1966 Dodge D/Dart ~ 'Mystery, Myth and Misconception'

The '61 Corvette's left a lot in reserve.
Moroso's '61 was slightly more modified than Bonzai/Shotgun, Rapid Rabbit, and Buckshot, but he was good at lowering the record for additional points

From corvette form
Ed was one of four partners when Stahl-Moroso was formed. It was Jere Stahl, Dick Moroso, Ed Hedrick and Bob Duffy (of Duffy's Performance, Red Bank, NJ). Duffy lasted about one month and got out. Dick sold his business in Stamford, CT and moved to York with his wife and young son, Rick (who now owns Moroso Performace). They lived above the shop in York. Dick lasted about a year with Stahl telling him what to do every minute of the day. Dick packed up everything one night and headed back to CT to open Moroso Performace out of a 1,500 sq ft store front in Greenwich - The rest of that is history up to today's business in Guilford.

Dick ran head to head with Ed for a couple of years, but always remained good friends. As Dan noted back then you could have a highly competitve car for a couple of thousand dollars. Dick paid $1,000 for his '61 (a 315 hp f.i. car) and in the mid 60s ran mostly a 290 ci engines. Modifications were not extensive back then. The engine had forged pistons (often 12:1), modified heads (Mondello), re-worked crank, and often an Engle Roller cam. Ignition was a modified vette 340hp unit. Headers were Stahl's, Trans was a Muncie and rear was a 1958 Olds unit with 6:17 gears. Back then, stock classes and M/P classes could only run 7" wide slicks. Best times I recall for C/MP was around 11.70 and in D/MP around 12.40 to 12.50. Back then extra points were awarded for breaking the ET record and the MPH record. The trick was to re-set the record by the smallest amount possible. This was through the course of a season you could gain a lot of extra points. You never ran all out to kill the record because in eliminations, when running against cars of other classes, you needed to run a close to your record without exceeding it by 1/10th of a second (if you did you lost. It prevented sand bagging). When you ran against a car in another class the slower car was handicapped against the faster class car. For example, if the record for one class was 12 seconds, and for the other 11 seconds, the slower car got a one second head start. The lights were set to reflect the difference. You can imagine the difficulty in watching a car be a quarter of the way down the track before, before your light went green ! Dick Moroso was one of the best for timing the lights and for applying the brakes at the end so he didn't "run out of the bracket" by running too far below the record. He always had an uncanny knack for setting the record a fraction lower to gain the extra points.

I think one of his crowning achievements was one day at a National Meet at Englishtown. He set 4 records in two different classes (2 ET, 2 MPH) in the one car. The first two were made in D/MP with the car weighing around 3800 to 3900 lbs. In a tweak of the rules, we welded a box to the rear crossmember that contained 100, 7lb bars of lead (the metal box added another 50lbs). In order to launch the car he had to leave the line with foot full to the pedal at around 9,500 rpm ! After setting those two records we put the car back on the hauler and torched the box off the car and got the car reclassified in C/MP. He went out and then set both ends of that classes record. On of the records fell later that day when Ross Gilbert (who ran a '55 C/MP) Chev broke on of them (can't remember which one), but for a brief time Dick held four national records set on one day. Quite an achievement.