NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

The Betway NHRA Carolina Nationals marked the 500th Pro Stock Motorcycle race of the modern era, which began in 1987 with the crowning of the first world champion, Dave Schultz. 

(Prior to 1986, the class was contested only sporadically, beginning at the 1980 Gatornationals, but ran only 22 events from 1980-86, with a maximum of just five races in both the 1985 and ’86 campaigns.)

The NHRA has crowned just 12 other champions in the interceding 35 seasons, marked by several eras of dominance, as those numbers might hint. Here's a quick history of the NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle class from 1987 to present.

1987-96: THE SCHULTZ AND MYERS SHOW

Schultz, a superior mechanical and riding technician, won six of the 10 championships in the class’ first decade, winning 41 of the 96 events contested over that span — Schultz was especially dominant in 1994, when he won nine of 11 events and finished with a 40-2 win-loss record — while his greatest rival, the popular John Myers, won three championships aboard the star Racing Suzuki and scooped up 30 more Wallys, leaving just one championship and 24 event victories for anyone else.

That short list of other winners included five wins by “Pizza John” Mafaro, whose 1989 championship broke up the Schultz-Myers monopoly, four by class pioneer Terry Vance, two wins by Jim Bernard and John Smith, and lone wins by nine other riders, including future world champ Angelle Sampey and the other Vance & Hines namesake, Byron Hines, who scored Yamah’s only win in the class at the 1992 Topeka event.

Late in that 1996 season, another name appeared on the winner’s list: Matt Hines, who had taken over the family riding business from his father and Terry Vance and forged wins in Denver and Brainerd and finished third behind Schultz and Myers in the standings.

1997-99: HELLO MATT HINES, ANGELLE SAMPEY, AND ANTRON BROWN

Matt Hines would dominate the next three seasons, winning a trio of championships and 21 more victories — exactly half of the 42 events in those three years — aboard the team’s Suzuki, including a monster 1998 in which he won 10 of the 14 events that season.

After a three-win, second-place finish behind Hines in 1997, Myers was killed in a highway motorcycle accident in August 1998, and Schultz began to battle cancer, which would claim his life before the start of the 2001 season.

Angelle Sampey, who joined George Bryce’s Star Racing squad as a teammate to Myers at the Denver event in 1996, emerged from that tragedy as Hines’ biggest rival and scored nine wins and finished in second place behind him in both 1998 and ’99. The Vance & Hines vs. Sampey battles would continue for years until she unexpectedly joined their team in 2019 for a three-year stint.

Also emerging at this time was Antron Brown, who would win three times in 1999 and finish third behind Hines and Sampey.

2000-2002: ANGELLE ON THE RISE

Sampey, like Hines before her, would go on a three-year reign of terror in the class, winning three straight championships and gobbling up 18 of 42 available race wins with her best year being 2001, when she won half — seven of 14 — of the events on the schedule.

Hines, by contrast, only won five times in three years, while Brown won six and finished second behind her in 2001, and Craig Treble, the championship runner-up in 2002, scored four times. Schultz won his final two events of a then-class-leading 45 victories in 2002 while continuing his brave battle with cancer.

2003: GENO WHO?

After a trio of Top 10 finishes but just one win in 2000-02, Geno Scali rode a rocketship straight to a very unexpected championship in 2003 on the strength of three victories as nine different riders visited the winner’s circle, and Scali denied Sampey her fourth straight title by just 78 points.

One of Scali’s three wins came, in Sonoma, over another whirlwind from the Vance & Hines camp in young Andrew Hines. It was late in the 2012 campaign when Andrew Hines began to follow in his older brother’s footpegs with a seven-race campaign and reached his first final a year later in Sonoma. Matt retired at the end of the 2002 season with 30 career wins.

Andrew finished seventh that season, and his best days certainly lay ahead of him.

2004-06: HINES AND HARLEY

The Vance & Hines team, long a bastion of Suzuki power, switched to Harley-Davidson in that 2003 season, and Andrew won his first event at the 2004 season-opening Gatornationals and scored twice more to win his first of three straight championships by less than a round’s worth of racing over Sampey, who by now was riding for Don Schumacher on a two-bike U.S. Army team with Antron Brown, who would finish second behind Hines in 2005.

The 2004 season was also memorable in that Steve Johnson, who has run the vast majority of the class’ events since 1987, finally got his first career win.

Hines made more history at the 2005 Gatornationals, where his Screamin’ Eagle Harley was the first to run in the six-second zone and again won the championship, this time ahead of his new Harley teammate G.T. Tonglet.

As a sign of the new parity in the class, Hines twice won only three of the season’s 15 events and won only twice in 2005, a season in which eight riders reached the winner’s circle.

2007-10: ANYONE’S GAME

In late 2006, Matt Smith, the son of veteran Pro Stock racer Rickie Smith, scored his first two wins, in Englishtown and Indy, after three and a half seasons spent learning the game, an education that began with six DNQs in his first eight starts in 2002.

Smith came on strong in 2007 and won the championship on the strength of four victories, one less than Hines, who finished second by a jaw-tightening six points.

Repeating as champion became an impossible task as subsequent titles were won by Hines’ new teammate, Eddie Krawiec — who won the 2008 crown without a single event win, only the second time in NHRA history that had happened (Rob Bruins, Top Fuel, 1979) — class veteran Hector Arana Sr. (a five-win 2009), and another second-generation Tonglet, LE., the younger brother of Hines’ former teammate, L.E. also scored five wins en route to his title.

Tonglet’s 2010 championship was won by just four points over Hines, and the Vanes & Hines team obviously was getting tired of these single-digit championship losses.

2011-15: A HARLEY HURRICANE

Team Harley won four of the next five championships with Eddie Krawiec’s two titles in 2011 and ’12 and Hines' two crowns in 2014 and ’15 sandwiching around Smith’s second career coronation in 2013.

In that five-year span, Krawiec and Hines combined to win 43 events of the 80 events and added 22 runner-ups; 14 of those runner-ups were in all-Harley finals against one another. Nowhere was that domination more complete than in 2012, where one or the other of the duo won the season’s first 11 races and 15 of the season’s 16 races. The only driver to break through outside of the Harley team was Michael Ray, who won in Dallas over Karen Stoffer.

Ray, the new rider for Star Racing, was the championship runner-up behind Smith in 2013, the only season where Hines, Krawiec, and the Harley team seemed to falter. Hines’ early season was so bad that he failed to even qualify for the Countdown to the Championship and finished 11th and won just once, late in the season when it really no longer mattered. Krawiec also struggled in the regular season, and it took two late-season wins to even finish third behind Ray and champion Smith, who racked up four victories and added a trio of runner-ups.

2016: THE GATOR MAN BITES ‘EM

Humble alligator farmer Jerry Savoie, who once claimed that he’d retire from racing if he won even one race, obviously told a tall tale as he racked up four combined wins in 2014 and ’15, then turned 2016 into a championship-winning season aboard his White Alligator Suzuki. Three regular-season runner-ups got him to fourth in the standings, and two wins in the Countdown to the Championship pushed him to the No. 1 spot, finishing ahead of Krawiec by just 24 points while Hines rode third, another seven points back.

Both Krawiec and Hines had five wins in the 2016 season, just not enough at the right time, though Hines’ 46th career win, in Brainerd, moved him past Schultz as the winningest rider in category history. Smith meanwhile went surprisingly silent with just one win, at the season finale in Pomona, leading to a disappointing sixth-place finish.

2017-19: HARLEY-SMITH-HARLEY

Matt Smith continued to be the monkey wrench in the works of the Harley team as he again broke up their domination over the next three-year span, winning the championship again in 2018 after Krawiec and before Hines.

Krawiec won seven times in 2017 and took a runaway title ahead of Hines, while Smith again finished sixth but without a win.

Smith’s 2018 championship campaign started as bad as it could, with a DNQ at the Gatornationals aboard a Suzuki, but he quickly returned to his Victory V-Twin and was in the winner’s circle three races later in Chicago.

In the meantime, Hector Arana Jr., son of the 2009 champ, set the class on its ear at that year’s Gatornationals with the first 200-mph pass, and Smith quickly grabbed one of the aerodynamic new EBR bodies that Arana was running and won three more times that season, all in the Countdown playoffs, and capped his season with a winner-take-all final-round victory over Krawiec at the NHRA Finals.

Hines and the Harleys rebooted for 2019, and Hines, who finished sixth in 2018, won his sixth and most recent championship by winning half of the season’s 16 events. Hines red-lighted to Jasmine Salinas in his opening round of the NHRA Finals, opening the door for either Smith and Savoie to win the race to steal the championship. Incredibly, Salinas, who had never won a race, ended up beating both Smith and Savoie – the latter of whom had mechanical issues in the final – to secure the title for Hines.

2020-22: ALL SMITH, ALL THE TIME

Hines’ 56th and final victory came in 2019 at the fall Charlotte event and retired to the sidelines to tune for Krawiec and surprise hire Sampey in 2022 and then for Krawiec and Gaige Herrera this season.

The 2020 season was, of course, run in the midst of the surging COVID-19 pandemic, and the season was shortened to just eight events, of which Smith won two, and six other riders – Krawiec, Savoie, Sampey, Ryan Oehler, and Smith’s two teammates, wife Angie and Scotty Pollacheck – each won once.

The season returned to 15 events for both 2021 and 2022, and Smith won those championships, too, to tie Hines and Schultz at six titles. During the 2021 season, Smith, who had begun to regularly eclipse the 200-mph barrier, set the national speed record in Sonoma at a blistering 205 mph and clocked six wins to finish ahead of Sampey.

Smith added another four wins in his 2022 title campaign for a total of 36 to jump to fifth in the class’ winner list, behind Hines (56), Krawiec (49), Sampey (46), and Schultz (45), and has added two wins already this season.

Here’s a look at the current stats for the class, including top 25 winners and every champion since 1987.