Pat Musi hadn’t intended to do any Pro Street racing this season. After all, the man who won eight championships between 1997 and 2005 really doesn’t have anything to prove, and the growth his engine-building business has experienced recently has imposed serious restrictions on his time.

But the National Street Car Association (NSCA) was holding an event at Atco Raceway, close to Musi’s Carteret, New Jersey, shop, and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remind some people that he had always been the man to beat.

And he still is. Musi, driving a 2007 Pontiac GTO owned by Khalil Toorani, qualified No. 2 behind New York’s Vinny Budano, and won the event on Sunday with a record-setting pass of 6.352 seconds at 224 mph. His victim in the final round was Budano, who ironically had set the previous record just one day earlier.

“I wasn’t planning to run in Pro Street this year, but it was close to home, and we want to test the new car as much as possible, so we figured we’d go do it,” Musi said. “It was a good news, bad news kind of deal. We built a new 737 cubic-inch Chevy Hemi for the car - Sonny Leonard helped us with the heads and the intake - but the whole combination ended up being heavier than we really wanted. We just had to add 80 pounds to go to Atco.”

“I had to show ‘em who the boss was” - Pat Musi

 

 

Pat Musi hadn’t intended to do any Pro Street racing this season. After all, the man who won eight championships between 1997 and 2005 really doesn’t have anything to prove, and the growth his engine-building business has experienced recently has imposed serious restrictions on his time.

But the National Street Car Association (NSCA) was holding an event at Atco Raceway, close to Musi’s Carteret, New Jersey, shop, and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remind some people that he had always been the man to beat.

And he still is. Musi, driving a 2007 Pontiac GTO owned by Khalil Toorani, qualified No. 2 behind New York’s Vinny Budano, and won the event on Sunday with a record-setting pass of 6.352 seconds at 224 mph. His victim in the final round was Budano, who ironically had set the previous record just one day earlier.

“I wasn’t planning to run in Pro Street this year, but it was close to home, and we want to test the new car as much as possible, so we figured we’d go do it,” Musi said. “It was a good news, bad news kind of deal. We built a new 737 cubic-inch Chevy Hemi for the car - Sonny Leonard helped us with the heads and the intake - but the whole combination ended up being heavier than we really wanted. We just had to add 80 pounds to go to Atco.” 

And while the trip to Atco may have been spur-of-the-moment, Musi had planned to do some racing this season. He series of choice was the American Drag Racing League (ADRL), and he made his first appearance at the organization’s event at South Georgia Motorsports Park near Valdosta, Georgia, in April. It was here that the car’s weight problem first became apparent. 

“We missed the field at Valdosta by a couple of thousandths,” Musi said. “The car is 130 pounds overweight. It’s hard to get that off, and 130 pounds is a lot of E.T. You just can’t get these cars any lighter – the only thing we can do now is find a driver who weighs a hundred and fifty pounds. I don’t know what else to do. 

“You know, they made us put all this extra tubing into the cars to make them stiffer and make them safer. And now the cars are overweight, so the jockey-sized drivers out there have an advantage. The GTO has a lot of titanium in it, you know, to keep the weight down, but it’s still too heavy.” 

It may be heavy, but it also sets records and wins races, and chances are owner Toorani will be more than satisfied with the car once it gets to its final destination this coming winter. The Jerry Bickel-built Pontiac will end up in the island nation of Bahrain, located in the Persian Gulf. There it will join Musi’s famous “Popeye” ’69 Camaro, which was built by the late Steve Grebeck, and Marc Dantoni’s Tommy Mauney-built ’41 Willys, among others. 

So how did the guy once described as “one of the most intimidating and influential doorslammer racers in the country” end up doing business in Bahrain? 

“Drag racing has been popular in the Gulf region for quite a while, and about five or six years ago a guy from Bahrain named Ali Arayan bought an engine from us, and he became a regular customer,” Musi said. “The sport just kept growing there, and a couple of years ago they built a killer race track at Sakhir called the Bahrain International Circuit. 

 “The popularity of the sport is spreading all over that region – In Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia,” Musi said. “We do business with a number of guys there now. Things really started rolling when Ali Arayan asked us to find him a Pro Mod car, and we shipped him one that was ready to race. We started shipping turnkey cars down there for other guys, and later we went down there to teach them how to drive them and how to work on them. 

“The GTO I’m driving was built by Jerry Bickel for Khalil Toorani,” Musi said. “I’m going to race it here this year, and when it’s running the way we want it to we’ll ship it to Bahrain and replace it with another one. I have been there three times now, but I’ve never raced there, and that’s something I really want to do. I think this coming winter, when we send this car down there, I’ll go down and run it.” 

And while racing success might still await Musi in Bahrain, he’s already made his mark on another far-away island nation. Curacao, one of the Lesser Antilles, is surrounded by the Caribbean Sea, and home to some dedicated drag racers and fans. And down there, Pat Musi is an icon.

Just weeks ago, Musi, along with friend and engine builder Sonny Leonard, traveled to Curacao to take part in the Caribbean Shootout at Curacao International Raceway. It was a special occasion for Musi, who was getting back into a Pro Stock car for the first time in many years. He was there to drive the “King Kong” Dodge Avenger owned by customer Frank Brandao in a best-of-three match race against the Chevy Beretta of Venezuela’s Anthony Karim. Musi won all three races and posted a best elapsed time of 7.007 and a top speed of 193.75. 

So what about those time restrictions mentioned earlier? Well, they exist – Musi juggles his schedule the best he can to work in trips to the race track, but these days business demands the lion’s share of his attention. Especially since he joined forces with friend Vic Edelbrock to launch a line of Musi/Edelbrock cylinder heads and crate engines.

“I started working with Vic three years ago, at first consulting and working on a nitrous system, and then developing a new cylinder head,” Musi said. “Edelbrock had an existing head for a big block Chevy – a conventional head – but they were looking to develop a head for racing applications. I told them that since I had lots of experience with racing heads that we could take the head they had, port it and come up with something pretty darn good. 

“So we took one of their heads, hand-ported it, worked on it, dyno’d it, and worked on it some more, until we had what I consider to be the best conventional big block head without going into something expensive, like a Big Chief head. Once we had it done we had a computer program done and we had a guy CNC port them, and that’s the Musi/Edelbrock head. 

“This year we’re taking everything up a step,” Musi said. “Vic wants to get more into racing, and Danny Jesel is helping now, too, so it’s a three-way deal now. It’s me, Jesel and Edelbrock. I always thought of Jesel from the standpoint of once we got the heads done we would go to him for the valve train. His complaint was that, yeah, these guys are designing the head, and it flows good air, but they forget about the valve train. Then they go to him and ask him to put rocker arms on the thing, and there’s no place to put the rockers. 

 “So now we’re engineering this whole thing the right way. I’m going to bring my race car experience, my going down the track experience, to the deal. We’re going to do a Big Chief head first; that’ll be our first deal and it should be out in May or June. That’s still a pretty conventional head, but we’re going to take it up from there. Eventually we’ll have a head that you can bolt on a Pro Mod car – you know, with five-inch bore spacing and so on.

“Edelbrock wants to get into racing, and Danny wants to help me and Vic, so it’s a pretty awesome deal,” Musi said. “If you think about it, Edelbrock is one of just a few companies with an in-house foundry. They do all their own casting, and they can control everything. Vic is always going to want to be in the street performance end of things – he never wants to give that up. But I told him that he could make racing parts as well as anyone – he just needed to know what to make, and that’s where Danny and I come in.

We’ve also come out with a couple of pump gas crate engines. They’re 555 cubic-inch pieces – one makes 700 horsepower, and one makes 950. They’re carbureted engines, but we can also set them up with fuel injection. We are going after the crate engine business in a big way - both street and racing engines. We’re going to build them and ship them from my shop.

So there you have it. The wheels never stop turning for Pat Musi. Championship-winning racer, engine builder, innovator, and now international celebrity, the man from New Jersey has come a long way since the days when he raced his ’69 Corvette on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway as an 18 year-old fresh out of high school.  After all those years, “Popeye” is still the boss.