The celebration sounded exactly like you’d expect after watching every Maddi Gordon interview since her debut in Gainesville. She bounced from question to question in the NHRA media center with the same energy she carried all weekend, smiling, laughing and talking fast enough that even seasoned reporters struggled to slip another question into the conversation.
Beside Gordon sat her team owner Ron Capps, celebrating the 80th national event victory of a Hall of Fame career while Gordon tried to absorb her first.
Then one question came in that hit her with the same force as her parachutes catching on a 340 mph run behind the wheel of her Carlyle Tools dragster.
What did it mean knowing Capps had once been willing to give up the Funny Car seat that made him a champion multiple times if that was what it took to put her in a race car?
For the first time all afternoon, Gordon’s speech halted
“That one’s hard to describe,” Gordon admitted. “I didn’t actually know that until a couple months ago and he said that casually in an interview and I looked at him like, I don’t know, like, ‘What?’
“And that’s huge. I mean he is a legend in our sport truly. And every time I say that he’s like, ‘Stop saying that, you make me sound old.’ But he is a legend and to drive for him is such a blessing. He is the best mentor. He’s the best teammate. He’s the best boss and it’s crazy to think that he believed in me enough to give up his seat that he’s been in for 30 years.
“He had never seen me drive a dragster with a blower on it, not a Top Dragster, not an Alcohol dragster, not a Top Fuel dragster and he believed in me enough to give up his seat potentially. And that’s the confidence that gave me the confidence to get in that race car.”
Sunday’s win provided the validation Gordon had sought, while Capps saw it differently. He saw it as history repeating itself.
Long before he entrusted the future of Ron Capps Motorsports to a 21-year-old racer from Paso Robles, Ca., he first wagered everything on himself. Stepping away from the security of Don Schumacher Racing following the 2021 season to start Ron Capps Motorsports, the headlines focused on the reigning Funny Car champion becoming an owner-driver. The public saw NAPA Auto Parts stay with him, championship crew chiefs Dean “Guido” Antonelli and John Medlen remain on board, and a championship team seemingly continue without interruption.
None of it was simple, but talking to Capps made it seem like a walk in the park. Capps smiles when revealing a conversation he had with former crew chief John Medlen.
“He told me that I was like a duck going across the water smooth, but underneath the surface you could imagine how fast my feet were paddling,” Capps recalled.
“Team ownership has been a lifelong dream,” Capps said when announcing the move. “I’ve been in the sport of NHRA Drag Racing for almost 30 years as a driver, and being able to race for legends like Don ‘the Snake’ Prudhomme, and then Don Schumacher, it’s obviously been an incredible experience. I’ve been very fortunate to compete at a high level all these years and be successful, and it feels like the right time to take this next step.”
A drag racer can have dreams, but dreams won’t purchase race trailers. Nor will passion buy a Funny Car chassis. The love of the sport doesn’t create a credit line for superchargers or convince banks to loan money against a startup race team with little more than a transporter full of race cars as collateral.
Enter Joe Maynard, who accepted all of the above as collateral.
“Joe Maynard… has been a huge help to me,” Capps said. “I had to start from scratch.”
The more Capps spoke, the more he revealed his vulnerability, returning to the duck-and-water image. It’s a reality very few people had ever heard.
Maynard loaned him the money to purchase equipment. He sold him parts and helped structure financing that allowed the organization to function while sponsorship dollars were still months away.
“I had to start over with this team from scratch,” Capps said. “So you get sponsor money, but the sponsor money is supposed to run the car. You don’t think about the million and a half that you got to get trucks, trailers, blowers, all the parts.”
The challenges only multiplied as truck and trailer inventories disappeared almost overnight. Some of his deals fell apart and equipment that Capps thought was available suddenly wasn’t.
John Force had planned to help him acquire a transporter but it wound up being sold elsewhere.
Then Force found a way to make it up to the driver he once wanted to hire. Capps revealed Force held onto a pair of race cars until Ron Capps Motorsports received its first sponsorship payment, giving the reasonably new organization time it otherwise wouldn’t have had.
“John Force has been a huge help,” Capps said. “He came up. He was teary-eyed when he came up and he was real proud of what we did. So that was very cool.”
The Top Fuel dragster Gordon drove to her first national event victory traces part of its history back to that moment.
Chuck Grospitch helped prepare the car before becoming Gordon’s car chief, another piece of a program assembled one relationship at a time instead of with a limitless checkbook.
There were other influences impossible for Capps to ignore.
Antron Brown had already walked the owner-driver path and became the first phone call when Capps began wondering how to build a business instead of simply driving for one.
“There’s a lot of Schumacher everywhere,” Capps said. “I told Antron that I’m not sure this would even be happening without him. He was a huge help for me when I decided to go on my own.”
“The smallest of things and the largest of things that you don’t think about of starting a business or a race team and things like that, he was a huge, huge help to me.”
The lessons, though, started much earlier and he has two drag racing legends to thank for the wisdom. Nearly three decades spent racing for Don Prudhomme and Don Schumacher became an education that couldn’t be found in any business school.
Capps learned how championship organizations looked, how they treated sponsors, how they presented themselves and, perhaps most importantly, how successful owners believed in people.
Those lessons resurfaced in April 2025 when Capps announced Gordon would become the focus of a Top Fuel expansion.
“We wanted to do it backward, where we wanted to pick somebody who we thought would be great and then come in from the other angle and find sponsors, where it’s usually the opposite,” Capps said at the time. “I want to give someone a chance like Snake gave me a chance. We’re going to build this program around Maddi.”
Most owners wait until sponsorship is secured before choosing a driver. Capps was never the typical team owner from Day One.
It wasn’t the safest business decision, but it was the same leap of faith someone had once taken on him. Gordon saw the chance crystal clear
She arrived believing she had been hired to drive a race car.
Sunday, she realized someone had trusted her enough to risk an entire organization on an unproven talent. That may explain why her answer took longer than any run she made all weekend.
By the time the conversation ended, the first Ron Capps Motorsports double victory looked like much more than two winners holding trophies.
It looked like proof that the gamble Capps made in 2022 was worth making.
And that after spending four years fighting to build a race team from the ground up, he was willing to fight through it all again because he believed the future of that team was sitting beside him in the media center.
“Yeah. I learned from Don Schumacher and Don Prudhomme especially on what made them successful and I think having everything clean and the way that things look are very important the way we present ourselves,” Capps said. “I didn’t have to train her at all, she understands it. A lot of things that I think are important. We’re going to make it. This helps, this will definitely help, two wins. But yeah, it means a ton because again, I don’t have anything other than this. This is it.”
