NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Professional drag racing teams are as complex as any other pro-level sporting outfit. There are the things you can see in terms of how a team carries itself, and there are the things you cannot see, like chemistry, inter-personal relationships, and more. This being said, the simplest way to define what a team is and how a team functions is by their bottom-line results.

So many factors are involved in delivering the end result of any given season that it seems impossible to pin down a singular thing that could take a contending team one year and make them a champion the next. In the NFL it’s easy to see team with a good passing game add a running back for the following season and become even better. In baseball, a team with big bats can add to their pitching to make a more complete package.

But what can drag racing teams do along these lines?

The numbers tell us a lot, and that’s why we decided to take a dive into them, specifically into the second- and third-place finishers in 2025. We went looking for a single element that a team could improve upon that would move them over the hump this season. Of course, in this exercise, we are taking for granted that all the other elements of the team and the things they are good at will stay the same and this one change will augment all that.

In this first installment, we’ll look at Top Fuel and Funny Car.

TOP FUEL

Third place: Justin Ashley

When we look at Ashley’s results from 2025, we see he had as many wins as Doug Kalitta, led the class in reaction time, and led the class in runner-up finishes. All those are solid things and seemingly don’t leave a lot to improve upon, but there is one area where this team lagged, and it seemed to spill over into another one: Average qualifying position.

The team ranked eighth in the class in this statistic and had an average starting position of 6.84, dangerously close to smack dab in the middle of the field. The area this spilled over into seemed to have been second-round losses, in which the team was also the category leader. Qualifying in the sixth spot typically gets you the No. 3 qualifier in round two, seventh gets you second, and eighth gets you first.

The one thing: Converting second-round losses, like the ones suffered in Dallas and Las Vegas to end the season, brings this team to Titletown. This happens with improved qualifying position and a less aggressive opponent in those rounds.

Second place: Shawn Langdon

Langdon, Brian Husen, and crew had another very strong season in 2025 with three wins, six final rounds, a near miss at the regular season title, and performances that kept them near the top of all the statistical categories, except for one: Their run completion rate. As a bellwether, champion Doug Kalitta made 128 total runs on the season and completed 87 of them with an elapsed time below four seconds and a speed of over 300 mph. In the NHRA statistical world we call this the Speed Index and, doing the simple math, his was 67.97 (87 completed runs divided by 128 total runs).

In contrast, Langdon made 124 runs over the 2025 season and completed 63 of them in under four seconds and at over 300 mph. This gave his team a Speed Index of 50.81, ranking them ninth overall in the class. This team had the most semifinal losses in the category with six, which was an indication of their weekly consistency of going rounds, but of those six, four of them were over the benchmarks to be considered for the Speed Index, a smaller sample of indicative of the larger trend.

The One Thing: If this team can elevate their run-completion abilities and push their Speed Index even into the low 60s from its position in the low 50s, Langdon will add another title to his mantle.

FUNNY CAR

Third Place: Jack Beckman

Some seasons are up and down, some seasons are marked with consistency, and some seasons are buckshot with highs and lows coming in manic swings. Very few times there is as clear a line of delineation in an NHRA season as we see in that of Beckman’s 2025 campaign. The team had three second-round losses from Gainesville to Indy and then proceeded to have four second-round losses in the five-race stretch to close the season.

When we look at those four-second round losses, they didn’t come from aggressive tire smoking defeats, but rather perhaps the opposite. The team qualified fourth, ninth, third, and second, respectively, in these losses and completed all four of the runs they lost under power but there just wasn’t quite enough of it getting to the ground. They effectively repeated their qualifying performance, but their opponents stepped theirs up

The One Thing: A more aggressive approach top to bottom over the last section of the season changes the end result for this team. We have seen them run the numbers that the best machines in the class can produce. Beckman is rock-solid behind the wheel, and their crew is experienced. Not a mechanical change here, perhaps a mental one.

Second place: Matt Hagan

Hagan’s championship runner-up season in Funny Car is a fascinating study in how experienced people in new roles evolve. Through the first seven races, they were in (and lost) five semifinal rounds. The next eight races saw them add a win, a runner-up, and a few first-round losses to the pile, one of them coming to start the Countdown.

The next four races saw three finals, two wins, and a first-round loss in Dallas, where the team was on the struggle bus from qualifying session one right up until the first round that they dropped to Paul Lee. The evolution of approach and the growth from a good, consistent, safe car into a pressing, aggressive sometimes tire-smoking car, to nearly the best statistical car in the countdown was amazing to watch. So, what do they change?

The One Thing: Comedian Steven Wright once famously said, “Experience is something you get right after you need it,” and, of course, he was right. But for this team, that was the one thing.

And now they have it.

They beat Austin Prock head-to-head in a final, they won multiple end-of-the-season races, and they finished better than they started. These guys have their one thing already, allowing them to lock in on other elements right off the jump.

Next time we’ll dive into the one thing that the Pro Stock and Pro Stock Motorcycle contending teams and riders need to get over the hump to championship glory.