NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Top Fuel points leader Shawn Langdon enters the Texas NHRA FallNationals on a four-race winning streak, the longest domination of the class since Texan Steve Torrence won five straight in early 2019 after finishing the six-race 2018 Countdown to the Championship playoffs with six straight wins.

Langdon began his impressive streak with a victory at the Cornwell Quality Tools NHRA U.S. Nationals, his third Big Go win in Top Fuel and the fourth of his career. He then added wins at the Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals presented by Mopar at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Mich., the NHRA Nationals at The Rock at Rockingham Dragway in North Carolina, and the NAPA Auto Parts NHRA Midwest Nationals at World Wide Technology Raceway outside of St. Louis on back-to-back-to-back weekends.

The wins in Martin and Rockingham completed another four-peat for the former world champ, crew chief Brian Husen, and the Kalitta Air team as, after wins earlier this season in Adel, Ga., and Mechanicsville, Md., he has swept titles at all four of the new events on the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series schedule.

“It makes me excited because I really have felt that the results that we're showing now are from the hard work that's come over the last couple of years,” said Langdon. “I really have a lot of faith and confidence in this race team. I've known how good they were, and I really felt like we had some good results when Brian came on board, and we had some wins here and there, and some races didn't go our way, and we finished fourth the first year, and then finished second the second year, and finished second both years in the regular season, but I knew the capabilities that this team had, and it just was a matter of things coming together.”

In his 16-round winning streak, Langdon has defeated 12 different drivers and has tangled twice with teammate Doug Kalitta, Justin Ashley, and Leah Pruett. He has averaged a .047 reaction time, better than his .060 season average and the .066 class average. Thanks to their qualifying performances and round elapsed times, Langdon and Husen enjoyed lane choice in 14 of their 16 rounds.

“We've been good when we need to be good, but we've been great when we need to be great,” he assessed. “I think a lot of that just comes down to the preparation that the guys do on the car. They put the car together perfectly the same every time, and it allows Brian to feel like he can make run after run and know that the car's put together perfectly, and so it makes his job easier, which in turn gives me the confidence inside the race car that I know every time I hit the gas, I'm going to have a really dang good race car, and hopefully, I don't mess that up.

"Kalitta has had some great success in the past. We had a couple years that the Top Fuel cars struggled a little bit, and that just comes down to Connie Kalitta making some changes, Chad Head, the general manager, making some changes, Connie allowed him to make some changes, and we've had some great people that have worked on these cars, and just for whatever reason things didn't work out, but I feel like right now we have absolutely the best of the best across the board, from crew chiefs to car chiefs to assistant crew chiefs to crew guys too, and we have a good lineup of drivers and drivers that want to learn and get better and drive the race car. I feel like across the board we have a great organization, and the organization's never satisfied, always striving for more and striving for perfection, so I really feel like it's just a lot of hard work that's gone into it, and, fortunately, right now we're able to get some of the dividends of that.

"I think a lot of it's just momentum-based, and one thing Brian always talks about is peaking at the right time, and I feel like right now we're peaking at the right time. You know everything that we're putting into the car, everything's working. All the parts are looking good. Everything's coming out consistent. We just kind of got to just almost plug and play a little bit, and so that's just what we're going to kind of do. Just go to Dallas, look back at the notes from last year, and see if we can go make some more good runs down there."

Langdon is halfway to matching Tony Schumacher’s 31-round winning streak from his record-shattering 24-race 2008 season — when he also set the record for most final rounds in a season (18) and most consecutive final-round appearances (11) and won seven straight races — but with just three races (12 rounds) left this season can’t break that mark, but, then again, Schumacher had four more races on the calendar that year.

And to even get close, Langdon would have to sweep the remaining three Countdown races, too, as Torrence did in 2018, no mean feat when teams are scrapping for every available point and position to boost their year-end bonuses.

“[Sweeping the Countdown] is such a tall task, and there's a lot of great cars out there,” Langdon reasoned. “Internally, do we think we have the capability of doing that? Absolutely, but I mean, at the end of the day, there's still a lot of racing left. There's three more races, a lot of good competition, and we know that with what we've done, we're going to have a big target on our back. People are going to be gunning for us and trying to lay down really good runs. So it's up to us to rise to the occasion and to do even better at the last three.”