Photos by Mike Burghart, NHRA, Mark Rebilas
Former Don Schumacher Racing colleagues Antron Brown (Top Fuel) and Ron Capps (Funny Car) have a combined five NHRA series championships and now carry the role of team owners. Both have announced plans to expand their operations, and each has chosen a woman to join the operation – and both have delayed the official additions to the pro ranks until 2026, with sponsorship, equipment, and crew members not settled yet.
Both ladies, as well, have similar situations. Neither Angelle Sampey, Brown’s racer, nor Maddi Gordon, Capps’ selection, has competed in Top Fuel before – but that’s where they’ll find themselves this time next year.
Just getting in the groove as a single-car team owner has been a gratifying accomplishment, for both Brown and Capps have won a title since leaving the entrenched DSR organization. Brown clinched his fourth in a dragster last November and Capps his third in a Funny Car in 2022, his first season as team owner.
Now the team bosses have gained a big-picture perspective. They’re leaning toward helping the sport grow and strategizing how to do that while preserving performance, all while studying the financial landscape. They definitely have started working on the puzzle and have the framework in order – the pieces that go in the center are still just a little bit scattered.
Brown assured that in bringing on Sampey he has “a method to all of our madness that we do, for sure. And we’re making sure that she’s right.”
The three-time Pro Stock Motorcycle champion did claim one of her 47 national-event victories last year at Reading in the Top Alcohol Dragster she once feared but now embraces. But another year would give her more confidence with four-wheeled racing machines, and it would give Brown more time to sort out sponsorship – and the extended game plan that includes his son Anson’s budding career.
Antron Brown said Sampey “has a lot of sponsors and eyeballs on her right now, and we have a lot of energy right now of going to Top Fuel. So we’ll see how all that stuff pans out. My son Anson’s in his second year of college right now, and we have some aspirations to move him up through the A/Fuel ranks. And we have a couple other people that’s been poking and prodding that might want to do Top Fuel or Funny Car.” He declined to name names, saying, “That’s more of their story to say, not for me to talk who that is and whatever comes that way. We really want to field another nitro car, and that’s the game plan.
“Our strongest possibility right now is Angelle. So hopefully that grows and then down the road, I know for sure my son Anson’s definitely want to take those footsteps. He has a strong following with Streamline, and they’re growing more and more each year in the sport and they’re putting more to his program on the bracket racing side and hopefully take him to a fuel route. We’ll probably get his license this year, and then the following year we probably will try to campaign him in a full-time deal once Angelle moves up. Or he’ll definitely race at least eight races or so the year after that while he finishes college. But that’s what we have in a nutshell right now, and we’re just pushing hard on it.
“I definitely want to be a two-car team. That’s the plan, and we’re not going to stop until we get there. Maybe it’d be a three-car program one day,” Brown said, “but I definitely feel comfortable with a two-car program. That’s our game plan – and maybe a Pro Mod team, too.”
Capps isn’t as ambitious, at least not right now. It’s not easy to amass all that’s required to do the job correctly.
“We don’t have trucks and trailers right now,” Capps said. He said crew chief Dean “Guido” Antonelli will choose the new hires at the appropriate time: “It’s his call to do. It’s going to be his team to pick. It’s his people to work with. He’s going to run it, and he will decide who the crew chief and all that will be. But that’s way down the road. We have the luxury of having time.” As for sponsorship, he said, “We’ve got some partners that are interested.”
Gordon will chase the Top Alcohol Funny Car championship with her family-operated team, hoping to deliver a title like father Doug Gordon, who has three. She won the season opener at Phoenix to take the early points lead. Last July at Seattle, the 20-year-old clutch specialist earned the distinction of becoming the 100th woman to win an NHRA national event.
Capps said he scheduled Maddi Gordon’s pro debut for 2026 to “give us time,” with “us” being him, Antonelli, and Gordon.
“I always had Maddi in mind, and I talked to Doug and Christina, her mom and dad, and I knew I didn’t want to interfere with anything we’re doing on our team. But even more so is to give her time to run for a championship with their team and with their car,” Capps said. “I didn’t want to rush things. I also understood, being around Don Prudhomme, being around Don Schumacher and really around a lot of the people in our sport, it could go very badly if you rush things.
But I keep checking with [Gordon’s parents]. I don’t want to take anything away [from her current focus] and cause any distraction. That’s my biggest thing.”
Brown said adding a team doesn’t strain the budget as much as some might think. “We already have the infrastructure to have two teams. It’s just basically having the personnel to run and tune that car. And we have that where it can balance each other, where you don’t have to have twice as much stuff. You can have just 75-percent more stuff than what we have now. What it does is it helps your team build and grow because you can lean on one another and you can learn twice as much, if you have two cars really working together, like [Kalitta Motorsports’] Alan Johnson and Brian Husen do.
“That’s a true two-car team,” he said. “[One] car figures out because he’s learning from the other car, because they run the same combination. It should be two cars that are identical. You turn the screws and you might try something a little different on one, but they’re all in communication on what they’re doing. They’re like pretty identical. And then you see him once the one car runs, you see A.J. come up to Brian if he’s the first car run and they go back to A.J.’s car and they’re talking about it. And then if AJ’s ran the first car, he comes back and they’re talking about it. That’s two car team. That’s what makes ’em so dangerous.”
The performance side is one matter, the financial/business side quite another. That part might worry some team owners, but Brown reduces it to logic: “You get the right partners involved where they can coincide and work with each other. That’s the whole name of the game, where you can bring another partner that compliments and they can collaborate with each other to grow their business.”
He said the hardest obstacle is patience: “I like it to happen. I want stuff to happen now, but I know you have to build it over time. And this is our year to try to make it happen, where we got to make it happen. If we want to have a second-car team, we have all the parts and pieces there. We’ve done our due diligence to get it ready. And we just need one more truck and trailer, which we have a couple trailers on order right now. We have all the stuff in place. We just got to get it going to make it happen.”
Brown is confident that “I have a strong foundation. I have a strong base, and my team is taken care of with the partners we have.”
Toyota’s planned exit at the end of this season does complicate things. “That’s going to hit hard towards the end of this year, where we need to find another manufacturer to be a part of our program. And we have all the criteria and we have all the stuff, like all of our stuff lines up with wins and championships and what we could do for partners. Just find the right partner that fits with you, that wants to grow with you and help you get you where you want to be. And that’s the whole trick, building those relationships. They don’t happen overnight. You have to build those. You have to develop it. And the reason why a lot of people are not patient is because they need the funding to pay the bill. That’s the difference. If you don’t need it, then you could be as patient as you want to be. But the reason why we built these partnerships is because at the end of the day, the dollar, the cash flow coming in, determines the outflow of cash you can spend.”
Brown has said it before: Rather than depend on the sanctioning body to slice costs, teams need to find ways to bring in more revenue to compensate.
“It needs to happen on all fronts, he said. “We need to bring more money in our purse. Money needs to be bigger. It’d be nice if you had enough purse money where you show up at a race that pays your travel fee before you even get there. When people come to the stands and see they want to see a spectacle. You’re the spectacle. You are to show. I always tell people, when Taylor Swift pulls up to a concert, she does not pay to park her bus, and she does not pay to put the concert on. You got to earn it. And that’s where the sponsorship comes in. So you have to earn that sponsorship so you can pull up and put the show on, and that’s what it’s all about. And then also the audience has got to pay to come in and that’s got to pay the purse to make you want to show up, too. You got to make it where it doesn’t cost you money to show up.”
Drag racing has a smaller ask and a bigger return on investment than the other major motorsports. ”In our sport, you’re talking about in the vicinity of anywhere between four to six million dollars. Other motorsports, you’re talking about 20 million, 15 million. And you don’t get the return on what you’re spending when you spend those type of dollars in some form,” Brown said.
“Some people you do. If you’re Tony Stewart, you got your return. Jeff Gordon, you got your return Your Chase Elliots, you get your return. Your Dale Earnhardt Jrs. and Dale Earnhardts, you got your returns., your John Forces They transcend the sport. That’s why they got the big dollars. They transcend the sport. Michael Jordan got the big dollars in basketball. He transcended the sport.”
With new personalities coming into the pro classes and smart decisions to support them, Brown and Capps are hoping to do just that.
