NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

The Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals marked the midpoint of the 2025 NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series regular season, with 10 races down and 10 to go until the Cornwell Quality Tools NHRA U.S. Nationals.

Reigning world champ Austin Prock looks to be having his way again in Funny Car, but he's being chased by four world champs and the class' most improved driver. Let's take a look at the season's first half with a combination of stats and analysis.

Ten takeaways

After his dazzling championship in his rookie season in Funny Car last year, Austin Prock is already ahead of last year’s pace with four wins as opposed to three at last season’s midpoint and a 20-6 win-loss record compared to 23-7 in 2024. If there is a falloff, it’s in No. 1 qualifying spots, where he had seven by this time last year but just three to date in 2025, and slightly in reaction time and left-first percentage. Four first-round losses — after just two all of last year — and a run completion percentage of just under 63% (down from 79% last year) speak to the team’s early woes, but back-to-back wins in Richmond and Norwalk have them trending up.

In his first full season in years, Prock’s teammate, Jack Beckman, remains a steady hand and gives him a run for the title. The car, which was incredibly reliable last year, finishing a class-leading 82% of its runs, is down to just 66% yet still leads the field by a hair over Matt Hagan. Beckman’s 10-race start mirrors his last eight of 2024 after filling in for Force with two wins and a runner-up.

After a blistering start with a first career win in Phoenix and a runner-up at the Las Vegas four-wide event that gave him the first points lead of his long career, Paul Lee has cooled a bit, reaching just one final (Bristol, a loss to Ron Capps) over the next six events. The car is certainly there — his 3.829s in Pomona and Charlotte are the second- and third-quickest runs of the year — but the car makes it down the track less than half of the time (49%, to be exact), and he’s giving away almost a hundredth on the Tree to the likes of Prock and Hagan. There's work to be done, but they can do it.

Coming off a stunningly winless 2024 campaign, Ron Capps is already up two spots — from sixth to fourth — at the midpoint over 2024, even though he doesn’t really shine in any of the top metrics. His reaction time is just sixth best (.076, his exact number for all of 2024), but the team is completing more runs than last year (61%, up from 58% last year) and already has its first victory (Bristol). His four first-round losses are just one better than his total for all of last season, but three of those came in the season’s first four races, so don’t read too much into that.

Even though he lost his world champion crew chief Dickie Venables over the offseason, the four-time world champ Matt Hagan is doing everything he can to make people forget that. He leads in both reaction-time average and left-first percentage, and the car is making more full runs (65% compared to 63% last year), but he has no wins and only one final-round appearance to show for it versus two wins and two runner-ups at least year’s midpoint.

J.R. Todd, who was the welcome recipient of Venables’ skills, struggled early as Venables worked his tune-up into shape, so you can’t really count his sixth-place standing against them much — he was never lower than fifth all last year until the Countdown — and his Epping win and Richmond semi show that DHL “Yella Fellas” can still deliver. Todd was last year’s reaction-time standout — a class-leading .059 — has slid down the ranks (.079, fifth overall) average, but he’s still third-best in head-to-head leaves, a testament to the drops in most drivers’ early reaction.

Stats be damned, Daniel Wilkerson looks like a win waiting to happen. He’s already won twice — if you count his pair of Saturday Mission #2Fast2Tasty NHRA Challenge victories — but as goes the weather, so goes Team Wilk. They’re better in the heat — their five round-wins in the last year's races account for more than half of their nine win lights — though D. Wilk’s .091 average will have to be chopped by a couple of hundredths to put them in title shape and back closer to his .077 average from last year.

Is Cruz Pedregon’s No. 1 qualifying berth in Norwalk an indicator that the two-time world champ is onto something? He qualified no better than sixth in the previous nine events, so we’ll have to see. Like D-Wilk, Pedregon’s reaction times have suffered this year over last — is this related to the tune-up or an overall class-wide trend — dropping from .073 to .086, but he’s cut his first-round losses almost in half, from seven to four midpoint to midpoint, even as the car’s overall consistency has conversely struggled as they worked into the current tune-up.

Bob Tasca III’s tough start — a stunning DNQ in Pomona and four first-round losses in the seven events since then — convinced the Ford team it was time to bring out a new car in Richmond, and he hasn’t lost in the first round since. This team is way better than ninth place (they were second last season at this point), and no doubt will continue to recover.

It's been a wild season for Chad Green Motorsports, with Green taking his first points lead with a NHRA Gatornationals win and son Hunter looking good in his limited rookie starts, but four straight first-round losses by Chad going into the break and uncertainly about the Hunter/Blake Alexander driving tandem the second car probably have them happy for time to regroup.

Probably regular-season finish: 1. Austin Prock; 2. Jack Beckman; 3. Paul Lee. Expect the world champ to stay hot in the heat of the summer and use it as a slingshot into the playoffs. Beckman will be right there tooth and nail, but could use a little luck. Lee won the Funny Car Callout last year in Indy; is that where he regains form this year?

Dark horses: As it is in Top Fuel, it's hard to consider past world champ Hagan, Capps, and Todd as dark horses in the Funny Car title chase. They'll stay within distance throughout the regular season, then the bonus will be on a playoff charge to add another notch to the championship belt.

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