NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

These are good times for the KB Titan Racing team in the NHRA Pro Stock wars with either Greg Anderson or Dallas Glenn reaching the winner’s circle – a streak that even goes back to the 2024 season finale – and the team’s Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals weekend only reinforced the group’s current dominance in the class.

Anderson’s Winternationals win, the 108th of his career, capped off a phenomenal weekend for KB Titan Racing, as all eight of the KB Titan-powered drivers on the grounds — Anderson, Glenn, Matt Hartford, Cory Reed, Deric Kramer, Cody Coughlin, and Erica and Matt Latino — qualified for the 16-car field.

"There are so many cars that can run fast, and I'm so damn proud of this KB Titan team," said Anderson after qualifying No. 1 for the 134th time in his career. "I've got eight cars out here this weekend, and quite honestly, any one of those eight cars, if they hit it on the target, any run can go to the pole. I've got a small part of that, and [I'm] probably prouder of that than the fact that my car went to No. 1 because it's hard to do."

Anderson, 64, remains competitive against a growing field of younger drivers, many of whom rely on KB Titan Racing's engines to stay at the top of the game. He never thought there would be so many cars under the same banner.

"I absolutely never thought I'd be doing this, but I still wonder if I've lost my marbles," he joked. "But somehow, we're trying to pull it off. The engine program is for the good of the class. We've got a lot of great up-and-coming stars coming in because we offer great equipment, great engines, and great cars to race right away with their natural talent. They compete for wins, and that's pretty damn cool. It’s absolutely what's made this class as popular and competitive as it is."

KB Titan Racing not only offers turnkey cars and at-race tuning but also supplies just engines to customers like Hartford and Kramer. Anderson takes great pride in this, even when his customers outperform him, as Hartford did in qualifying No. 1 at the NHRA Arizona Nationals and in beating Anderson in the Mission #2Fast2Tasty NHRA Challenge during qualifying in Pomona.

"It's very tough to race against it, but I'm very proud of it too,” he said. “We’ve supplied complete race cars, where the driver basically just brings his helmet, or just an engine like we do for Hartford and Kramer. My guys are doing a fantastic job, and somehow Matt Hartford’s doing an even better job with the same power. My hat’s off to him.

"We have a great relationship with them, and we need to learn from each other. When one team runs faster, there's a reason for it, because all the engines are pretty much the same. Whoever is the fastest has done something better from the rear bumper to the front bumper, and that includes the driver. Matt has shown that he has the horse to beat. I'm very proud of my race car and the job my guys are doing, but he's doing a better job yet.”

The Pro Stock class as a whole has undergone significant changes in recent years, particularly since the introduction of fuel injection and a 10,500 rpm rev limiter in 2016, and it’s just been the last two seasons that the performance of the fuel-injected engines finally caught up with their carbureted predecessors. 

Until the 2022 NHRA Gatornationals, where the Elite team’s Erica Enders reset the national record to 6.450, former KB Racing driver Jason Line’s carbureted 6.455 from nearly seven years earlier (Charlotte 1, 2015) was the quickest run in class history, and entering the 2025 season, the track record at 13 of the 20 events on the calendar were set in 2015 or before.

"For a long time, we never thought we'd get there,” Anderson admitted. “To be honest, we were banging our heads against the wall for six or seven years and just couldn't make gains. You almost went home from every race dejected because we were in a box so tight that we didn’t think there were any gains to be made. Then, the Elite group got an advantage on us. We looked at each other and said, ‘Apparently, we can still find gains in these engines,’ and we went to work and, lo and behold, we started uncovering things that made them faster. 

“Over the last two or three years, both my group and the Elite group have made a lot of gains," he said. "Now, we’re finally back ahead of where we were when we raced carburetors. We’re running faster than we did before and setting records. It took a lot of years of stagnation, but we finally broke through, and now it’s fun again. Fun to go back to work.”

According to Anderson, the recent horsepower gains have been and will in the future always come in small, almost infinitesimal increments.

“It’s about every inch of that engine, from the oil pan to the top of that intake manifold,” he said. “You keep playing with it, trying to find one horsepower here, two horsepower there. You're not going to find big jumps like 10 or 20 horsepower, but you just keep adding those ones together, and hopefully, you can be a star again."

Despite the strong start for the KB Titan team, Anderson knows that staying ahead of the powerhouse Elite Performance team won’t be easy. The Elite team has been dominant for most of the last 11 years with Enders winning six championships to KB Racing’s four (two for Anderson, one each for Jason Line and Bo Butner) and Tanner Gray’s one-off in 2018, but 2024 was the first time since 2017 that an Elite driver did not finish as the champion or the championship runner-up (Elite’s Aaron Stanfield was third).

"I’ve got no grand illusions that this is going to continue through the year, but we're going to try and keep it going as long as we can,” Anderson said. “This is what you work every day of your life, to find an advantage like we’ve got right now, and it's not going to last. By the semifinals [in Pomona], all the Elite Performance trailers were leaving the gate. That’s how desperate they are to get home, get to work, and try to close the gap. 

“Every time this happens, you light a fire underneath the competition, so I certainly don’t expect it to last forever, but you’ve got to make hay when the sun's shining. Right now, it’s shining on us, and we’ve been doing a good job of it. Hopefully, we get out to a big lead and see how long we can ride this wave, but I know if I don’t go back home and try to get better before we go to Las Vegas, I’m going to get beat. That’s the mindset every week: Find a way to get better before the next race."