When the drivers in the NHRA Pro Stock class got together and decided to run throwback car designs at this year's 66th annual Denso Spark Plugs U.S. Nationals, five-time class champion Jeg Coughlin Jr. was quick to select his favorite ride.
 
"It was pretty easy for us to pick the 2000 design we used to win our first Pro Stock championship, which also happened to be the car I drove to my first Indy win in Pro Stock that same year," Coughlin said. "Fortunately, when we started to overlay that design on my current JEGS.com Elite Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro, it really seemed to fit really well. It was meant to be!"

Already a world champion after winning the 1992 Super Gas title, Coughlin was just a few years into his pro career when he entered the 2000 U.S. Nationals with a very competitive JEGS.com-branded Oldsmobile Cutlass. He was the runaway points leader, having won seven of the first 15 races of the year, and the chase pack seemed to be getting smaller and smaller in his rear-view mirror.

In a final-round clash of world champions, Sean Bellemeur maintained his perfect record Aug. 16, by scoring a second-in-as-many-tries Top Alcohol Funny Car win with the Summit Racing Equipment Mid-West Drag Racing Series presented by J&A Service (MWDRS). Bellemeur, the two-time and reigning NHRA TAFC champion, defeated first-time Funny Car pilot and defending NHRA Pro Mod world champ "Stevie Fast" Jackson for the Domino's Summer Speed Spectacular title at World Wide Technology Raceway, near St. Louis.

"Stevie and his team, they're proven champions, so it didn't surprise me at all they made it to the final," Bellemeur said. "He's a great driver, makes waves wherever he goes and likes doing it, so it was a fun weekend. And I'm especially glad the outcome turned out the way it did."

Tommy Johnson Jr. is uncertain if he wants to be through driving a nitro car at the end of the season. However, if his options dry up for 2021, it's been a great career.

The racing world learned on Wednesday afternoon that Johnson's stint of driving one of two charity-themed fuel Funny Cars for the Chandler Family under the Don Schumacher Racing umbrella ends at the end of the pandemic-spoiled 2020 season.

Johnson understood from the day he accepted the driving gig initially with the Make a Wish-themed Funny Car and later M.D. Anderson Cancer Center tribute, the program had a shelf life.

It's been a long time since Stevie "Fast" Jackson could say he was a rookie behind the wheel of any kind of race car. But there he was on Sunday, at the Midwest Pro Modified Series killing it.

Maybe Jackson, the man whose exploits behind the wheel of a doorslammer, might soon have a new t-shirt line to rival his "Shadow" Radial vs. The World design.

It could read, "Never in my life did I think I'd be racing a Top Alcohol Funny Car, but here I am killing it."

Giving back has long been a core value of the Don Schumacher Racing fabric, and with the launch of the Chandler family ‘Giving Car’ program in 2014, DSR significantly amplified its charitable efforts over the past seven years.

The program, which enables a non-profit to be recognized through a dedicated tribute livery at no cost to the organization, was started by philanthropist and longtime friend of DSR, Terry Chandler. Following Terry’s passing in July 2017, her husband Doug Chandler opted to keep the program going in her honor, extending its run for an additional three years by personally funding the 11,000-horsepower Funny Cars piloted by Tommy Johnson Jr. and Jack Beckman. As DSR celebrates its final stretch of the Chandler family partnership, which will conclude at the end of the 2020 NHRA season, drag racing’s winningest organization reflects on some of its proudest accomplishments.

Tony Schumacher, the winningest Top Fuel driver in NHRA history, will return to the seat of a Don Schumacher Racing (DSR) Top Fuel dragster to compete with DSR at six of the remaining 2020 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series events.
 
Schumacher temporarily rejoined the DSR stable for the Indy 1 and 2 events last month after a year-and-a-half hiatus from racing. He will make his second comeback aboard the Okuma/Sandvik Coromant dragster starting with the NHRA U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, September 4-6. Schumacher will then compete at the next five NHRA events that follow the prestigious Labor Day weekend race.
 
Calling the shots on Schumacher’s co-branded machine will be championship crew chief Mike Green. The Schumacher/Green duo dominated the dragstrip from 2009 through 2017, having won 27 races, and two Top Fuel world championships (2009, 2014) together.

Tommy Youmans of Georgia is a racer’s racer to the core. He’s a family man and foremost, home and hearth come first; but when it comes to his recreational activities, his love of drag racing good old American hot-rods certainly holds this 56-year-old man’s attention. If he’s not busy with his industrial steelwork, or with his beloved wife Wanda, he’s thinking of ways to go faster and quicker with his bad-ass, Pro 275 car “The Judge.”

That’s right a Pontiac GTO Judge, circa 1970. Tommy’s a Pontiac fan in the truest sense of the word, through and through, so he chose to build his latest creation based on his youthful remembrance of his first ride in a GTO and that fond memory still tugs his heartstrings to this very day. One of Tommy’s earliest jobs as a young man was at a gas station, a full-service station as you’d see one now, back when checking the oil and cleaning the windshield as he pumped gas, was a standard service every customer received. Back at the time, LBJ was in the White House, and Richard Nixon was just a Senator looking to stay in public service. If you remember S&H Green stamps and free Coke Glasses with a fill-up and oil change – those were the days.

A little more than five years ago, Kyle Riley was the owner of a trucking company who raced whenever he got a chance.

Fast-forward to 2020, and he’s still a trucker and drag racer at heart -- and one of the most successful promoters in the sport. 

Riley’s the founder and braintrust of SFG Promotions, which this summer paid $1.1 million to New Jersey’s Steve Sisko for winning a bracket race in Martin, Mich. For an encore, Sisko pocketed an $100,000 in the next day’s event with a different car.

Ryan Oehler was in a stiflingly hot attic when he received a phone call that changed his life.

He was working for his family’s AirTech Inc. heating and cooling company, dreaming about how he and his father, Brad, just had “to go to the big time,” meaning the NHRA’s Pro Stock Motorcycle class. As he repaired a blower motor on an air handler in the hood, he dreamed of racing glory.

He remembered thinking about his American Motorcycle Racing Association Pro Mod Harley comfort zone and wanting to break out of it: “We don't want to kill the guys in Pro Mod, because we already beat them all. They're all like, ‘Ugh – Ryan's here.’” After all, Oehler had scored back-to-back AMRA Pro Mod Harley championships (2015-16), and he still owns that class’ elapsed-time record (5.227 seconds) from Rockingham Dragway in 2016. “They just didn't like that I was young and being so successful. You can just see it in all these older guys’ faces: ‘He’s a good kid, but damn him, he's just too fast.’” That’s why he said he was thinking, “I got to make it. How are we going to do it?”

The Ignitor in Boise had a few tense moments in the first round of Top Sportsman when Daryl Coe of Ridgefield WA and Todd Fricke of Pasco, WA got together in the shutdown area. It appears Fricke had a rear brake lock up and jumped the car sideways. The Corvette crossed into Coe’s lane and the two cars got together and then collected the right-side guard rail. Both drivers emerged shaken otherwise uninjured.