Subenet: Features Pat Moro

Features

Press Releases

Desert Storm

“Pat the Parts Guy”

Subaru Super Production rally driver and team owner Pat Moro knows his local Subaru parts dealer all too well

By David Gee

“We impacted the tree pretty good. It took the radiator and the front core support out. The hood, the grille, the lights, they all had to be replaced. That’s rallying for you though.”

Yes that is rallying. And as the 2008 Rally America Production GT champion Pat Moro knows, sometimes you have to keep writing checks well after a rally event has ended.

“We really had high hopes going into Sno* Drift. I have a new Super Production Subaru and it’s great. It has lots of power and we thought we had everything sorted out and just got caught on the outside going too fast in a Left 4. I got on the outside of the berm and it redirected us into a tree and kind of ended our event. But I thought we were doing well prior to that so all in all we were very disappointed.”

To compound the disappointment a little more even, the off road excursion came only a third of the way through the event, in just the fourth stage. I asked Moro what his first reaction was when they came to a stop – against the tree.

“I tried to stick it in reverse and keep on going!!!” he said excitedly, spoken like a true racer.

“But then I looked again and saw the hood was kind of sticking up and it was kind of smoking and I figured we were done. Matt Johnson burrowed in pretty good behind us so we got our belts off and went back and tried to help him, though of course we didn’t have a car to tow him out with. Then Dave Mirra stopped and broke Matt’s tow strap trying to get him out. It’s a cool thing about the rally community that there is this camaraderie where competitors arewilling to help each other out.”

Moro was going to need some more help to get his damaged Subaru back into top form, with only two weeks between the first and second events on the 2009 Rally America championship schedule.

“We had all the parts in at our local Subaru dealer in Ohio in two days. Subaru has a really great parts system and if we can have an order in by Tuesday we can have the part in hand by Thursday. I am amazed at how quickly they ship their parts, it’s really pretty spectacular. And these are not always easy-to-find pieces. Okay, so you might expect to get a radiator and a hood and the like fairly readily but core supports? I might have expected that stuff to take a long time to get to us. It really makes our job easier when things get to use in such a timely fashion. That way if we do have to rebuild and replace, like we did after Michigan, we’re not waiting until the last minute to have the car ready to go to the next event.”

Moro said even though it’s early in the season he’s loving his new SP Subaru.

“The SP cars have a lot more power and are a lot more fun to drive. The closing speed to the corner is much faster than the Production GT car I was in last year. When you put the accelerator down in this car it goes. Our top sped at Sno*Drift this year was right around 120 miles per hour and I know we didn’t approach those speeds in the PGT car last year. I noticed the straightaways were a lot shorter this year! Coming off the corner you can just feel it push you back into the seat in ways that we didn’t feel last year. This car is just vastly faster than our PGT car. We’re still on the RS&SP suspension so the handling of this year’s car is similar to what we had last year.”

I asked Moro if he could envision a rally where an SP car cold get an overall win.

“It would take a lot of stuff to happen for a Super Production car to take an overall win, there would have to be a lot of attrition. But an SP driver can definitely be on the podium this year, I would expect to see that.”

And what does he see in a year where the economy stinks and everyone’s budgets are constrained?

Moro, who is a businessman at heart, and by profession, thinks there is a great opportunity for corporate America to embrace rallying for a fraction of what they are used to spending in other forms of motorsport.

“The amount of views that rally gets on the web and through other forms of media shows there is an incredible audience out there. I’m a little surprised that more teams didn’t come in, like Monster did, with sponsorship of an Open class car and a Super Production car. I thought there would have been more of that this year.”

As far as his personal goals for the year, Moro says he is taking it event by event.

“Super Production has some good equipment in it this year but it all depends on who has the budget to go out west and do those events and put the cars back together after we break them. So budgets are playing a part in everyone’s plans this year. Our car has a lot of vacant real estate on it right now as some of our previous sponsors have pulled back. I would love to see some of that space taken up by some new sponsors. If not, we’ll just try to go from rally to rally and make it all work with the contingency money from Subaru.”

On the plus side, Moro told me he has a new race hauler and 35-foot trailer to hold the two cars he is running for ’09, and that he is proud of the team he has put togther.

“Our equipment and set-up just keeps getting better and better, even with the beleaguered economy. We’re putting a stronger effort out each and every event and I think that is quite an accomplishment.”