Jason Scruggs’ motto has always been simple - race good enough to let them know he was there. When the bell rang at the end of the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals, “them” knew the farmer from Saltillo, Mississippi, had been there. 

Scruggs is savoring the victory, despite not being his first in drag racing. It is, however, his first on the big stage of the NHRA Pro Modified series. He stopped Jose Gonzalez for the monumental victory.

Scruggs isn’t a trailblazer in the sense that he’s not at every race when the NHRA schedule rolls into town. He does make it a point to make the most of his opportunities.

“If you add everything I’ve done since I started NHRA racing, I probably hadn’t raced for a year because I’ve run about three races a year,” Scruggs explained. “Last year, I ran two races. This year, that was my first race of the year. I hadn’t raced for two or three times a year on an average since 2019, my first year.”

Scruggs admired the NHRA scene and respected its competitors to the utmost, but for him racing the blue-collar, backwoods Quick Eight events was always his calling card.  

“I was always an outlaw racer, and I always enjoyed eighth-mile stuff, and I never really thought about running NHRA a whole lot,” Scruggs explained. “Then Pro Extreme went by the wayside.”

Pro Extreme, once considered a true “run whatcha brung, and hope ya brung enough” doorslammer division where rules were at a minimum, at one time was drawing upward of 30 cars first in the ADRL and later PDRA. When that platform began to fade, Scrugg began considering the NHRA platform. 

“I just thought that’d be a good challenge, something fun to do, something I’d never done,” Scruggs admitted. “And then once we started it, my dream’s been to get a Wally. To get a Wally until I quit doing it, for sure.”

Scruggs nearly pulled off the milestone victory three years ago when he lost a rain-delayed Lucas Oil NHRA Summernationals final in Indianapolis, one of three races at Indianapolis Raceway Park during the pandemic-abbreviated season. 

“I almost got it,” Scruggs said. “I was ahead at 1,000 feet, and then Chad came around me. I will always believe God had a plan because a year earlier, Chad had broken his back. It was his time, and I was fine waiting for mine. I was proud of him.”

NHRA completed the event during the U.S. Nationals, the most prestigious drag race in the world. But there was a time when the most prestigious race for him was in his so-called backyard at smaller venues such as Atmore Dragway and Phenix City Dragstrip. That’s where Scruggs watched his doorslammer heroes do battle almost every weekend. rld championships all over the place, and we’ve been doing this a long time; we just had not won anything in the NHRA,” Scruggs said. “We had gotten so close it was heartbreaking. But this is awesome, and I’m just so happy right now. All these guys that help me, I just appreciate all of them. I’ve got good parts, so it makes me look good when we can race good stuff. This win is awesome, and a dream come true for us.”

But it was one racer who transitioned between a mullet hairdo and a mohawk who got his attention. 

“A lot of these races that we did in those places,  people may not know, about over the years were pretty big too,” Scruggs said. “Scotty Cannon was always one of my heroes, and we always did some match racing there right before he went fuel funny racing. We’ve always had a lot of good times. It’s hard to ever duplicate those days.”

Scruggs might not have been a pioneer in those early days of mainstream Pro Modified, but he was a pioneer in the fact that he helped make outlaw doorslammer racing more mainstream and became an icon during the transitional years. 

“I didn’t really start till the mid-90s, but I was a fan through all the, when Scotty Cannon was running nitrous the very first time, and Jeff Littleton and all them were out there, and the Super Chevy Shows were real big back in the day, 1990,” Scruggs said. “I was a fan during all that time, but I didn’t really start Pro Mod racing the mid-90s.”

One of Scruggs’s most significant lessons is the value of being a people’s champion. Watching Cannon’s interactions with the fans and the lesser teams only confirmed the thought process ingrained in his mind already. 

“Scotty was the same person regardless of what track he was at,” Scruggs said. “It didn’t matter that he’d won six world championships. He was just the same person. I always admired that. He didn’t know me from anybody, and he had won a few championships, and I was at a little bracket racer once, and he offered to weld on my car for me because he was the only one there with a welder. Even though he had all kinds of success and was the main guy for a long time, he never let it go to his head.”

Scruggs hasn’t let success go to his head, either. 

“We’ve won wo