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To finish first, first you have to finish. Darren Morgan finished first in the 2010/’11 Top Fuel

Champs and never missed a pass

CAPTAINS E N S I B L ES E N S I B L E

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SUPER SEDANSWITH Saturday evening showers turning into solid overnight rain, the plug was pulled on the 44th Castrol Edge Winternationals and the event was rescheduled for July. Even so, there was plenty of action before the rain came, including the first-ever six-second Pro Street pass (see page 134). Here are a few of the highlights:

GREAT to see a former SM cover car (May ’09) in action. New owner Trevor Cooper from Bundaberg has rejigged the car and hit the track. “It’s now running a 400ci, 8/71-blown and injected SBC by Tremaniac Racing,” he says. “It ran an 8.04@165mph at the Winters Warm-up, so we should see a seven out of it soon. We’re looking forward to running in Pro Street.”

WHEN we first saw this tonner, it was running a tough nitrous-equipped LS1. Colin McGill owns it these days, and has fitted a Mick Atholwood 427ci LSX with an 8/71 and Birdcatcher injection!

ALAN ‘Bundy’ Lucas is giving his SMOTY-winning HQ Monaro a birthday but in the meantime he’s teamed up with his brother, Mark Smith, to put this 900hp Rehr Morrison-powered HK on the track, complete with the HQ’s famous plates.

AFTER stacking his Mustang at last year’s Winters, Neil Murphy had the stunning car back and running hard. This time Darryl Woods handled the steering as Neil was away on Defence Force duties. Best time with the new set-up so far is a 6.90@205mph.

TOur success is the people around us. The performance

isn’t just on the track

HE Darren Morgan Racing rail coasted to the line after a clutch problem in first qualifying at the washed-out Winternationals last month. It didn’t matter because getting the green light gave Darren the handful of

points he needed to clinch the ANDRA Top Fuel title, and he was more interested in improving the car.

It was a rare chance for him to feel like he could give Ben Patterson his head with some development ideas. At 21, Ben’s the youngest crew chief to spanner a professional Top Fuel outfit.

Morgan usually sticks to his doctrine of racing well within the team’s abilities — a doctrine that has made him more consistent than any other Top Fuel racer in the four years DMR has been on the track.

“Instead of going the fastest we could, we just do what we know we can do,” he says. “I’m pretty sure we’ve never missed a pass that’s been available to us.”

While there’s some pride in that, the reality is he can’t afford to break things. As a privateer without the backing enjoyed by other major teams, he can’t just buy new bits if something goes bang.

“We put ourselves in a corner,” he says of his decision to go out on his own in 2007. “The global recession was

about exactly the right time for us to fail, so as per usual I’d bitten off more than I could chew and we’ve been struggling just to be there, let alone take it up to them.”

And yet DMR is now the number-one Top Fuel team in the country. His success, he says, has come from being meticulous and imbuing the people around him with that same attention to detail.

“I guess I’m a bit anal,” he says. “Cowin always tells me off for using that word.”

‘Cowin’ is legendary racer Graeme, the bloke who spotted potential in the young kid back in the early 90s after he bought the eight-second big-block altered that Darren had built and raced. Even today, Morgan seeks Graeme’s advice and support.

“We work off each other, we’re still the best of friends,” he says. “When I was in Queensland, before lining up in the stage I rang him to see where the hell he was, ’cause I missed him,” he laughs.

Cowin took him to the US in 1995, where he got to see the NHRA big boys up close. He learned that professionalism can beat money when he helped get the Cowin rail to runner-up in the US Nationals, and dominate Australian drag racing through the late 90s.

A keen interest in mechanics inherited from his father and grandfather found its outlet through his burning passion for drag racing and it was paying off.

“My grandfather was the first A-grade mechanic in Mildura and was a doctor of mechanical engineering,” Morgan says. “We used to hang out in his workshop, which was all dirty and shit, but I learned stuff.”

What he learned was how to build hot engines and soon joined in the cat-and-mouse games with the local cops. It was Mildura and that’s what you do in Mildura.

“I had a Monaro with a big-block Chev in it but the cops didn’t think that was a good idea,” he says. “Then I had an LJ with a nitrous small-block but the cops said that wasn’t a good idea either.”

He found solace on the racetrack, putting the Torrie

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Above: From left: Will, Natalie, Darren, Rory and Caitlyn

Left: Darren hauls a lot of spares to each meeting, including 3-4 complete engines, eight pairs of heads, eight piston and rod racks, four blowers, eight clutch packs, six parachutes and heaps more

through its paces before satisfying a desire for open-wheelers with the altered, into which he shoehorned the engine from his Monaro. There was no question about where he was heading.

“Drag racing is just about making horsepower and that’s a heap of fun,” Darren says. “No other sport shakes the ground — 2.5 on the Richter scale, 8000hp. There’s no other motorsport that comes close.”

The workmanship in that altered (Morgan built the LS7, chassis and gearbox) was his ticket. As well as Cowin, others were sitting up and taking notice.

Among them were the Lamattina brothers, who put him to work on their Capri before Darren — whose star was shining brightly — decided in 2004 it was time to get back behind the wheel.

Cowin wanted him back in the States but the Lamattinas wanted him to stay on the Capri and to keep him they agreed to let Darren build a rail and have the team run it under their auspices. He promptly reeled off the quickest-ever licensing pass (4.85sec) and won the ’04/’05 Top Fuel title.

Then the opportunity came along to create his own team, Darren Morgan Racing.

“A group of people around Mildura wanted me to do it and came up with a bit of money,” he says. “It was about a third of what we needed but we did it.”

He tried to find a major sponsor but with the economic climate as bad as it was, there was just no-one willing to invest. What he did have, however, was plenty of skilled mechanics in Mildura happy to lay their spanners at his feet for no pay.

“Our success is the people around us,” he says of his dedicated team. “The performance isn’t just on the track, it’s the whole picture.”

“You have to have a good crew. They’re just about to send you on a 300 mile an hour ride, so if they want you dead that’d be pretty easy to achieve!” he laughs.

“They’ve got an hour to get everything right, so they’ve got to have it perfect every time. They have to sync with each other.

“I’ve seen it before where the clutch guy is having a competition with the other guy and that doesn’t work,

because the competition is to get the engine back together. And you’ve got to have the parts in the trailer perfect — we’ve got a spare rear end in there that we bolt on and it works, we’ve got eight sets of racks and heads in the cupboard that we swap out every pass.

“Attention to detail is the secret, it’s the heart and soul. If you go in half-arsed about it, that’s what you’re going to have.”

He’s done it now, taken his crew to the top against the odds, and he gets satisfaction from that.

“We copped a lot of shit at the start, that we’d never do any good from Mildura, but I reckon we had every ET and mph record in the championship within 12 months.

“Every job is the signature of its creator,” he adds. “Mine is to have the fastest and best-looking car, the best crew — it’s all an expression of you.”

There’s more to achieve, a dynasty to build much like the Cowins, and like them, his family is right in there with him. His wife of 24 years, Natalie, runs the back end of the business, daughter Caitlyn, 16, takes care of merchandise and marketing, son Will, 15, is learning the tools (he and Caitlyn are both Junior Dragster pilots too), and Rory, 9, is always there, absorbing.

“I went to a parent/teacher night and Rory was asked what he wanted to do. He said: ‘Be a Nitro Funny Car driver.’ I didn’t even know he thought about it.” s

Attention to detail is the heart and soul.

If you go in half-arsed, that’s what

you’re going to have

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