Cars are hard to avoid when you grow up around Detroit. But while Samantha Moore, who hails from Brighton, Michigan, made the 45-mile trek to auto shows at the Cobo as a teenager, and soaked in the atmosphere at the Woodward Dream Cruise, the auto bug didn’t bite until she graduated from the University of Michigan with a geophysics degree in 2011.

Moore bought a Camaro as a graduation present to herself and decided to take it drag racing. Fourteen years later, she co-owns a successful street-performance and race-preparation business, Vector Motorsports (VMS), working on late-model V8 muscle cars at the shop and trackside. She’s also a multiple NMRA/NMCA drag racing champion with her 2014 Mustang California Special, Relentless. By any standards, it’s been quite a journey.

“None of my family was mechanically inclined and nobody really liked cars much,” she told Motor Life. “But I drove the Camaro, liked it, and started racing it. It’s been an addiction ever since.”

Moore’s path into the automotive business began when she opened a web design company to fund her racing, putting to good use a passion for design and the coding skills she’d learned during her geophysics studies. Contracts with automotive aftermarket companies, sometimes in exchange for work on her cars, fed the addiction harder, and led to her co-owning VMS.

“I got sick of other people tuning my cars,” she explained. “I had a few tuners blow my cars up and cost me a lot of money. I figured, if anyone’s going to blow my stuff up, it’s going to be me! I taught myself how to tune with the help of my business partner, Dan Sienkiewicz. Geophysics is a more focused part of physics, but cars are math and physics too, and the tuners require programming logic. It all ties together.”

“When I got into cars, I looked at it as math first, mechanics later. Over time, I learned the mechanics part, but I would always think in ways that the traditional mechanics didn’t. I’d come up with solutions to a problem faster, because I was skipping the basic mechanical components, skipping to the end to find the answer.”

Having since learned traditional mechanical and fabrication skills, Moore has redone her Mustang from top to bottom in the years since we last caught up with her. She won the NMRA/NMCA Limited Street title in 2022 and 2023, but with then-sanctioning body ProMedia scrapping the class at the end of 2023, Moore was forced to pivot to the popular Ultra Street category. Most crews took a year or two off to make the changeover, but Moore’s team completed the radical remodeling of Relentless in three months.

The rebuild severed what remained of the Cali Special’s street-car roots. Still equipped with an alternator up to that point, she’d even driven it on the Woodward Dream Cruise in 2022.

“It was a race car before, but it wasn’t cut up like it is now,” Moore described. “Even with the 25.3 cage in it, I’d driven it on the street. Fortunately, that cage was also legal in Ultra Street, but we had to make a bunch of other changes. We put a fabbed Merillat nine-inch rear end in it, which moved the shocks inward, so they’re now coilover-style, quad-adjustable custom shocks from Viking Performance. We basically had to custom fab the entire suspension aspect of the car. We also went to motor plates and mid-plates, instead of the stock motor mounts that were on it until then. Next we had to redesign the whole fuel system, move the fuel tank to the front of the car from the trunk, fab front-exit headers, and so much more.”

Relentless also went on a crash diet in a bid to get down from the Limited Street minimum weight of around 3,600 pounds to the new target, still not quite reached, of 3,000 pounds. She listed what had to be done: “It’s a carbon deck lid now instead of stock. We replaced the factory doors and glass with carbon doors and Optic Armor Lexan windows. We cut the front of the car off and it now has a two-piece nose so you can take the whole front-end off. It’s fiberglass, because right now I can’t afford carbon! A 16V, TurboStart lithium battery saves more weight, and I probably pulled 100 pounds of wiring out of the car, then I mil-spec-wired the whole car myself.”

Alongside her customer tuning work on ECMs and mostly-Holley aftermarket EFI systems, Moore has developed a passion for wiring over the past five years, describing it as “calming,” she explained. “There were so many times when I had cars brought to me for tuning where the wiring was a nightmare, and as a tuner, you have to figure it all out. When I go to tune a car, it makes life a lot easier if I can wire that car as well.”

The Coan Engineering Turbo 400 in Relentless has been carried over to the new class and the Mustang retains its Coyote V8, which now sits at 318 cubic inches and has a billet Frankenstein intake manifold on top. A new Waterman mechanical pump was added for the M1 alcohol fuel. It’s boosted by a gear-drive ProCharger F-1A-94 supercharger, replacing the belt-drive ProCharger P1X (air-to-air intercooled) that helped the car to dominate in Limited Street. Moore still winces when she recalls three previous crank breakages, a known Coyote weak spot.

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After a couple of years breaking records, the 2024 race season was a brutal reality check for Moore…and her wallet. “I went through two engine builds last summer, which definitely hurt,” she recalled. “It wasn’t a pretty race season, but I learned a lot. Driving this car now is totally different to how it used to be. It sounds different, feels different, and is way faster. The respect you have to have for the g-forces, versus the class I was in before, is insane.”

The rapid pace of development in the Ultra Street class left the VMS team fighting to catch up as they came to grips with the new car. A 5.20 in the eighth-mile at the season-opener was a 4.60 by the end of the year. That number would have been near the top of the pack in 2023, but in the meantime the frontrunners had lowered their ETs into the 4.3s.

Moore observed that the Coyote-ProCharger combination is harder to work on than some of the rival motors in a class that features a diversity of combinations – everything from turbo- or nitrous-equipped, small-block Fords and Chevys; to big-blocks on nitrous and a turbo Hemi. With the weather conditions affecting the car now more than it ever did in Limited Street, she and her crew are still building a bank of tunes for every scenario while running against competitors with a decade or more of Ultra Street experience. It’s a tall mountain, but she’s climbing.

Changes this winter have been limited to the suspension, with more costly improvements such as mini-tubbing the car, or taking out excess weight, on the backburner until funds allow. “We’re trying to play where we can and keep cutting the ET. Every race we cut about a tenth off, so we’re slowly chipping away.”

In what’s envisaged as a test and development year, in 2025 the Mustang will take in events from several different series, beginning with Lights Out 16 at South Georgia Motorsports Park from February 20. You can also expect to see Relentless on track at some Radial Outlaws and Sick the Magazine races, at Holley Ford Fest in Bowling Green in September, and at the team’s local Milan Dragway, where Moore’s racing career began more than a decade ago. She’ll also take the car to the Yellow Bullet Nationals on Labor Day weekend, while plans are afoot to run again at another event in Maryland – the World Cup Finals in November.

“We have a lot of work to do before the World Cup to get the car back to a quarter-mile for the first time since it’s been rebuilt,” she said. “We hope to go from 4.4s, 4.5s for the eighth-mile this year to around 6.8 at 200+ mph in the quarter at the World Cup.”

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According to Moore, Relentless earned its name not just as a descriptor of how much of the brown stuff hit the fan when things were going badly, but also as a reflection of her and the team’s never-quit attitude – whether winning championships or pulling all-nighters, scrapping to get the car to the strip for the first Ultra Street pass at Gainesville last year.

“The running is awesome, and I love the challenge. Even though we didn’t win in Gainesville that first race and I ended up breaking something in the burnout box before I even made it to the starting line for eliminations, I’m proud of the fact that we got the car to Florida and made a pass down the track. I knew how much I had pushed myself to not give up. For me, the biggest thing in racing is pushing yourself, having goals and making those goals.”

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Despite the setbacks, Moore’s enthusiasm for racing is undimmed. However, she is realistic about how hard it will be to return to the days of perennial number-one qualifier and winning meets and championships.

“I probably have more of an addiction to it now than I ever have,” she assessed. “It is exhausting, and there are times when you’re thinking, why am I doing this? Financially it gets very tough. I don’t have the financial backers that other teams might have. I pay for it if I blow something up. Sometimes I still decide to send it, and if it blows up, it blows up. It’s all on me if it does.

“Sometimes you’re deciding between making the rent or making the race. Most of the time, it’s making the race. That may or may not be a good thing, but I’m dedicated. When I commit to something, I commit. I don’t quit. I went from winning all the time, to getting my ass handed to me, which I knew was going to happen. But I’m going to keep my head low, keep fighting, and hopefully shock everybody again.”