NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

PRE-RACE NOTES

Welcome to a wild and windy day at Texas Motorplex. After overnight rain, the promised cold front blasted into Texas this morning, and it has been steady winds of 20-25 mph with occasional bigger gusts that won’t tail off until early evening.

NHRA has already made several schedule changes, including moving Pro Stock Motorcycle to behind Pro Stock car and nitro for Q1 and moving the first rounds of the JEGS Allstars competition in Comp and Top Sportsman to tomorrow.

Enough of the weather, let’s move on to the news.

Pro qualifying doesn't start until 4 p.m. CT, but fans might need a program to recognize some of the teams at this event, as a number of them are sporting special paint schemes here.

First off, Leah Pruett will be flying the Mobil 1 colors on her Top Fuel driver, and her Tony Stewart Racing teammate, Matt Hagan, will be bannering Johnson's Horsepowered Garage.

Doug Kalitta will also be flying the colors of Mobil 1 after displaying the dragster at ExxonMobil corporate headquarters in Houston on Wednesday.

Ron Capps’ machine will carry NAPA Hydraulic Fluid branding this weekend, and his Funny Car and Maddi Gordon's Carlyle Tools Top Fuel dragster will feature increased Okuma branding in Ennis, Texas, as part of a six-race collaboration with the global leader in machine tool design and manufacturing.

Billy Torrence will also have a new look with Red Line Oil branding on the Capco Contractors car. The black, silver, and red design prominently features two products from Red Line Oil’s performance chemicals lineup: Complete Oil System Cleaner and Total Intake System Cleaner.

After a three-race hiatus, the Jim Dunn Racing team returns to the track and will be cloaked in pink for Solid Start/True Brand, a female-owned, family-operated automotive additives manufacturer that partners with the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) to raise awareness and drive impact in the fight against breast cancer. “This has a special meaning to my family and I, as both my mother and sister-in-law are breast cancer survivors,” said driver Jeff Arend. “My wife does the annual 60-mile walk for breast cancer for the last 12 years.”

Two-time Funny Car world champion Cruz Pedregon and primary sponsor Snap-on have also turned their Funny Car pink for their annual Socket to Breast Cancer campaign. This is the program’s 12th year, and Snap-on, its franchisees, and customers have raised more than $1.2 million to help breast cancer patients cover essential living expenses during treatment.

Steve Johnson will continue his 40th anniversary season of Pro Stock Motorcycle competition with support from the Texas Capital Air Show, which will be held at the San Marcos Airport, near Austin, Nov. 7-8. Johnson, Pro Stock Motorcycle’s “Iron Man,” will be competing in his record-setting 531st career NHRA national event.

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Leah Pruett and her team enter the event sitting fourth in points after uncharacteristically early exits in the first three Countdown to the Championship races, notching just two round-wins in three races. Pruett, in her final three events before taking another hiatus to continue to grow her family with husband Tony Stewart, still believes deeply in the team, which has only had two first-round losses and qualified inside the top five 11 out of the 17 events so far this season.

"Our team is many things, but resilience is the leading current value," she said. "Our Countdown hopes have been stressed and bent, but our ability to bounce back and end this season strong is the true form I look forward to showing this weekend."

Pruett has a good record at this event. The last time she competed at Texas Motorplex in 2023, she ended the weekend sharing the winner's circle with teammate Matt Hagan in TSR’s first double-up. Pruett also visited the winner's circle in Factory Stock Showdown in 2018, making the Motorplex the only track where she has won in multiple categories. 

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Speaking of Hagan, he comes into the race in the middle of a six-race streak, where he has finished semifinals or better and owns a 72-point lead in the championship battle. Hagan has three FallNationals victories (2010, 2016, and 2019) and six runner-up finishes and appeared in six straight final rounds from 2019 to 2024 at the facility.

 "I think this JHG Dodge team is in a really good spot mentally," he assessed. "We've been going rounds, and the car is running well, and we just have to keep moving along. It's so easy to get knotted up in thinking and worrying about it, but things change so fast. We saw someone go from sixth to third in just one race — that can happen with any of us all stacked in here like we are. The Countdown is always nerve-racking, but we've been doing this a long time, and it's kind of business as usual."

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With three races remaining in the season, Josh Hart and the Speedmaster Top Fuel team are just 45 points out of fifth place and only 70 out of third place in his first season with John Force Racing and on track to meet some pre-season goals.

“At the beginning of this year, Dave Grubnic and I set our objectives to make sure that we finished in the top five," said Hart. "We knew there were going to be some hurdles and that we were going to learn from each other. I said in recent social media posts that the tough times are when you find out what everybody’s really made of. Some people took that post out of context. It’s cool when champagne is falling from the heavens. But when you’re down, you get to see who’s going to man up and take the bull by the horns to try to figure out how to turn this thing around."

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In his rookie season in Funny Car, for class icon John Force, Jordan Vandergriff is just a tad more than rounds out of first place, and despite the pedigree of the car that won the previous two world championships with Austin Prock in the saddle, former Top Fuel driver Vandergriff has impressed in his first season with the engine in front of him.

“After I got the call from John and got the opportunity, I actually sat down, and I thought about how the year could possibly go," he reflected. "I remember telling people at the preseason Gainesville test that I had a few goals for the year. One was to win a race and the second was to win the championship. I remember people kind of looked at me like, ‘OK, buddy, you haven’t even run a race yet.’ I got that look from a few people, but I just wanted to picture that in my mind because, if I wasn’t, then what was I really doing?"

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Vandergriff's teammate, Jack Beckman, is 123 points out of the lead but still eyeing his second world championship.

"People talk about giving it 110 percent, but that’s not mathematically possible," said the ever-pragmatic pro. "This isn’t the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl and the quarterback’s got a broken throwing finger and just sucks it up. This is a mental exercise, and I try to do the best I can do, whether it’s qualifying or the final round, and I’m gonna continue to do that. Sometimes the breaks just don’t go your way, so we are going to have to have a couple Indy-like weekends, and we need Hagan to go out early at one or two races, which is very possible."

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Alexis DeJoria, the third member of the JFR Funny Car armada, is hoping to continue her recent performance gains at a track where she has had mixed results.

"I've done really well here in the past," said DeJoria, who made her Professional debut at the 2011 Dallas event while competing for Kalitta Motorsports. "I also had a pretty bad fire there back in the day. We've got the car to beat right now. In St. Louis, we had one of the best cars out there. Unfortunately, I am human, and I went red in the second round against my teammate. Those are tough ones. Those are the ones that make you want to just curl up in a ball and hide, but we've got the car right now; that's the takeaway."

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Hunter Green is making his return to action in the CGM Bond-Coat Dodge//SRT Hellcat after sitting out the previous two events after his engine exploded and the car hit the retaining wall at the event in Martin, Mich.

“We had a whole new front end put on my race car after the engine explosion,” he said. “So, the new car will be ready for action, and I know my dad and I really want to go after that Cowboy Hat and diamond Wally trophy this weekend. We have regrouped as a team, and we believe we can race for the win. There would be a wild celebration if a Texan wins the Texas race.”

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Chris King is also here after running previously in Indy and St. Louis, and the firefighter is coming in hot after recent changes to his car.

"At Indy, the Funny Car was lifting the nose as King accelerated downtrack, creating a challenging driving environment. Between the U.S. Nationals and the Midwest Nationals, the team made some adjustments with the help of Jonnie Lindberg [Alexis DeJoria’s crew chief and master fabricator] to keep the nose planted to the track.

“We made one run in Indy where the nose was off the track a couple times, and that got a lot of airtime,” said King. “I kept it straight, but we made some fixes, and St. Louis was a lot better."

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Coming off a second half of the Countdown to the Championship, the Elite Motorsports team arrives in Ennis having swept the opening three races of the Countdown. Troy Coughlin Jr. kicked the Countdown off with a victory in Martin, where he broke a 41-race winless streak. Greg Stanfield and the Janac Brothers Racing team got the job done in Rockingham, N.C., while taking the points lead for Elite Motorsports, the first time the powerhouse team has led the Pro Stock field since 2024 in Las Vegas. Greg’s son, Aaron, and his Johnson’s Horsepowered Garage/Melling Performance/Janac Brothers team finished off the swing with a statement victory at the most recent event in St. Louis.

The Elite team has an extra car here this weekend, a Camaro outfitted with the 2027 Pro Stock combination that returns the class to the once-familiar hood-scoop-and-carburetors configuration. It will make a series of exhibition runs this weekend with Mike DePalma Jr. at the wheel.