NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

It's still early into the 2025 NHRA Mission  Foods Drag Racing Series season, but we're still learning a lot from the year's first two events. Here's our five big takeaways from the NHRA Arizona Nationals.

Final-Lee

It's been a long hard road for Paul Lee to get to the Funny Car winner’s circle, and those of us who have known him all these years have seen the struggle and the dedication to finally get there. Seems like a lifetime ago, but it was actually “only” 21 years ago that Lee was a hot commodity in Top Alcohol Funny Car, winning three times in the 2004 season.

Lee, who grew up as a fan watching Funny Car match races in Englishtown and Atco Raceway in his home state of New Jersey, hero-worshiping the great “Jungle Jim” Liberman, said he'd been trying to win a Nitro Funny Car race since he was 13 years old, and then let's not forget about the 2016 “widowmaker” heart attack that probably should have killed him if he had not lived right across the street from an EMT center whose paramedics were able to get to him within four minutes and saved his life. 

Some guys would have called it quits there but not Paul Lee. Two years later, with his doctors and with his heart being monitored, he made his first Funny Car run since the heart attack at Firebird Motorsports Park in Connie Kalitta’s DHL Funny Car. The doctors looked at the numbers and figured he was OK to go, but it was still going to be another nine years before he ever got to the promised land. 

Certainly hiring John Medlen, whose great experience over the years in the nitro ranks dating back into the 1980s with drivers like Rudy Toepke and then of course all of his years at John Force Racing, was a good start, and Medlen eagerly welcomed Jonnie Lindberg as a protege, and things began to click for Paul Lee and team. 

We started to see the plan finally come to fruition last year when he scored two runner-ups, both times to Austin Prock, and then went on to win the Funny Car NHRA All-Star Callout in Indy. 

But as good as the car could run, there always seemed to be something that got in the way of Lee winning, so when it was Prock staged in the other lane for the final of the NHRA Arizona Nationals looking to make some history of his own with John Force Racing’s 300th Funny Car win, a lot of people figured this might be another missed opportunity for Lee. 

But Lindberg and Medlen had tuned Lee to a quicker elapsed time than the “Prock Rocket” in the semifinals, and the Prock team knew they had to turn up the wick for the final to get past Lee, and that was their undoing. Prock’s Camaro broke loose at mid-track, and despite a masterful pedaling job by the world champ, Lee turned on the win light to become the 96th different winner in Funny Car history.

Langdon is flying high again

Last year, Shawn Langdon and the Kalitta Air team won two of the season’s first three races – with scores in Gainesville and Phoenix – and the former Top Fuel champ is off to another high-flying start this year with yet another win in Phoenix on the heels of his Gainesville runner-up. Langdon also won Saturday’s first NHRA Mission Challenge, giving him nine win lights in 10 launches.

Langdon has a special affinity for Firebird Motorsports Park, where he once raced in Jr. Dragsters and now patrols the strip at 330 mph. In addition to his back-to-back Top Fuel wins in Phoenix, he also scored in Super Comp in 2007.

“Honestly, I wish we had 20 races here,” he joked. “Then maybe we could win the championship.”

Langdon was making a point about how after his hot start last year, the team didn’t win again in 2024, scoring five runner-ups that carried the team ot the cusp of the championship before it was derailed by a blown rear tire at the year’s penultimate event in Las Vegas.

“Yeah, it was a tough situation, and hard not to hang your head on that, because that's always in the shoulda-coulda-woulda, and that stuff will just eat your life for the rest of your life,” he said. “So, I just take everything I can and learn from it, and then kind of push all the rest of that away.”

And with crew chief Brian Husen clearly on his game, Langdon thinks there’s no limits to what they can do.

“Brian and I get along so well; we have, dating back to the alAnabi days when Brian was the crew chief on the car under A.J. [Alan Johnson]. Honestly, [we] just clicked from day one. How we view things, and how we view the mentality on race day, and how we view procedures, and dealing with the team and people. We kind of feed off of each other, and it's just a good feeling to have. 

“Brian's extremely smart, and he's extremely talented, and with his confidence, he’s dangerous, and I'm just thankful that he’s on my team. Having the points lead and doing good first couple races, kind of where we're at last year before we got into a streak of runner-ups, I think now maybe we can kind of turn the corner and continue to get some wins.”

Veteran Anderson kept his cool

The saying goes, "Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good,” but it also helps to be a veteran with thousands of laps worth of experience, and that certainly could be said for Greg Anderson on Sunday at Firebird Motorsports Park. Pro Stock's all-time winner collected his 107th victory, but it was surely one of the strangest of all of his scores of Wallys.

Hot off of claiming the 2024 NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series world championship in a winner-take-all final round battle in Pomona with Dallas, Anderson started the season hot with a runner up at the Gatornationals to Glenn and came into the Arizona Nationals with what looked like one of the strongest cars on the grounds. He didn't qualify No. 1, but he was consistently quick in all four sessions.

The trouble first came in the second round when Anderson went to fire the HendricksCars.com Chevrolet and it backfired. The engine raced, revving high, and Anderson and crew didn't know what to make of it. The crew quickly removed the front clip and searched for the problem, finally discovering that the backfire had compromised the gasket between the intake manifold and the plenum, leading to a serious vacuum leak. With nothing left to do, the crew quickly tucked in what pieces of the gasket they could and sent Anderson into the water box. With the revs way higher than they should have been, he backed up to the starting line and prepared the stage. Fortunately for him, waiting in the other lane was his KB Titan Racing teammate Eric Latino, who, informed of Anderson's problems, had slowed down his staging procedure. 

Anderson somehow managed to stage the car despite the revs going to what he called “Mach 9” and then kept his cool like the veteran he is, stopped the holeshot on Latino, and won the race. 6.61 to 6.59.

The craziness didn't stop there though, as lining up against Glenn in the final round for their third straight final round dating back to the Pomona finale and the Gatornationals, Anderson knew he'd have to be sharp on the Tree to beat “Double-Oh” Dallas, and Glenn for his part was thinking he needed some of that .00 magic to get past Anderson's quicker hot rod. 

Glenn admittedly went light on the clutch with his foot, and when he revved the engine, it knocked his foot clear off the clutch pedal, and he red-lighted blatantly. Anderson, not realizing what happened but only seeing a flash out of the corner of his eye, also let go of the clutch and also red-lighted. But that's as far as Anderson's car went as something went awry in  the engine — the team surmises it was ignition-based — and Anderson's car rolled to a stop 200 feet downtrack. Glenn, who was probably also confused about what was going on, was able to get back into the gas of his car and race to the finish line, even though Anderson had already been declared the winner on the double foul. 

When you win 107 races, some of them are greater than others and some of them are going to be lucky. Pro Stock is a tricky business, and you go where the breaks are.

Interestingly enough, Anderson was involved in a similar final round at the 2004 CARQUEST Auto Parts Nationals in Chicago in 2004 and came out on the losing end. Anderson barely red-lighted with a -.003 reaction, but opponent Dave Connolly broke just off the line and never reached the finish line, but he was nevertheless declared the winner over Anderson.

Old age and treachery

As strong as the youth movement is within NHRA with young stars like Austin Prock, Dallas Glenn, Jasmines Salinas, and Ida Zetterström, Phoenix 2025 was a race where old age and treachery overcame youth and exuberance.

Jeff Taylor, one of the sport’s all-time greatest Sportsman racers and one of just 24 racers with 50 or more wins, got started on his next 50 wins with a victory in Comp, showing that at 64 he still knows how to find the winner’s circle. His crew chief on the J&A Servcie dragster? David Nickens, who at 74 still knows how to brew horsepower.

Rickie Smith, 71 years young, made it to both Pro Mod finals – the rain-delayed Gatornationals and the Arizona Nationals – and even though he was twice turned away, he’s clearly still got it.

We already talked about Greg Anderson, who’s now 63, Paul Lee is 67, and then there’s ageless John Medlen, who helped tune Paul Lee to the Funny Car victory, calling on his years of experience and his calm hand.

Capps and lessons learned

For the second time in less than a year, Ron Capps found himself driving a convertible and crashing into the guardwall after a massive engine explosion shed the back half of his NAPA Toyota at halftrack in round one, sending him careening into the opposite-lane guardwall.

Although the plucky veteran’s first thought was to exit the car and raise his arms a la Raymond Beadle after his barrel roll at the 1982 Gatornationals to let his family, all in attendance, know he was OK, he had plenty of other thoughts during and after the serious shunt.

“It just happened so fast. In the car, I feel like it just smoked the tires a little bit, and then ‘kaboom.’ All of a sudden, it was a convertible, but there was a lot of fire in my face, and I was just trying to get it to settle down,” he said. “I was kind of bouncing around, and then it wanted to go left. I didn't have much steering, and it was going hard left, and I knew I was still traveling pretty fast. In my head, I'm like, 'This is not gonna be good,’ so I just braced, honestly, and I didn't expect to be awake after it hit the wall. It hit the wall, and I was still awake, and there was still some fire. I got on the brakes and got it to stop. The 'chutes were already out, so NHRA safety did its job.”

Capps praised the safety of today’s Funny Cars, the hard lessons learned after the death of Eric Medlen on that exact date 18 years earlier, especially in the head padding area. After John Force’s crash in Virginia last year, the team also installed upgraded head padding between the Gainesville and Phoenix races.
 
“I wanted to get out of the car and find John Force right away and just thank him,” Capps said, “because unfortunately, Eric Medlen started this with the head padding when we lost Eric, but then with John's accident [at Dallas in 2007], his life was spared because of Eric Medlen's, and then you fast forward, John's life was probably spared the second time [in Richmond in 2024] because of his previous accident, and I for sure walked away from mine because of Force's accident. So, thankfully, we and NHRA have learned from all the bad stuff that's happened and made the safety improvements.”
 

Next stop: Pomona!