NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

When Antron Brown climbed triumphantly out of his Top Fuel dragster after locking down the 2024 NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series Top Fuel world championship, it was one of the most memorable moments in a career full of them. The AB Motorsports team owner and driver of the Matco Tools/Lucas Oil/Toyota dragster had in some ways shocked the drag racing world with this fourth career NHRA banner. Brown had maintained his positive attitude and outlook through the entirety of the 2024 season, and in the end, that attitude, approach, and outlook were proven right. 

Let’s take a look at his 2024 NHRA Countdown to the Championship and understand how grit, guts, and determination earned Brown and his experienced team the NHRA Mission Foods Series trophy on a cool November Sunday at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip. 

Off to the perfect start 

Reminiscent of the 2023 championship run of Doug Kalitta, Brown and his team started the Countdown in the best possible manner: by winning the first two races. Let’s start by looking at the win in Reading because it showed this team’s true skill set in 2024. 

This was a team that was at its best grinding in the trenches. The Matco car was not a flashy low-e.t.-generating, No. 1-qualifying, blow-the-scoreboards-over hot rod in 2024. Instead, it was a fundamentally solid race car helmed by some of the most experienced tuning and wrenching professionals in the business. In any sport — drag racing, pickleball, or ice hockey — you need to have the fundamentals locked down to be able to succeed when the going gets rough, and that is exactly what this team was built for. 

Their opening win in Reading proved this point beautifully. They qualified seventh (one of only two top-half qualifying positions they nabbed in the Countdown) at 3.755. Running their car in the performance window Mother Nature handed them, they had their quickest run of the weekend at 3.723, and in the driver’s seat, Brown was locked in at the Tree with lights in the low .060 range until the final when he dropped a .043 in Shawn Langdon’s lap. 

Charlotte was a scorcher, especially for the time of year. Temperatures more than 80 degrees greeted teams for the first round, and it was only going to get hotter from there. In so many ways, this was an ideal situation, not for comfort, but for the performance pattern of Brown’s car. Their hallmark in 2024 was navigating hot dragstrips with a deft touch. Yes, they didn’t have the titanic middle-3.60s shots some teams did, but their car would traverse many surfaces those others could not dream of getting down. 

Winning again in Charlotte running a string of 3.80s, the most impressive numerical accomplishment of the event was Brown cutting three straight .054 lights in eliminations. That starting-line performance was integral to the team’s trip to the winner’s circle. He won the first round on a holeshot over Steve Torrence, and it only got better from there. 

Turbulent three-race stint in the middle

As well as the first two races went for Brown and company, the next three were enough to cause many people to question if this team had the strength and guts to actually win a title. After two wins the hard way to start, a second-round loss in St. Louis, a first-rounder in Dallas, and a second-round out in Las Vegas could have been the curtain call for championship aspirations, but a funny thing happened. All three of the main contenders had their struggles, and no one established a dominant position to break away from the pack. 

By winning the first couple of races, even with main rivals Langdon and Justin Ashley running well, Brown had placed himself about 80 points ahead of each of them. In St. Louis, he and Langdon went out the same round, so other than some qualifying points Langdon chewed up, it was basically a push. Ashley, however, went a round past Brown and out-pointed him by more than 20. 

Dallas would be the race that really upset the proverbial apple cart on paper. Having to race Ashley in the first round was a high-stakes moment. Ashley, who had made one qualifying run on Friday and then flew home for religious observance, was a massive wild card on Sunday morning. In a wild one, Ashley stopped Brown in that opening round and went on to win the entire race. Langdon lost in the second round, and when the points were tallied leaving Texas, Ashley had taken a slim, but still mentally tough, 12-point lead on Antron. 

If we look at the performance of the Matco team in Dallas, we see two good, solid qualifying runs on Friday (3.79 and 3.73) but a pair of missed shots on Saturday (4.18 and 4.13). Returning to a 3.70 tune on Sunday, they had a competitive car, but his first-round opponent Ashley drew a .041 light off the trailer and had a marginally quicker car. Brown had simply found the wrong guy in the wrong round. 

If there is one rule in drag racing that also applies to all other professional sports, it is that when you have your opponent on his or her back foot, you have to keep the pressure of your attack on until the job is complete. Las Vegas presented itself as that situation for both Langdon and Ashley with regard to Brown. Coming off a second- and a first-round loss, they needed to land some big blows in Las Vegas. 

They didn’t. 

With the Matco Tools dragster qualified 11th, the Kalitta Air dragster of Langdon qualified second, and the Scag dragster of Ashley qualified seventh, the sharks were circling. Add in the fact that Brown’s dragster had still not achieved a 3.6-second elapsed time in the Countdown to that point and things were looking pretty grim, especially when he lost in the second round. 

But, just when you thought it may be over, the ladder did him a favor. Langdon and Ashley had to race in the second round. This meant he would only lose footing to one of them, and even then, not a ton, even if they went the distance. In one of the most electrifying rounds of the season, Langdon dialed up a .047 light to Ashley’s .052 and beat him on a holeshot, 3.701 ahead of a 3.698. 

This was the best-case scenario for Brown … or so he thought. 

In the next round between Kalitta and Langdon, disaster struck when Kalitta blew up a rear end in his car, and Langdon, undoubtedly feeling the championship pressure, hung with a run in his car a shade longer than usual, got up to the centerline and hit the blocks, destroying the car’s left rear tire, costing him points and throwing his whole team into chaos for the better part of the next two weeks. 

The calamity of Langdon is not something Brown wished to see or wanted to see, but it was a huge moment for his title hopes staying not just alive, but alive and very, very healthy heading into the In-N-Out Burger NHRA Finals. 

A conquest of space and time 

When history looks back on the championship season of Brown, those doing the digging better spend a minute on the performance they had at the 2024 In-N-Out Burger NHRA Finals. This truly was the encapsulation of what a true world-class organization looks like and does when the pressure is on. Of course, they made it a little dramatic too. 

In the rain-shortened two sessions of qualifying that Brown got, they ran a 3.725 first and smoked the tires on the second run. It left them 12th and facing down Ashley, who had run 3.67 to enter eliminations fifth. They were set to be the third pair of the first round. The first two had run. It was fast. It was cool. It was just about time to fire the cars. 

And then the plane crashed in the pits. 

For more than an hour, we watched and we waited. The teams fidgeted nervously in their pit areas before being summoned back to the staging lanes. Did it give them time to make changes? Surely, it did. Were any made? Only the teams know that at this point. 

In what was absolutely the defining run of his season, Brown took the Tree next to Ashley and went .043 green, stopping the clocks with a 3.696 elapsed time — his first 3.60 of the Countdown — his best reaction time since Reading and his ticket into a second-round matchup with Langdon. 

Langdon, who had run 3.65 in qualifying and 3.69 in the first round, was seemingly the favored car in this matchup, but as the Tree flashed and the drivers reacted, tire smoke poured off of the slicks. A quick pedal by Langdon blew the burst panels out of the intake, and Brown, with the deft touch of a Hall-of-Famer, somehow nursed his car to the finish line. With the win light, he was now one round-victory from a fourth title. Brittany Force would be his dance partner in that round. 

The first-round win over Ashley was one of those interesting tipping-point moments when a seemingly invisible door is busted down and the person kicking it in is traveling a path of fate from that point forward. Brown and his guys were those people. 

In the semifinals, Force’s car launched and suffered a mechanical failure, shutting it off. Brown roared to a 3.693 on a run that started with a .051 light. That one clinched the title, the title that seemed a foregone conclusion leaving Charlotte and then a lost cause leaving Dallas. It was theirs, and boy, did they ever earn it. 

The final-round performance of the team was a perfect capper to not only race day, not only their Countdown, but their entire season. They ran 3.681, the quickest the car had gone since the Denso NHRA Sonoma Nationals during the Western Swing. Add in the fact that Brown’s .038 light was his best since a first-round loss to Tony Stewart in Epping and the run was a complete package of performance, both human and mechanical. 

“This is super special,” Brown said. “We just never lost faith. It’s truly been a blessing. It hasn’t been easy and we’ve had those races where you’ve had to do the unthinkable to get it done, and I’m so proud of my team for getting it done. We’ve been through these moments time and time again to win a championship. That’s where the experience kicks in and it was a lot of fun to go through them.

“I’m not one of those people to look at all those accolades. I’m always hungry for the next, so this championship is going to sit well this off-season,” Brown said. “This class is only going to get tougher, so we’re going to have to keep working harder. Looking at all the things we’ve done the last three years, it’s been incredible. I’m just so blessed to be on a team with the group of people we have. Everyone on this team digs in deep and we have so many key people who make this happen. That’s a testament to all the work we do together. We have a lot of strong links and we have a group that never quits.”

“This is what you have to do to win a championship,. If you look at the Top Fuel class right now, it’s incredible. You can keep going down the list. I’m telling you, pound-for-pound, Top Fuel is the toughest class out there. Just winning the first round now is like winning a final round. You’ve got to be at a top-notch level no matter who you’re racing. We’ve done our fair share of winning this year and once we got in a groove, it really helped our confidence. But no matter what, this is a team that stays humble and stays hungry, and we’re always learning to improve. That’s what we did Sunday in Pomona.”

Like the famous scene in The Natural when Roy Hobbs mashes a home run into the stadium lights, circling the bases in a shower of sparks, Brown finished his season with the header flames over the wing and the fans going wild in the stands. The command and control his team showed on that final Sunday of 2024 should live a very long time in the lore of Top Fuel drag racing as a master class in how to close out a season with the best possible results. 

There’s a look back at a Countdown that showed us an amazing amount of twists and turns in Top Fuel. The category is stocked with talent in a way it has not been in decades. That talent goes from the bottom end of the engine, through the cockpit, and right into the crew chief lounge in the trailer. 

In the end, it was calm, collected, measured veteran leadership along with otherworldly driving talent and clutch performances that earned Antron Brown and his entire AB Motorsports team their 2024 world championship. What an incredible thing to watch. 

Now, if you think this season was a tough nut to crack, wait until you get a load of 2025.