Exclusive Interview With Tim Moceri of Salvage to Savage on His Twin Turbo DeLorean

Tim Moceri: "This car started out as sort of a bucket-list vehicle. I just wanted to get it out of my system, I've always wanted a DeLorean. And this one came up and it was actually the cheapest DeLorean in the United States.


It was crashed, the motor was full of water, the interior was completely destroyed. You know, I don't have $50,000 to buy a fixer upper which is what DeLoreans are going for now... so I found this one for $11,000 and it was red actually. I just saw the potential as opposed to the uphill battle I had in front of me."

AE: Clearly, everyone at the shop has supported this epic build, right?

TM: "We work with a lot of partners at S2S. We work with Garrett turbos and KW Suspension as well as others. When they got wind that I personally got a DeLorean it was like a snowball. The clinker (though) was the body kit.

You see the body kit as it is now, completed, but the gentleman who designed this body kit is somebody that I've been following for a long time. His name is Khyzyl Saleem.


He's arguably one of the best designers in the world right now for cars. He was responsible for Need For Speed Underground, for all the cars they designed. Now he's working with Lotus and Nike and all these other companies.

So it really started with the body kit, the headlights, the taillights, and all that jazz. We wanted to create a DeLorean that would've been made maybe now but also keep with the heritage of the original concept of the DeLorean.

So the aero package on this car is very eighties. But the soul of the car is really the headlights and taillights. So when he designed the lights, it was really a challenge to make these things in real life. How you see them is exactly as he designed them."

AE: Tell us about the exterior build process.

TM: "We actually 3D resin printed these lenses and then the buckets themselves were also 3D resin printed. We bodyworked them and then painted them.

So with the new technology we have at our disposal we're able to rapid prototype a body kit, headlights, tail lights, in order to create the one-off car.

To round out the back of the car we, have these solid acrylic tail lights that we CNC cut. These actually have LED light bars that are integrated.

Then we teamed up with Skol for the wheels on this car because when I found them on the Internet, I had to have these wheels. They were just very reminiscent of the old eighties IMSA racing days."

AE: What changes have you made to the interior of the DeLorean?

TM: "We kept it pretty normal as far as how radical it goes. The interior emulates the original. Your AC controls there and the actual tape deck that we retained.

We originally were thinking about putting a modern touchscreen display with Apple CarPlay and all that stuff. But when I pulled that tape deck out, I looked at it and it was just so retro that I wanted to have it in the car.

So we repurposed the original tape deck, the original hazard switch, and the original headlight switch from the original car and then integrated the Restomod air AC vents and controls that are in billet aluminum.

The dash display is a Haltech IC7 display; it's a full LCD screen. It's kind of like a modern Ferrari or Lamborghini. Then the seats are from a company called Status. They made this rose color for this car specifically. It's like an eighties throwback to that Miami Vice pink."

AE: You've done a ton of this work yourself, correct?

TM: "Yea, all the engine work, all the fabrication work was done by me personally. We have a team at S2S, we do a lot of fabrication, we do a lot of custom builds... but this was my car that we kind of did on the side."

AE: So tell us more about the business end of this DeLorean.

TM: "Yea, I started the build back here. The car was kind of a mess, and it needed a lot of work. The Peugeot-Renault-Volvo V6 had to go immediately. It was like 130-horsepower.

Our original plan was to do a clear deck lid to emulate the Ferrari F40... to be able to see the engine. So these louvers were cut out and replaced with clear glass. We also got rid of the (side) glass to be able to show off the 5.3-liter all-aluminum gen-four LS.

This is gen-four LS mockup motor. This isn't the final motor for this setup but we developed an individual throttle body setup with billet intake manifolds. These are one-off for this car. 40-hours to CNC-machine out of a solid block of aluminum.

All the charge piping is titanium. We teamed up with Vibrant Performance for all of the components to make the car actually work."

AE: What sort of power output are you hoping from at the end of the day?

TM: "Well, those are Garrett G50 ball-bearing turbos with 50mn Turbosmart wastegate. It should make about 600-700 horsepower to the wheels.

Future plans for the car are getting it tuned and running properly. Possibly getting rid of the 5.3 in favor of a 6.0-liter from TexasSpeed and trying to get to the four-figures. I want to have the first 1,000-horsepower DeLorean."

That's one heck of a goal, but it feels truly fitting in this case. John DeLorean was a man with wild goals and aspirations. Tim Moceri and the folks at S2S Speed Shop are carrying that maverick spirit forward in the coolest way possible. We can't wait to see this beast once it's finished up. Hopefully, we'll even get a chance to experience it in person.