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Drag King
How a performance-driven ethic has fueled Moroso's
race to the top of the auto aftermarket
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Business New Haven
6/4/1995
By: Terry Pitt
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If you wonder how the stock truck pullers you're watching on MSG while you're doing your 6 a.m. stint on the exercycle can keep from turning over in the dirt piles, or how your next door neighbor can go from zero to 60 in five seconds without doing a major wheelie, a company in Guilford has the answer. While its major customers are motorsport racers, street-legal car enthusiasts also buy its products. The company's story is one of American ingenuity creating American products for vehicles made in the U.S.A.
It's also the story of an internationally recognized niche company with a broad aftermarket product line scrambling to recapture its place on the crest of the wave of new products when innovation after innovation have been copied by small and not-so-small specialty competitors. As Moroso's 1993-94 Performance Products Catalogue (one of its most frequently ordered items) says: “With many of our designs, the 'pirates' of our industry steal them away. Some of the technicians who assisted our oil pan development program have stolen our designs and set up their own shops.”
“Moroso made a commitment about a year ago to return to the level of innovation it started out with and got soft on for the last six or seven years,” explains Mike Vendetto, Moroso's vice president of marketing and sales. To reach that goal, the company has doubled its large research and development staff, hired new advertising people and are currently looking for three race-savvy salespeople and a technical writer to create ad copy for the several new products to be introduced this year. To accommodate new staff, plans are on the drawing board to enlarge its 68,000-square-foot Guilford facility.
Indeed, practically every manager at Moroso is a racing enthusiast, if not a former or present racer. Many drive street-legal performance cars, with Moroso parts which have been certified to federal emissions standards in newer models. “Not many people get to work at what they really love, so we also have lots of folks here who have been with Dick Moroso almost from the beginning of the company,” Hone adds.
Top management, salespeople, technical support staff and engineers devote time to the race support effort by attending at least ten events a year. And not just to sit in the stands. Most of their attention is focused on racers in the pits, finding out what works and what doesn't, checking out Moroso parts as well as competitors' products.
It all began in the late 1950s when Dick Moroso traveled throughout the Northeast as a grass-roots drag racer running modified classes in National Hotrod Racing Association (NHRA) Division 1 competition. As a student at Georgia Tech, Moroso used his engineering background to design and build the parts that gave his car a competitive edge.
To stay one step ahead of the competition, Moroso kept trying out new ideas. Long before aerodynamics became a major factor in racing, he taped small strips of paper to his car to determine optimum air-flow characteristics. His approach resulted in race victories, national records and championships.
When other racers approached Moroso to make parts for their cars, the building blocks for Moroso Performance Products began to take shape. The first really successful Moroso-designed product was the deep sump oil pan. The pans were welded at night in his basement using spray cans to paint them and egg boxes to ship them.
Today Moroso is the world's largest manufacturer of high-performance oil pans and, with more than 2,000 products, is one of the five largest companies in the high-performance aftermarket industry. Offering more than 100 production oil pans to fit a variety of GM, Ford and Chrysler engines used in street/strip, drag race, oval track, road race, truck and marine applications, Moroso also custom-fabricates oil pans and any other parts in steel or aluminum to a racer's specifications. Custom orders account for about two percent of Moroso's revenues.
In addition to the deep sump oil pan, Moroso is responsible for many innovations that have become commonplace in the industry, include lightweight drag race front tires, solid steel motor mounts, racing air cleaners, aluminum water pumps and perhaps the best known innovation, the tall valve cover.
The “speed” industry has evolved since World War II into the most popular spectator sport in the U.S. It's sophisticated and capital-intensive, financed by big money from the tobacco and beer companies. Moroso's products are used by cars racing on drag strips and oval tracks, because that's where the American-made cars are. Japanese cars are used on road courses, like the one at Lime Rock in northern Connecticut, where actor/entrepreneur/racing enthusiast Paul Newman sometimes races. For every drag strip, there are three or four oval tracks in this country. The Nutmeg State towns of Waterford and Stafford Springs, as well as Riverside, Mass. are home to
oval tracks.
NASCAR's Winston Cup and the Busch Grand National series are some of the events which yearly demand and get better performances from faster cars with more daring and knowledgeable drivers. The winning drivers have assumed the status of superstars. It's not unusual for avid fans to have their cars painted to resemble their favorite driver's race car.
The aftermarket industry must keep up with the need for performance parts equal to the cars and the people who race them. And the search for the newest widget to give an inch better performance gets ever more insistent.
Racers and enthusiasts, top teams and grass-roots drivers can see Moroso's latest products displayed in the company's tractor-trailer unit at major motorsport events. The Moroso van typically contains more than 100 new products each year, developed through its close association with the racing community.
For the driver who wants to know more, for example, Moroso offers a power/speed calculator to gather and analyze factors which go into the building of a winning drag race car. Using the size and gear ratios, etc., the calculator works out the relationship between elapsed time and mph, weight/power ratio, tire diameter to speed and gear ratio, engine displacement to compression ratio, etc.
Competition Engineering is a Moroso division that provides a variety of chassis, suspension and traction equipment engineered for both street and competition use. Modifications to the chassis and suspension systems improve traction because power produced by the engine must be used to “plant” the tires and “launch” the car forward with minimal power loss.
From campers to Camaros, all passenger vehicles were designed to fit broad parameters, not to perform the standard drag race practice of high rpm launches from a standing start which wreak havoc on stock suspension systems and usually result in unwanted wheel hop, tire spin and breakage. Revving the engine and dropping the clutch results in a wheel hop and tire spin. Controlling this unwanted reaction is the job of a traction device, which limits the movement of the rear axle housing and transfers its action to the chassis.
After Moroso R & D designs, develops and tests prototype versions, engine-related parts are sent to Moroso Engine Development for further evaluation. MED began operation in 1989, and in addition to testing Moroso products, supplies completely tuned motors for Moroso Racing and other racing customers.
The race track is the ultimate test for any high-performance product. Each season, Moroso Racing, headquartered in Moorseville, N.C., fields cars in NASCAR's Winston Cup and Busch Grand National series. The cars run a number of Moroso products and the team maintains a close relationship with Moroso R & D and the Engine Development company.
Moroso's close involvement with the racing industry doesn't end with R & D, production, engine development and racing. To provide a challenging and safe venue for racing, Moroso Motorsports has multi-purpose facilities in West Palm Beach and Miami-Hollywood, Fla. The tracks are host to more than 285 events each season, attracting a live gate in excess of 480,000 spectators. Television, magazine and newspaper coverage impacts another several million.
The flagship facility in West Palm Beach includes a NHRA-sanctioned quarter-mile drag strip, a 2.25-mile championship road course and a mudbog pit. The drag racing schedule features one of six Winston Series Drag Racing Championships in the NHRA's southeast division, the annual NHRA Citrus Nationals, the Coors Five Day Bracket Championships National Open (the largest and most prestigious bracket race in the country) and Super Chevy Sunday as its premium events of the year.
Moroso Motorsports Park is the home track of the Florida region of the Sports Car Club of America, and the southeast Florida base for the Skip Barber Driving School and Barber Saab Race Weekends.
Separate from the drag strip and road course is the Moroso mud bog pit, a 200-foot mud pit where 12 classes of vehicles try to beat the mud bog each month.
The Miami-Hollywood Motorsports Park hosts the Brands Hatch Driving School. In addition, the track also conducts the Firestone/Centerline E.T. Bracket Racing Series on alternating
Saturday nights, and has test-and-tune racing twice weekly.
The profile of Moroso Performance Parts pictures a manufacturing company which is a vital element in the Connecticut economy. More than that, Moroso will host both its home state neighbors and nationwide visitors who are long-term motorsports racers and enthusiasts, or who are vacationers simply looking for something different and exciting in the way of vacation fun.
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