends.



A custom Moran-designed sheetmetal intake built by Wilson Manifolds sits atop the 540ci big-block feeding air to Dart
Pro Stock-style heads. Copious amounts of fuel are passed through Weldon components.
Chassis
Frame: The former IHRA Pro Stock chassis was built by Larry Larson of Larson Race Cars in Oak Grove, Missouri. It ran
during the 2002 season before Moran purchased it as a roller for about $45,000. The complete car weighs 2,334 pounds
without driver.
Suspension: Up front are Lamb struts with titanium coil springs. The rear is a Larson Race Cars four-link with Koni
remote-adjustable shocks.
Brakes: There are Lamb carbon-fiber rotors with Lamb calipers at all four corners.
Wheels: Weld 15x3.5-inch Magnums, front; Weld 16x16-inch Magnums with beadlocks, rear
Tires: Hoosier 24.5x4.5-15 front, prototype Hoosier 36-inch-tall Top Fuel slicks, rear

Style
Body: '99 Chevy Monte Carlo with steel roof and carbon-fiber fenders and hood
Paint: PPG '88 Ford Truck Purple applied by Sullivan Auto Body
Interior: Larson Race Cars custom driver seat, Stroud harnesses, Grant steering wheel, Auto Meter gauges, and
fabricated-aluminum intercooler

LOL! I was thinking the same thing!

And as of this Months Hot Rod Mag, He made it into the 5's! car looks SSOOOOO Much cooler too! I keep checking to see when they will post it so I can Copy and Paste it

See Matty you rebuilt it all wrong! LOL!

That would be awesome lol. But she is my daily car which means I would have to find another monte to drive it. Did you guys go monte hunting this weekend?