MORGAN HONORED BY CP READERS CHOICE AS PRO STOCK DRIVER
Larry Morgan’s NHRA Pro Stock career spanned 28 years, and in that time -- more than 600 starts -- he missed only one event, in 1999 at Dinwiddie as his team didn’t get engine blocks from Dodge in time.
That’s a long time to make an impression on drag racing fans, and Morgan scored 12 national-event wins. And despite having won fewer races than Kurt Johnson (40), Dave Connolly (26), and Bruce Allen (16), Morgan was the CompetitionPlus.com readers’ choice as the best driver never to have won an NHRA Pro Stock championship.
Morgan garnered 27 percent of the vote to outdistance Connolly (21 percent) and Johnson (17 percent) for the top spot in the poll.
“I was able to achieve a goal that most people don’t do, and that’s race for a long time in a class and be fairly successful every year,” said Morgan, now an engine builder from his longtime Newark, Ohio, home.
“I won Indy twice (including a Pro Stock specialty event), won three of those big $50,000 Shootouts and one Mr. Gasket IHRA Shootout and the NHRA Winston Invitational. It seemed like the big races, and I didn’t have a problem winning. I did good in my time. I have no regrets. I got to meet a lot of good people and race a lot of good people. I won this (ARP) deal, but there were other guys as deserving as I was.”
Morgan had the misfortune, if you will, to race during an era when a handful of drivers hoarded multiple titles. During his tenure, Morgan saw Warren Johnson capture six crowns, Greg Anderson grab five and Jeg Coughlin Jr. snare four more. Bob Glidden won three of his unprecedented 10 Pro Stock titles while Morgan was on tour, as did Jason Line and Darrell Alderman. Virginia’s Jim Yates won a pair.
But while those drivers dominated most of the schedule and made off with the bulk of the Wallys and seasonal gold, Morgan was doing everything in his power to make himself a pain in their side in the opposite lane.
You have to trace Morgan back to his sportsman days to appreciate what it took for him to make his mark in a pro category.
He drove a Rod Shop entry in Super Stock in 1984 and scored wins in three NHRA nationals. The following season, he took over as driver for a four-cylinder NHRA program launched by Pontiac and picked up a win in Competition Eliminator. He added four more Comp victories in 1986, and that led to an offer from Oldsmobile, via program manager Arlen Fadely and team owner Bob Panella, to wheel a Pro Stock Olds Firenza.
“That’s how it all got started, making that program happen,” Morgan said. “I’ve driven Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Chevys, Ford, Dodge. I’ve driven almost everything you’ve been able to run.”
He added, “It was really gratifying, but I knew there was going to be a lot of pressure (moving to Pro Stock) because there were a lot of things involved in doing all that. I knew I’d have my hands full. We built a shop and put a dyno in, started building the engines ourselves. Jimmy Oliver and myself were the two that first got started, and Gary Pearman was the crew chief. We all put a lot of effort into what we were doing, and we were successful pretty quick.”
In their third year, the team not only earned its first Pro Stock victory, but it also did so in the biggest race of all. Morgan took down Glidden in the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis, and he ended the season third in points behind Glidden and Allen. He also won a special non-points Pro Stock shootout at Indy that preceded U.S. Nationals race day.
That success came after the team got a full understanding of what was needed to compete and win. When the team took its first engines from Ohio to New Jersey for dynamometer testing, it learned that horsepower wasn’t an issue; far from it, in fact.
“That’s when Pro Stock was mainly Frank Iaconio, Glidden, the Reher & Morrison team, and Warren,” Morgan said. “We took our engines to Hoffman Machine in New Jersey -- the guy that took care of Frank Iaconio’s dynoing. He’d just dyno’d Frank’s motor when we got there. I’ll never forget the look on his face. He pulled back the handle, shut down the switches, turned to me and said, ‘You need to go back to the shop and lock the doors.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You’ve got plenty of power. You need to get the car right.’ “
In bottom-line terms, that meant that a change in chassis builders was imperative. Team owner Panella “was wealthy enough he could have what he wanted,” Morgan said. Panella gave Morgan several options from which to choose, though he gave his driver a strong indication of his personal preference.
“He said, ‘You can have any car you want. You can have a St. Louis Subaru or a Minneapolis Mercedes,’ “ Morgan said. “The Minneapolis Mercedes was a Don Ness car. Ness had a higher-quality car, and when I got that car, it just turned our program around. It wasn’t the power. It was the whole program. From that point on, I realized how important the car was.”
After notching his Indy Wally, Morgan and his team took a quantum leap forward in 1990. Morgan won consecutive events at Atlanta, Memphis, and Baton Rouge, then added Denver on the Western swing in the summer. He repeated as the Shootout victor and was the U.S. Nationals runner-up. But at season’s end, Alderman, Glidden, and Jerry Eckman finished ahead of Morgan in the standings.
Morgan found Victory Lane more elusive in ’91, posting his only win at the Texas Motorplex but delivering the consistency to take third in the points behind Alderman and Warren Johnson.
Last week, our ARP Question of the Week poll asked who was the best Pro Stock driver never to win an NHRA world championship. By a 27-percent majority, you responded Larry Morgan. #ARPQuestionOfTheWeek #DragRacingNews #dragracing - https://t.co/FEEcvhYIx7 pic.twitter.com/dgxS7SEhmG
— Competition Plus (@competitionplus) December 2, 2019
It still rankles Morgan to think about how his quest for a championship was derailed by a few drivers who used what he calls “alternative fuels” in their induction system to boost performance.
“I have to thank Bob Glidden for bringing that to a head in our class,” he said. “Once that started, then guys were starting to work with chemists and fuel additives. It got kind of ugly at the time for the Pro Stock class.”
Yet, he said, “I don’t have any bad feelings to those guys. They’re going to have to answer that someday, how they done. … I was lucky enough I didn’t have to do that. We did the best we could do.”
Morgan’s best season following his Pro Stock heyday came in 2004. He competed on a limited basis in Pro Modified with Brad Anderson in 2017, and he’s “tested some stuff” for Pro Mod/Pro Boost tuners Jason Lee and Patrick Barnhill. He’s built engines for NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle teams, and he’s currently handling the Ford Factory Stock engine work for Jerry Welch.
“We stay pretty busy doing that. That’s quite an undertaking,” Morgan said. “It’s another development class we feel is going to be big in the future. Trying to get a leg up. It’s a tough deal, believe me.”
Morgan described his best Pro Stock years as “a lot of work. We worked and worked and worked for that. There was a lot of effort put forth back then with Jimmy and Gary and all the other guys that worked in the shop. It was a full-time job. My wife and my whole family put up with a lot of times that I couldn’t do anything with them while I was trying to live this life. It was a job.”
His last Pro Stock wins came in a Jerry Haas-built car in 2015, first at Charlotte in the Four-Wide Nationals, then again at Denver against Allen Johnson following one of the longest burndowns in NHRA history. Perhaps those victories are fresh enough in the mind of the fans of what a high-caliber competitor Morgan was, and can be, in the right equipment. They could have been factors that helped him win the “best driver to never win an NHRA Pro Stock championship” fan vote.
“That’s gratifying. There were a couple of people — Bruce Allen, Frank Iaconio (11 wins) and I would certainly say Kurt Johnson — who both were deserving.”
And maybe his outgoing personality came in handy, too; that his friendly demeanor was a plus when it came to the fans’ feelings about his Pro Stock body of work.
“Well, that might’ve helped because I’m not afraid to say what I want to say,” he said. “Sometimes it gets me in trouble, but I am what I am, and I guess you know what you’re dealing with. ARP is a sponsor of mine, so that was awful nice of them to put up this award.
“I’ve got to thank the people that voted for me as well. I think they looked back at the years we worked real, real hard and put forth the effort to do well.”