Phil Moran is my dad. He is also the Crew Chief for the #2 Whelen Modified series car driven by Doug Coby. He builds and manages everything to do with the cars with a team of volunteers and coordinates what happens during the races with the driver. They just won the Whelen Modified Tour Championship for the third year in a row, meaning they gained the most points throughout the season, and also won many of the races.
My dad and I have never had a relationship marked by open communication. Sometimes we have no communication at all for several months and years at a time. Growing up, he was traveling every summer at the races and the rest of the year, he would work 12-hour days and come home late. Since my dad's mother, my Nana, died this past spring, I have been trying to make an effort to have a relationship with him, since I know that is something she would have wanted. I have taken this up as an art project where we have been exchanging photos every day to share our lives more and have a frequent exchange. This occurred until November 9, 2016, when the presidential election led to our communication getting heated and faltering a little. It has been painful for me because he voted for Trump. In this interview on 11/1/16, I talked to him about the championship, his life of racing and the politics of Nascar.
How did winning the Championship go? Congratulations, 3 years in a row!
It was good, we went to Stafford and we won that one first, which we needed to do to get more points. Then we went to Thompson, which was the last race, and we only had to finish 16th or better. And Thompson has been a pretty good track for us, so you know we set second fastest time, which was good, and the guy who was second in points qualified at about 14th, so we had a little psychological advantage on him already. And then we came in and ran 2nd most of the race, had a bad pit stop and came out 4th, which wasn’t too too bad, only lost 2 spots, but then we got in a bad restart line and went way back to like 14th, and the kid we were racing against ended up in second, and we was like “oh shit,” but Doug kept his head, just real smart, drove smooth, and drove back up to 7th. And the guy we were running against ended up winning the race, but we just stayed safe, and ended up winning the Championship by 12 points. All we had to do was finish 16th or better, so we just played it safe.
Nice! Did anyone try to mess with you guys?
There was one guy who tried to rough us up a little bit, and I was like “grrrr you idiot” but no it was fine, you know we just played it slow and easy, we did good, can’t complain.
Yeah! You won 3 years in a row! That’s exciting!
Yeah, nobody else has ever done it before, so that's pretty cool for sure. Pretty cool. But we’ll see, next year’s another year, they’ll be gunning for us hard
Does that make you nervous?
I was more nervous this year than any other year because we were leading in the points for so long. The third race of the year we were leading in points, and it was going for so long it was just nerve-racking then going into the last race it’s like, “Alright, what’s going to go wrong?what’s going to go wrong with the car?”Glad to get it over with. It’s nice to get it done and get it done right.
What do you think of our photo exchange project so far?
It’s cool. With me you know, you see a lot of sunsets and stuff, but I think it’s great. I get to see stuff you're doing that I wouldn't normally see and you see stuff that I’m doing that you wouldn’t normally see. In fact, I gotta send you a picture today of our new trophy case that Johnny built. It’s, like, frickin’ unbelievable. It’s like something you would see in the Winston Cup shops. That was my today job, cleaning all the trophies and putting them on the new shelf.
So why do you love racing?
Why do I like racing so much? Why do I love racing so much? The competition. The thrill of the competition is what I like the most. Seeing what I work real hard at, you know 10, 12, 14 hours a day, and then being able to watch it go on the race track and go fast and do what it's supposed to do. That's the thrill part of it. Being satisfied. It’s like if you do a painting and it’s really nice and people see it and say “Oh it’s beautiful” or “I see what you were trying to say with the painting.” It's the same way I feel with racing. So when I build my car and it goes fast, it’s like okay, I’m doing my job, and it’s going good and everything’s right so…. Personal satisfaction, is that a good way of putting it?
Yeah , funny, ever since this summer when we talked on the way back from Louden I’ve been thinking about the similarities between racing and art, or between what you do and what I do.
I know you’re proud of your work when you do something and think it's really nice. You wonder what other people think about it and they feel the same way that you do about it its really cool. It’s the same way, now, I’m pretty lucky that I’ve had a successful career in racing. I’ve had a really good career.
It seems like it’s a hard thing to be successful in too.
Yeah and same with art! God almighty that seems hard to be successful in. Right?
But you’re day is going to come. But yeah that’s what I love the most, the personal satisfaction in my job and in racing.
Does the mechanics of building cars feel like an art to you?
Yeah. You know when I build a car it's like putting a piece of art together and when I finish building a car, you know I sit there and look and it and go ‘man that’s a piece of art’ It looks nice, it’s put together right, I can picture how it’s gonna look on the race track and I go ‘I like that’ It’s like a sculpture, I guess.
And it goes faster than all the other cars…
Oh so that’s the job part of it?
Well, no. People say to me ‘why’s your car always so clean?’ you know, ‘it always looks nice’ and I say ‘because I take pride in what they look like’ So I want them to look good. I get pissed at my guys if the car’s dirty and they're sitting around eating a sandwich or something. I say ‘grab a rag, wipe that thing off, I take pride in my car!’ But yeah, you know, it’s a piece of art, race cars are a piece of art.
How do you feel about your role and your collaboration with your team?
I think somebody said something about that at the last race at Thompson. After we won the championship, we all went up to the clubhouse at Thompson.hey do it every year, the place buys you dinner and it's an open bar and they pick up the tab for the team, their wives, kids, and their family and everything like that. The collaboration is, you know, in the summertime we are family. On the weekends, that's our family. We hang out with them, go to dinner with them, we all hang out. So, you know, sometimes in the summertime we see more of our race team then we do of our family. So the collaboration we have… it’s great, it’s great because we do hang out and after the races or something we go out to eat and we all do it. It’s not like one guy goes ‘I'm going home’ or ‘I'm going to go hang out with these guys.’ We are all friends, which is a big, big, big plus. A lot of the teams out there, they go home and they’re done. We are usually one of the last teams to leave the pit, we hang out and have a couple beers and we are all having fun. I don’t look at myself as the boss of those guys. I’m the crew chief and I have all the responsibility I have to go to those meetings and crap but we are all a team and we all get along. If somebody has a problem they come to me and we figure it out.
So do you feel like a leader more than a boss?
Yeah, I don't feel like a boss. I don’t want to feel that way. Mainly because A) those guys don’t get paid, they are all volunteering. But they go ‘OK boss’ and they always say it jokingly, but I go ‘hey, don’t call me boss, I’m not your boss’ I feel more like a shop foreman, team leader, not a boss. When I was down south, I was shop foreman there and there were 150 people that worked below me and I was their boss. I hated it. I had to fire people and chew people out for screwing up, and I hated it. I was fortunate enough to get out on the road where I didn’t have to worry about it.
What do you think about that system in comparison to how you work now with volunteers? Does it feel different?
Yeah, because the volunteers we have now do it because they love the sport and they want to be there. The other guys they did it because it was their job. They would come in at 7 in the morning and at 4 in the afternoon, they would punch out and go home. If the job wasn't done, it's there tomorrow. Now with volunteers we work until we get it done, not because we’re getting paid or not. You do it because you love to do it. If I got paid for every hour I spent working, if I had an hourly salary, I’d be a millionaire.
Yeah, you put so many hours in.
Yeah...you know there are alcoholics and drug addicts out there, and everything else, and I’m a workaholic. One of those unfortunate things I guess, or well you can’t call it a bad thing…
How do you feel about it?
Sometimes i get pissed off at myself because I work so much, but sometimes I sit there and I go well, it's gotten me pretty successful in my life as far as my career goes. I feel like well, the people that are around me, if they understand it then, I’m ok. But i sometimes i get pissed when I look around at people that are more successful than me when they go home at 5 o'clock every day, and I go home at 10 o’clock. But I’m very happy with the way that things have gone.
What do you think of Nascar as an organization or as a company? Is it an organization or a company?
It’s a company. And, unfortunately it's turning into a money making company, where all they care about is making money. We are luck down at our level that i race at, it hasn't really taken over that part, im sure it will. But the upper levels of nascar it's all about the buck it's all about entertainment. Nascar is entertainment, like baseball or football is entertainment
I can remember last year one of the promoters of one of the race tracks came up to me and it was at Thompson last year, and we had won every race at thompson last year and we had won by a lot. We led 114 laps out of an 125 lap race and it's what they called “stinking up the show”. He came up to me last race of the year last year, and we were tied with the second place guy and the third place guy was three points behind us. So a real tight points battle. He came up to me and he said, “this is all about entertainment, don’t stink up the show”. And I'm going, “you know what? This is my job and my job is to win, so my job is to stink up your show”, and he smiled because he knew where I was coming from. But he said “I’m not going to put butts in the seat if I don’t have an entertaining show”. And that’s the way Nascar is getting. Big picture, are they playing favorites with people that get more people in the grandstands? Yeah they are. You’ve got Hendricks Motorsports, who've got 4 teams. They’ve got Dale Earnhardt Jr. who is a big name. He drives for them and nascar needs those people to be in the sport. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has probably the biggest fan base out there. 30,000 people in the grandstands are Earnhardt fans. So if anyone pisses of Hendricks and they say “I’m not going to race with Nascar anymore,” Nascar’s going to do everything they can to keep them in the sport. So they play favorites. I'm in it for the competition part, not the entertainment part. So I want to duke it.
Do you think if they are concentrating on the entertainment part, it kills what people love about it?
Yup and that’s a fact. I don't know if you watch any of the races on TV or anything but if you looked 10 years ago, the grandstands were full. 100,000 people and people standing outside in line waiting to get in. Now you could walk up the day of the race and get a ticket and get a good seat.
Why do you think that is?
Because Nascar is all about the entertainment part. They are all about making money through the entertainment part and it’s ruining the sport as far. The fans aren't as dumb as Nascar thinks they are so when they favor somebody, they're like “Wait a minute, you can’t do that.” And they say, “It’s our park, it’s our arena and were gonna do what we want. “People are getting sick and tired of it. They gotta get back to the racing the way that it used to be.
They got so many rules and regulations and this and that. They gotta be a little more lax on some of the stuff. Let the crew chiefs and the builders be more creative. It would be like you painting a painting one way and your teachers telling you, “That's not the way that is supposed to be done.” If it’s not done the way they think it should be but it’s still good, I sit there going “Wait a minute.”
Creativity seems really important.
Right, and that's where Nascar is screwing up in my opinion, they're saying “This is the way we want this built. Build it this way or hit the highway” And people are starting to hit the highway and saying we'll go race with another division or something like that.
How does your racing career shape how you see the world? Or how does racing shape your life?
I don't know how to answer that one. It's made me work hard my entire life. It's cost me a lot as far as relationships and marriages and that was because, like alcoholism or other things, it causes problems because I work so much.
Yeah. Yup, it really has. Yup. And yeah hard habit to break, they don't have a rehab for this kind of stuff. I can't check myself into the Betty Ford clinic and say “Can you help me? I'm addicted to racing” So yeah, I don't know if that pertains to the question. It's a common thing in racing. People at my level, my success or whatever. They're in the same boat I'm in. Married. Divorced. A couple of relationships here and there. It always starts out fine. “Oh, racing, I love racing” then it’s like “Well wait a minute, this racing takes up all of your time. Instead of spending any time with me, you're always working on the damn car.” And I’m like “Well you sorta knew that when you met me.”
germansingergirl
gummygunk
origamiaround
blakekathryn
areudirty