Terry Murphy was all fired up at the ADRL event last month at Virginia Motorsports Park, but it certainly wasn’t his temper getting the best of him.

In fact, Murphy is a pretty cool operator in the ADRL’s Pro Nitrous ranks, but in each of his first three qualifying attempts his Dennis Price-owned ’63 Corvette barely moved off the starting line before belching bright orange flames from its hood scoop and exhaust pipes.

With some help from Pro Nitrous pioneer Charles Carpenter and other competitors, Murphy finally diagnosed the problem: a faulty coil wire and a couple of bad spark plugs that revealed themselves only under full load.

Terry Murphy was all fired up at the ADRL event last month at Virginia Motorsports Park, but it certainly wasn’t his temper getting the best of him.

In fact, Murphy is a pretty cool operator in the ADRL’s Pro Nitrous ranks, but in each of his first three qualifying attempts his Dennis Price-owned ’63 Corvette barely moved off the starting line before belching bright orange flames from its hood scoop and exhaust pipes.

With some help from Pro Nitrous pioneer Charles Carpenter and other competitors, Murphy finally diagnosed the problem: a faulty coil wire and a couple of bad spark plugs that revealed themselves only under full load.

“It was misfiring and what it was doing was loading the motor up and it would backfire,” he explains. “So it wasn’t nitrous explosions or backfires, it was motor backfires.”

Murphy recovered just in time to lay down a 12th-place qualifying effort in Saturday morning’s fourth and final session. He made another solid pass to oust Greg Godwin from the opening round of eliminations.

Things were looking up for the Kansas City-based team.

“Then finally it caught up with it,” Murphy recalls. “When we came up to run Burton Auxier in round two we broke a valve on the burnout.”

Murphy had already planned to strip the motor down, but as it happened fellow Pro Nitrous racer Dan Stevenson’s rig was heading south after the race to Charlie Buck’s engine shop in King, North Carolina, so Murphy opted to yank the ailing power plant and send it along with Stevenson’s crew for repairs by its builder.

“It was almost ready, but about Thursday (last week) Buck had to send one of the cylinder heads to get welded on and we knew the guy wouldn’t work on it until Friday and we also knew that even if we overnighted it, it wouldn’t get back to Charlie until at the earliest Monday or Tuesday,” Murphy says.

“Then we’d have to go pick it up and it’s a day-and-a-half, non-stop from Kansas City to North Carolina and back, so instead of putting Dennis’ motor back in, I had an identical 843 (c.i.) motor here - another Charlie Buck motor, too - so we put that in and that’s what we’re going to Michigan with.”

It still took many long hours and several late nights to get the car ready for departure late Wednesday for the 10.5-hour drive to Martin, Michigan, but Murphy is confident in the new engine’s potential at this weekend’s ADRL event.

“We’ve never run it before, but it’s a good piece,” he says. “It’s Randy Weatherford’s old motor; it’s gone a 3.95 and we’ve gone 3.96 with Dennis’ motor, so it’s really a toss-up there.”

After salvaging a decent result from his weekend in Virginia, Murphy is hoping for an even better outing in Michigan to solidify his championship chances in his first full-schedule assault with the ADRL.

Currently listed ninth, just one position outside qualifying for the championship-deciding Battle for the Belts in October, Murphy is 48 points (less than half a round) behind defending class champion Khalid al-Balooshi (who has not competed with the ADRL in 2010) and only 78 points back of Virginia winner Shannon Jenkins.

“That’s what we need,” Murphy says of his effort to join the Pro Nitrous elite eight. “We just want to have a good race.”