NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

As part of NHRA’s 75th Anniversary celebration, an elite panel of Sportsman racing legends — Dan Fletcher, David Rampy, Peter Biondo, Luke Bogacki, Justin Lamb, Gary Stinnett, Jeff Taylor, and Austin Williams, who have combined for 411 NHRA national event victories and 35 world championships  — has collaborated to select the Top 50 Sportsman Racers from NHRA’s first 75 years.

Each racer named to the Top 50 Sportsman Racers list will receive a large commemorative NHRA challenge coin recognizing their place among the most accomplished Sportsman competitors in NHRA history.

The Top 50 Sportsman Racers list will be unveiled in groups of 10 over five consecutive Tuesdays beginning today. Here's the first group, selected randomly from the list and presented here in alphabetical order.

Steve Cohen

One of Super-class racing’s first and most recognizable stars, Steve Cohen put together a career that includes 21 national event wins, 30 divisional wins, and a very memorable world championship. 

Cohen’s 1987 season is the stuff of legend. The first year that a national championship was crowned in Super Comp, he led nearly wire to wire and locked up the title by late summer. In the end, Cohen achieved a massive score of 7,437 points, far ahead of second-place Edmond Richardson’s respectable total of 5,640.

Every driver wants to win the Cornwell Quality Tools NHRA U.S. Nationals, and Cohen was fortunate to do it twice, first in 2003 and again in 2008, both of them in Super Comp. He also won his home event in Gainesville in 2014. In his later years, Cohen transitioned from Super Comp and Super Gas to the then-new Top Dragster class, where he won his final three events.

Dan Fletcher

It would not be difficult to make a case for Dan Fletcher as the greatest Sportsman racer in NHRA history, and his statistics certainly support that argument. 

With 110 national event wins (and counting), Fletcher has put up career numbers that dwarf those of most of his contemporaries. By now, most NHRA fans know the Fletcher story. He used the winnings from his first national event title at the 1994 Columbus race to finance a trip to the Western Swing, where he swept all three events in Denver, Sonoma, and Seattle. A short time later, he became a full-time touring Pro who spent the next two decades touring the country. 

Along the way, Fletcher racked up win after win after win, including three world titles. He’s also among the most versatile drivers in the sport with wins in Comp, Super Stock, Stock, Super Comp, Super Gas, and Super Street. 

Kevin Helms

Four-time Stock world champion and Michigan Motorsports 2013 Hall of Fame inductee Kevin Helms collected 55 NHRA wins from 1990 through 2025, including 25 at the division level. 

It all started at Detroit Dragway, where the Michigan native — now based in Florida — began bracket racing at the age of 16. His first NHRA championship came in the West Central Division, and NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series championships came later, stacking consecutively from 2001-03, with another added in 2015. Among his accolades are three prestigious NHRA U.S. Nationals victories: back-to-back triumphs in Stock (1998 and 1999) and another in Super Stock (2017). 

His successes aren't just from behind the wheel; Helms worked and raced with Division 4 Hall of Famer Joe Teuton and the Southland Dodge team and later was lead mechanic and tuner, overseeing Don Schumacher Racing's then-new Drag Pak Challenger program in the Factory Stock Showdown class, ultimately tuning Leah Pruett to the 2018 championship.

Jimmy Hidalgo Jr.

In recent years, NHRA South Central Division Stock and Super Stock racer Jimmy Hidalgo Jr. has been frightening to find in the other lane. After winning the Stock championship in 2022, the second-generation racer went on to score 711 points in the category and finish a single point behind Joe Sorenson for the series title. 

The next year, the driver known as "Cooter" and the "Country Puppy" found retribution in claiming the Super Stock world title. Fifteen of his 42 victories (as of the end of the 2025 season) were claimed at the national event level, but perhaps most impressively, Hidalgo made quick time of stacking up wins. 

Aside from two seasons (2013 and 2020), the former Jr. drag racer has earned at least one trophy at the national or divisional level since 2011, and the results were particularly exceptional in 2024 and 2025, with eight and six wins notched, respectively.

Shawn Langdon

Long before he became a Top Fuel world champion in 2013 and a perennial race winner ever since with 24 combined Top Fuel and Funny Car wins, Shawn Langdon was already an established and respected driver, first in the NHRA Jr. Drag Racing League, where he won a conference championship at age 14 in 1997, and then in NHRA’s Sportsman racing ranks. A standout baseball player in high school, he chose a racing career over college scholarship offers and excelled on the quarter-mile as he had on the baseball diamond.

The son of longtime drag racer Chad Langdon joined him as an NHRA national event winner in Super Comp in 2002, won back-to-back Super Comp titles in the JEGS Allstars competition in 2005 and 2006, and then back-to-back NHRA Super Comp world championships in 2007 and 2008. 

Langdon also excelled in Super Gas, where he scored three wins, including one of his greatest triumphs at the prestigious NHRA U.S. Nationals in 2010.

John Labbous Jr.

Super-class racing isn't for the timid, and John Labbous Jr. has been a large part of the threat for the better part of a decade. His father, John Sr., drove an array of fearsome "Loose Caboose"-branded race cars to wins and division championships across the Southeast beginning in the 1960s. 

It's no wonder Labbous Jr. chose the same path, making his own mark as a bracket racer before moving into the NHRA realm with talent and resourcefulness to spare. In 2017 — the same season he joined the elite double-up club with wins in Super Comp and Super Gas at the spring race in Charlotte — Labbous drove Anthony Bertozzi's car to the NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series world championship. 

Six years later, he was the champ again, in Super Comp. A regular in the Top 10, Labbous entered NHRA's 75th Anniversary season with 13 national events wins and 30 overall, including divisional victories.

Jimmy Lewis

Two-time NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series world champion Jimmy Lewis has enjoyed a fruitful career highlighted by impressive runs in a variety of categories. 

He started bracket racing in a Volkswagen Beetle soon after getting his driver's license, and his reputation as a formidable NHRA racer began in 1985. Lewis first found a home in the Super Gas winner's circle in Baton Rouge, La., in 1987, and in 1998, he became a world champion in the category. Super Comp, Top Dragster, and Top Sportsman would eventually become part of his repertoire. 

The Forney, Texas-based racer pulled off an incredible late-season pull in 2021 to win a second world title, this time in Top Sportsman and with a long-coveted victory at the NHRA U.S. Nationals on his scorecard. South Central Division racer Lewis has been a threat for four decades and entered NHRA's 75th Anniversary season with 37 wins across four categories, 14 of them at the national level.

Bruno Massel Jr.

Only 10 drivers in the 63-year history of Competition eliminator have won more than one championship, and Bruno Massel Jr. is the only driver to capture four (2009, 2012, 2021, and 2023). His 19 national event wins in the class rank him third all-time behind only David Rampy and David Nickens, and he also collected 22 divisional wins and six Division 5 championships.

Massel not only carved a winning legacy in one of the sport’s most experimental eliminators but did it by mastering the tricky world of turbocharged powerplants. His interest in the power adder was piqued when he covered NHRA’s Sport Compact series for television in the mid-2000s, and he quickly developed his own combination, built around a turbocharged four-cylinder GM Ecotec engine that he placed in a new Cavalier and a dragster, and won in both. He later switched to a turbocharged inline-six Toyota 2JZ powerplant.

Massel’s talents were not limited to Comp, as he also has scored a national event victory in Stock and competed in Pro Stock.

Brad Plourd

When it comes to versatility, few can match Brad Plourd, who seems right at home in almost any race car. From a 12-second Stocker to a 230-mph supercharged Comp altered, Plourd has driven almost anything, and he’s done so with amazing success. 

Plourd’s 23 national event titles have come in six different eliminators, and he’s currently looking for a seventh behind the wheel of a six-second Top Dragster entry. When the pressure is greatest, Plourd tends to do some of his best work, which helps explain why he has three wins at the sport’s marquee event, the Cornwell Quality Tools NHRA U.S. Nationals. Remarkably, he’s also won Indy in three different classes: Comp, Stock, and Super Comp.  

At this point, the only thing lacking from Plourd’s extensive résumé is a world championship, but the second-generation racer is still young enough and talented enough to make that a reality. 

Scotty Richardson

By any measuring stick imaginable, the late Scotty Richardson is one of NHRA’s all-time greats, and it isn’t an exaggeration to suggest that he might just be the best Sportsman racer of all time. 

Richardson, the younger brother of fellow Sportsman legend Edmond Richardson, first emerged as a rising star when he won his first national event title at the age of 17. For the next decade, Richardson won everything in sight, amassing 39 national event wins in 47 final-round appearances, across six different disciplines. Richardson won five world titles during his career, but that number could easily be seven as he lost two others via a tie-breaker. 

Arguably, Richardson’s most dominant season came in 1994, when he won both the Super Comp and Super Gas world titles, becoming the first driver to do so. Prior to his untimely death in 2024, Richardson also dominated the big-money bracket scene.

Look for the next 10 of the Top 50 Sportsman Drivers to be released June 9.