Lex and Gerda Joon are in the market for a car chief.

Lance Larsen decided after the final qualifying run at the Denso U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis that he would step away from the Hot Wheels Americana Car Care Products Top Fuel team.

Marc Meadors has a new hot rod rolling out of the Jerry Bickel Race Cars shop. This neat classic Chevrolet will be powered by a Carl Stevens-built, turbocharged engine. 

Despite all of the wins, despite the 2016 championship and the more than 750 round wins, the one - and possibly only - thing still missing from Ron Capps’ career resume in Funny Car is a trophy from the biggest drag race of them all.

Capps has collected 65 trophies in all during his decorated career, a career that has spanned more than two decades, but he has never held one at the U.S. Nationals. He has one runner-up, coming here in 2017, but a win has eluded him.

That all changed - sort of - four weeks ago when Capps collected his first career win at Lucas Oil Raceway. While it wasn’t the big one, Capps finally got a taste of victory in Indianapolis.

As they say in life, all good things must come to an end.

That is exactly how Jack Beckman is treating the remainder of the 2020 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season as he learned just a few weeks ago that his time in the Infinite Hero Dodge Charger Funny Car for Don Schumacher Racing would be coming to an end at the conclusion of this season and, very well, could spell the end to his time in Funny Car.

Josh Haskett was supposed to be one of the teams, who were scheduled to compete at the prestigious Denso Spark Plugs U.S. Nationals at Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis in Brownsburg, Indiana last weekend. The North Carolina native, who competes in Top Alcohol Funny Car, was not able to compete at The Big Go. 

Haskett -- who does not have a big primary sponsor -- saw his entire trailer go up in flames on Tuesday, September 1st, on Route 35 in Rio Grande, Ohio. He said a battery was the cause of the fire. 

“The tow car was downstairs in the hauler and it was the battery,” Haskett said. “According to the Fire Department and those that were there, all the hotspots were right there at the trunk. In the car, that’s where the battery was in the trunk. Thirty minutes prior to that, see, we had left North Carolina at 3 in the morning and we stopped to get something to eat around 7 am. Then, probably 20 miles up 35 after we stopped, the road was very rough. The trailer was bouncing. We assume that the battery was bouncing, which led to the fire.” 

The Pro Stock debut of Mason McGaha was a year in the making.

McGaha, 18, made his debut in the 2020 season and not surprisingly there has been some growing pains.

McGaha drives a 2020 Camaro for his family’s Harlow Sammons Racing team.

From the time Dr. Jamie Meyer took over as president of the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) Trade Show in May, he understood a day was coming when he'd face an unprecedented challenge.

Simply put, Dr. Meyer is the first PRI Show executive to be challenged with staging the annual trade show amid a global pandemic.

"It's a super complex area," Meyer said. "I'm respectful, especially folks like you that have caught it, that safety is just paramount. There's a lot of politics involved, but at the heart of this, we have to keep people safe and certainly not pushing this thing to make money or to do anything foolish like that. But many industry folks rely on the PRI Show to help them set up their next year and continue those relationships.

J.D. Campbell understood the time was as good as it would ever be the make the jump.

At 43 years old, Campbell, a diehard X275 Drag Radial racer from Arlington, Texas, had long aspired to race the Radial vs. The World division, the top of the food chain for the narrow tire style of racing. For him, he landed a big fish at the right time.

"I've always wanted to run Radial vs. The World or Pro Stock," Campbell said. "This is going to sound a little simplistic or whatever, but just to have what I call a purpose-built race car, a Bickel car that you sit back in the seat far, has always been a dream."

Owner and founder of Aeromotive Inc., Steve Matusek, has announced his plans to continue the 2020 Pro Mod season following an incident at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis on Sept. 6, 2020. Matusek debuted his 2020 Pro Mod Mustang with his new title sponsor, Tequila Comisario, before enduring a roll-over crash in round one of eliminations.
 
With continued support from Tequila Comisario, Matusek will be returning to the Pro Mod class in a backup race car from Elite Motorsports. Matusek is familiar with the black sixth-generation Camaro as he drove it to a personal best of 5.739 at 252.05 mph during the 2020 Drag Illustrated Door Slammer Nationals in Orlando. It utilizes a ProCharger supercharger as a power-adder for motivation on the dragstrip. The car’s livery will feature the Tequila Comisario logo and bottles.

The 2020 Atlantic Oils East Coast Thunder meeting scheduled for Sydney Dragway in November has been canceled, making it the fifth event this year to fall victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The last meeting on the domestic calendar was at Sydney Dragway, January 25, 2020.