NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

On a cool July summer night in Sonoma, Calif., in 2017, Robert Hight almost broke one of the sport’s last remaining speed barriers. His stunning run of 339.87 mph put the sport on the precipice of the 340-mph barrier.

That run has stood in the record book ever since, proudly if not openly taunting crew chiefs and racers who remember what could have been.

At the end of that 2017 season, when NHRA announced that it was poised to make rules changes for 2018 designed to slow the cars, multiple teams admitted after the fact that they were openly gunning for the 340-mph mark. None made it.

For the 2018 season, the allowable angle that the headers could lay back was changed to make them more vertical and the engine ignition control system was kicked on at 7,700 rpm instead of 8,100. 

In 2017, several cars had exceeded 336 mph and a handful had made 338 mph a semi-common occurrence. In 2018, the fastest Funny Cars running were running 331-332 mph, and the talk of 340 mph faded gently into the distance.

But this is drag racing, and more specifically, this is nitro-powered drag racing, an arena of automotive competition where no one has ever fully employed all the power available to them, even on their best day. We say this not as a swipe at the tuners who continue to master these cars, but as the reasoning for the slow and steady increases in speeds that began happening from the 2018 season on. 

The rules package for the headers and the ignition system have been largely static since then, but the minds of the tuners have been anything but. Smart people given a consistent set of tools to work with are going to refine them, slowly and steadily, making them better with their accumulated knowledge. This is the exact thing that’s happened to Funny Car speeds. 

It took a minute for the tuners to adjust their approach, but reminders popped up that 340 mph was in the offing, even as far back as 2019 when Rahn Tobler tuned Ron Capps to a 339.28-mph shot at Maple Grove Raceway that still stands as one of the most stunning runs in modern Funny Car drag racing history. 

At the end of the 2023 NHRA season, something interesting began happening in the Funny Car category. Specifically, it was happening with Bob Tasca III’s Mustang. The thing was making wild speed. It ran faster than 338 mph in Dallas and then clipped 337 to close the season in Pomona. The team was onto something, and fans were starting to again hear the murmurs about 340 mph.

Tasca’s car looked 340-mph-capable at the 2023 In-N-Out Burger NHRA Finals and then proved it was by going 341.68 mph in a preseason event at Bradenton Motorsports Park in February 2024. The world was poised to see the number officially duplicated at an early-season NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series national event to place it into the history books with indelible ink. And poised they remained until the final day of the last event of the season. 

The sport’s premier teams unleashed a fusillade of amazing speeds over the 20-race 2024 season, culminating in Austin Prock making the first 340-mph NHRA national event run with his Tasca-matching 341.68 shot at the Finals.  

So, the natural question on the table here is whether or not 2024 supplanted 2017 as the nastiest year in Funny Car speed history with the 340-mph mark finally bested by Prock after a seven-year wait. Let’s take an objective look at it.

Here’s a look at the fastest Funny Car runs in NHRA history at the start of 2024.

And here’s a look at the list after we left In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip and locked the gate behind us.

Incredibly, with all that we saw, just two runs from 2024 made the cut on the all-time Top 10 list. With them going in, 2023’s lone representative (Tasca’s 338.57) was bumped out. 

The reality of the situation is that 2017 still stands as an insane year of speed that even the mighty performances of 2024 didn’t upend. Let’s look at the best runs of each year to really illustrate this. 

Yes, 2024 can claim the top spot, but the "bump spot" to break into this speed field in 2017 was faster by about half a mph. In my mind, 2017 is clearly still the king when it comes to the bottom half of the scoreboard.

Amazing, ain’t it?

One last point to make here. From 2015-2017, the speeds increased in Funny Car by an incredible 10 mph. Once the crew chiefs dialed in on the laid-back headers and the rev-limiter that allowed the engine to see more than 8,000 rpm before activating, the speed rise came on like a tsunami. It was this rapid elevation that had the tech department making changes to slow the cars down some. 

The march back to and ultimately past 340 was not on this two-year pace. It was a far more methodical and plodding pace of speed increases. The step-by-step gains per year brought the class back to the 340 barrier. In 2023, the Top 10 runs were mostly populated by 335- and 336-mph shots with Tasca being the outlier with his 337- and 338-mph heroics at the close of the year. 

Taking all that they learned during that 2023 season and torturing the data until it confessed got them over the 340 hump just like it did for Jimmy Prock, Thomas Prock, Austin Prock, and their whole team to close 2024. 

So, 2017 is still the king, 2024 was brutally awesome, and we have seen a Funny Car go 341 at a national event. What’s left? Only questions. 

What, if anything, does the tech department plan to do this winter? If they make an adjustment, what will it be? Will the cars go slower?  In a bit of fun irony, it will be time, not speed, that will provide the answer to all of us. 

The only constant will be the ability of the crew chiefs to find ways to use more of that bottomless reservoir of horsepower at their disposal, and by virtue of that, the process of going faster will continue. It always has, and it always will.