NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

NHRA's annual trip to the Great Northwest for the Muckleshoot Casino Resort NHRA Northwest Nationals produced, as always, a great race worthy of the locale, a crucial event as the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series regular season ticks down to the last few events. Here's our five big takeaways.

POINTS TIGHTEN LIKE A VISE

The Muckleshoot Casino Resort NHRA Northwest Nationals was race 12 of the 14-race regular season, with just Indy and Brainerd before the Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin, and the points battles have suddenly become furiously close.

Shawn Langdon has comfortably led the Top Fuel points since the South Georgia Motorsports Park event with teammate Doug Kalitta lurking in second, but Langdon’s second-round exit in Sonoma and first-round loss in Seattle, combined with Kalitta’s two straight wins, now has Kalitta just five points back of Langdon. One of them surely will win the regular-season title, but there’s no clear-cut favorite.

Similarly, Greg Anderson is now just eight points behind season-long frontrunner Dallas Glenn in Pro Stock. Both lost in the first round in Sonoma, and Glenn’s loss in the semi’s at Pacific Raceways and Anderson’s win have brought them closer than a Pro Stock clutch pack.

By contrast, Funny Car is a runaway with Ron Capps owning a 37-point lead but, as we all know, that’s only two rounds. What’s more, the top five, which includes Jack Beckman, J.R. Todd, Jordan Vandergriff, and Matt Hagan, are separated by just 64 points.

DOUG VS. DIXON

Doug Kalitta’s Top Fuel win was the 62nd in the two-time world champ’s long Top Fuel career and tied him for third place in Top Fuel history with three-time world champ Larry Dixon, behind only Antron Brown, who has 66 wins, and all-time wins leader Tony Schumacher, who sits at 88.

While it's easy to look at the numbers and note that Dixon collected his 62 wins in 380 starts and it took Doug Kalitta 637 to get his 62 and think that Dixon is the hands down stats champ, you have to remember that Kalitta has done a lot of his winning in an era where, first, Schumacher was the dominant driver and then in these later years since Dixon’s retirement, the ascension of Brown, Shawn Langdon, and others who have helped make the current Top Fuel scene a tough field.

If not for Schumacher's U.S. Army car, tuned by Alan Johnson, who, now, of course, is tuning for Kalitta, there's little doubt that it would have reached the 62 wins much quicker. That's not to say that Dixon's great days with Don Prudhomme’s dragsters in the late 1990s and early 2000s were easy sledding either, because Schumacher also was in that era but maybe not quite as dominant as he would be in the mid to late 2000s.

Kalitta also has collected more final rounds than Dixon, 132 to 113, with Dixon having 51 runner-ups and Kalitta 70, which calculates to a 54.9% final-round win rate for Dixon and 47% for Kalitta but, again, two different eras with two championship drivers and two amazing teams now sharing a spot in third place.

Obviously, Kalitta’s next target would be Brown, who, like Kalitta, continues to win deep into his career, and you have to wonder if either will be around long enough to catch Schumacher's 88. Both are more than 20 wins away, and with a good Top Fuel season these days being five wins, that's another four seasons, and that's if Schumacher doesn't win any more races. We’re not saying it's not possible because both Brown and Kalitta are still at the top of their game, but it'll be interesting to watch.

PRO STOCK’S A BATTLEFIELD

If the two-race Western Swing showed us anything, it's that Pro Stock is about to get a whole lot more interesting. For the last two seasons, Dallas Glenn and Greg Anderson and the KB Titan team have run roughshod over their perennial nemesis at Elite Performance. But as the season has unfolded, we've seen the Elite cars start to get better as a group, with Greg Stanfield obviously emerging as their top threat. Stanfield's win at the Denso NHRA Sonoma Nationals, the final driver standing after an all-Elite semifinal foursome, and his Saturday win in Seattle in the Mission #2Fast2Tasty NHRA Challenge competition shows that the four-time Super Stock world champ is ready to become a first-time Pro Stock world champ, too.

Even Anderson was emphatic that the stakes have gotten bigger and tougher the last few months. Glenn still seems to have the best car, as evidenced by being the low qualifier in all four sessions in Seattle, but that doesn't always translate into round-wins or event wins. The fact that the KB Titan cars of Anderson, Glenn, and Matt Hartford all wounded engines during the two-race swing as they found they needed to push their equipment harder is evidence that the pressure and the competition is definitely there. While it certainly looks like either Anderson, who took over the points lead, or Glenn, the season-long points leader, will win the regular-season championship, there's no doubting that Stanfield, who jumped to third place in the standings, and the rest of the gang are going to be nipping at everyone's heels.

“It's a humbling sport, no doubt about that,” said Anderson. “It's a tough class to win in, and you just got to stay the course. You just got to keep trying, keep digging. I think there's three or four cars that have three wins this year, and there's a lot of hungry people that haven't won yet this year that can win and should win and probably will win. So, the rest of the year is going to be cool. It's going to be a helluva dogfight.

“The way I look at it, it's almost the start of the Countdown. By the time we get to Brainerd and Indy, that’s where it starts. You set yourself up, whatever position you get, you get the extra points, and you can't wait till Brainerd's over and then try and turn on a switch. It doesn't work that way. You’ve got to go into those last couple of races before the Countdown on high C. You’ve got to be on the top of your game. So, hopefully this was a turnaround weekend for us, and we'll get three weeks to work on our equipment and our engines and our cars and our minds and our attitudes and come back stronger. We’ll have to be.”

STARTING NO. 1 TO END UP NO. 1

J.R. Todd won Funny Car from the No. 1 spot, marking the third time in the last four races that the class’ low qualifier also went on to raise the Wally and the fourth time this season in 12 races, or exactly one-third of the time.

Outsiders might think that having the fastest car in qualifying should guarantee an event win, but the vagaries of track and weather conditions, breakage and driver error (or excellence in the other lane), but across 950 eliminator races between the start of the 2014 season and now, the No. 1 qualifier historically has won at less than a 25% rate.

Thanks to the heroics of Funny Car’s Austin Prock and Pro Stock Motorcycle’s Gaige Herrera, the No. 1 qualifiers in 2024 won a whopping 37.9% of the time, a record in the modern era. The 2023 mark, also heavily influenced by Prock and Herrera, was 31.8% but last year nosedived to 26.6%.

For the record, the 2014 season was the lowest in this dataset with just 15.9% of low qualifiers also winning the event.

DOUBLE OR NOTHING

Ty Gaynor and Brad Burton both had a chance to do something special in Seattle: Win two eliminators at the same race. Only one of them did it, while the other lost both finals. Sportsman racing is tough, ladies and gentlemen.

Burton was in both the Stock and Super Stock finals, but his double dream died early with a final-round loss in Stock to Gary Gandee. Then Gaynor won Right Trailers Top Dragster, defeating Don Sefton for the Wally.

Then, interestingly enough, it was Burton who had the chance to stop Gaynor’s double in the Super Stock final. Gaylor had the better leave, .035 to .060, but Burton was closer to his dial-in, just .009-second from perfect, but the win light came on in Gaynor’s lane, his better launch too much for Burton to overcome.

Gaynor became the 32nd driver to double, and the double was the 48th in NHRA history, and at age 18, Gaynor is far and away the youngest driver to accomplish the feat. It’s also the second double of the season, having been accomplished in Norwalk by Phil Unruh.

Burton came away empty-handed, but there’s little shame in that as a double runner-up has happened 16 times previously, and to the best of them, including recent Top 50 Sportsman Racer honorees David Rampy (twice!), Peter Biondo, Jerry Emmons, Kevin Helms, Justin Lamb, and Anthony Bertozzi, and has happened twice in Seattle, with Lamb (2017) and Dylan Hough (2023).