NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

By almost any measure, Richard Gadson’s rookie season in 2024 was successful, but nothing he accomplished in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class can compare to what happened this season, where Gadson won his first NHRA race and then went on to win his first championship.

When Gadson left the recent Dodge NHRA Nevada Nationals powered by Direct Connection in Las Vegas, he was nursing a 21-point edge over teammate and two-time champ Gaige Herrera. After a few tense days in Pomona, waiting for a break in the weather that never came, Gadson officially locked up the title after the In-N-Out Burger NHRA Finals were cancelled.

“This is a big, big, big, emotional roller coaster; the journey last year, really a lot of blows, a really, really, really hard season to get through, to start this year, and still trying to find that groove,” said Gadson. “Once we found it, I would say after Bristol, I was kind of starting to feel like I belonged. Starting to feel like, you know, I can run at the top of this class.

“There’s a lot of tough competitors out here, my teammate, Gaige [Herrera], I want to take a minute to give him his due. I’ve got a lot of respect for him.”

Joining the Vance & Hines team at the start of 2024, highly touted Gadson showed a lot of promise with three final rounds and a third-place finish, but those who know Gadson best knew those results were just the tip of the iceberg.

There was no sophomore slump this season. In fact, Gadson started strong and then got progressively better as the year went on. The turning point was his long-awaited first win in Bristol. From that point forward, Gadson was in control as he finished the season with four wins in six final rounds. He took over the points lead with a win at the four-wide event in Charlotte in September and never relinquished it.

Gadson’s path to the championship resembles the one taken by his crew chief, Eddie Krawiec, who won the first of his four titles without winning a national event. Krawiec never got discouraged and finished his riding career with 49 wins.

“Eddie Krawiec, my crew chief, I want to zero in on him,” Gadson said. “I think that he had the same thing on his mind this year that I had, which was to prove a point, rise to the occasion, and try to figure it out. Gaige and Andrew [Hines] are legendary, individually and together. I think they’ve changed our class and what it takes to win forever. They raised the bar, so me and Eddie both had to dig deep and figure out ways we could be better individually, and then how do we mix that together and make us better on results, and I think we really have come a long way this year.”

Gadson had difficulty closing the deal until the Super Grip NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals in Bristol, where he claimed a narrow holeshot win over Herrera in the final round. Gadson then tacked on additional wins in Sonoma, Reading, and Charlotte, the latter two coming during the crucial Countdown to the Championship playoffs.

In Sonoma, Gadson set low elapsed time of the race at 6.702 on his way to a final-round win against John Hall. A few races later, Gadson turned in perhaps his most impressive performance of the season in Dallas, where he qualified No. 1 and claimed a narrow final-round win against another up-and-coming young star, Brayden Davis.

Gadson appeared to have a lock on the title until the penultimate event in Las Vegas, where he lost in the quarterfinals and had to watch from the sidelines as Herrera won the race, closing the gap to just 21 points as the tour headed to Pomona.

For three days, Gadson sat in the rain in Pomona, pondering all the possibilities as the title would go to whichever rider advanced the furthest in eliminations, and there was the very real possibility of a winner-take-all final round.

Ultimately, that pressure lifted when the tough decision was made to cancel the event and crown champions based on incoming points totals.

“I went through every emotion you could think of this weekend [in Pomona],” said Gadson, who pulled off a rare feat when he went the entire 2024 season without a round-one loss. “It was way too much time to think this week. Unfortunately, we are a sport that Mother Nature dictates. There’s nothing we can do about it. NHRA was in a tight spot. The racers, the competitors, are in a tight spot. None of us left home with this in our plans. But what do you do?

“Everybody was here with the intent to race, and my mindset, even while it was raining, was, ‘You know what? Whether we race or not, you’re going to take it anyway,’ ” Gadson said. “ ‘Take it anyway. It’s yours, either way it goes. If you got to go to war for it, you got to go to war for it. If Mother Nature dictates that for you, you work your ass off to be in the position to win it anyway.’ So, you know you can’t smack the smile off my face right now.”

Gadson is the 13th different rider to win an NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle title since the category was recognized as a Pro division in 1987, joining class icons such as Dave Schultz, John Myers, Matt Smith, and Angelle Sampey. Gadson also joins Herrera, Krawiec, Andrew Hines, Matt Hines, and team founder Terry Vance as the latest rider to earn the No. 1 plate for the storied Vance & Hines team.

Gadson grew up in a family of motorcycle-racing enthusiasts, and his uncle, Ricky, briefly raced in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class. Given an opportunity to forge his own path to success, Gadson won multiple championships in multiple organizations before getting an opportunity to race with the RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines team aboard their Suzuki Hayabusa.

“You’ve got to understand one thing; I come from a motorcycle-racing family. It wasn’t just my uncle,” said Gadson. “My grandparents rode motorcycles. My dad and my sisters and brothers all ride motorcycles. There was no plan B in this life. It’s all about motorcycles.”