Erica Enders wouldn’t describe herself as a Top Fuel driver. But earlier this week, that’s exactly what she drove during a private test session at Indianapolis Raceway Park.
And after spending most of the last 25 years looking through a windshield, the six-time NHRA Pro Stock champion discovered the view from behind 11,000 horsepower is considerably different.
Enders and Elite Motorsports teammate Aaron Stanfield made their first Top Fuel runs as part of a plan Richard Freeman has been talking about publicly for more than two years. Tony Stewart and Leah Pruett were there to help with the education, along with crew chiefs Mike Green, Joe Barlam and the team maintaining Elite’s Top Fuel operation.
The first lesson came quickly. Enders believes she can do it, but she isn’t pretending a few runs made her a Top Fuel driver.
“It’s definitely a really big learning curve,” Enders said. “I’m super fortunate to have Tony and Leah in my corner, helping teach Aaron and I how to drive and getting to work with people like Mike Green and Joe Barlam and the guys that work on the car. They made it way more comforting, but I will say there’s nothing comfort feeling about getting in a bomb, but it was very cool.”
Calling Enders inexperienced in a dragster wouldn’t be accurate. Before becoming one of the most successful Pro Stock racers in NHRA history, she raced Super Comp and Top Dragster for five years, including the period when the latter was still known as Quick 32.
What had disappeared over the years was familiarity. Enders has spent her professional career driving short-wheelbase, suspended doorslammers, and a Top Fuel dragster doesn’t offer much that resembles them.
“I drove dragsters for a long time, but haven’t been in one in quite some time,” Enders said. “Everything I’ve driven short wheelbase was suspended. So it’s a different perspective, different view in front of you. Definitely takes some different handling skills. I’m excited to have another opportunity to try again. I wanted to run again the next day.”
The difference in how she sits behind the steering wheel is worlds apart. One she’s sitting up like in a regular passenger car and the other is more laid back.
“It’s pretty close to the ground. Then the front, the wheelbase is so long, it handles completely different than what I’ve been driving for the last 25 years. So yeah, but it’s fast.”
Fast is a word Enders understands better than most, and her Pro Modified experience prepared her for a violent launch. What surprised her wasn’t what happened after leaving the starting line. It was what happened when the clutch started coming in.
The initial hit wasn’t what caught Enders’ attention. It was what happened farther down the racetrack when the clutch began applying and the acceleration refused to quit.
“I was glad to get the first run over with, and after that, I was fine.” Enders explained. “I need to make more runs, but at least I put the procedure into perspective, like exactly what I had to execute to make it happen. And it’s not the hit. We go .900s in a Pro Mod car (60-foot), and we go high .830s, .840s in testing in that car. So it wasn’t, and Aaron will tell you the same thing. It wasn’t the hit or the first 60 feet or whatever. It’s when the clutch comes in. Then it just keeps pulling from that point on. It takes your breath, your vision changes. [Aaron and I] joked and said that they totally undersold how fast it is out there. Not on the starting line, but out there.”
Enders didn’t need another adjective when asked if the acceleration actually took her breath away.
“When the clutch comes in, it sure does. Yep.”
Freeman has been talking about putting Enders in a Top Fuel dragster since June 2024. At Indianapolis, she finally strapped into one.
He first let the Top Fuel plan out of the bag in June 2024 during an appearance with Joe Castello on WFO Radio. Freeman said he intended to field a Top Fuel dragster with Enders driving it, which was also an interesting way for Enders to learn about her own future.
She laughed it off at the time. But by September 2025, Freeman’s idea had grown considerably. He announced Stewart would join the newly formed Elite Motorsports Top Fuel team for 2026, while Enders and Stanfield were expected to begin testing during the summer.
This week, the talking stopped. The next stage isn’t about putting Enders into an NHRA national event immediately. More tests are planned but Elite isn’t going to interfere with Stewart’s championship pursuit or consume parts and resources merely to accelerate somebody else’s timetable.
“We talked about it after our test in Indy, and it’s just going to depend on Tony and their race program and parts and whatever with the countdown coming up,” Enders said. “So I know that there’s a test day after Indy. I think there might be one after Vegas, so we’ll just have to see where we can fit it in. We’re not in any sort of a rush, but we definitely… Aaron and I definitely want to make some runs.”
Enders already knows enough to understand that processing a Top Fuel run isn’t accomplished while the car is accelerating. Inside the cockpit, her attention was on procedures, positioning and making the correct decisions before the car covered another few hundred feet.
Only afterward could she replay what had happened.
“You’re trying to take everything in so fast and make the best decisions possible,” Enders explained. “So you’re really not thinking about the speed or what’s happening. You’re just focused so hard on trying to do a good job for everybody that I don’t think I though about that until after I mentally downloaded the run afterwards and talked it over with my crew chiefs and whatever. It wasn’t the initial hit. It’s out there, and it’s feaking fast.”
There was also the matter of firing the engine.
Enders has been racing long enough to know how to compartmentalize everything happening around her once an engine starts. Top Fuel didn’t change that part, although a familiar observation from Billy Torrence suddenly made considerably more sense.
“When they fire, same as in their Pro Stock car,” Enders explained. “You can be thinking about stuff and worrying or wondering, and then they fire it, and for whatever reason, everything goes away, and you just do what you’re supposed to do.
“Billy Torrence, he makes me laugh so hard. I’ve known him since I was a little kid. But he says, ‘This stuff’s ignorant.’ Every time they go to fire it, I say, ‘Please don’t start. Please don’t start, please.’ And I’m like, ‘I can see why you say that. Please don’t start.’ Aaron and I had a really great time and I think we both did pretty well and we’re just going to move the needle.”
Moving the needle is probably the best description of where Elite’s Top Fuel expansion sits.
Freeman has never been particularly shy about expansion. What started as a single-car Pro Stock operation has grown into a sprawling organization with cars competing across Pro Stock, Pro Modified and Mountain Motor Pro Stock, and now Top Fuel.
Enders has watched that growth from the inside. What sounded like another Freeman idea when he first announced it in 2024 is now a race car she has actually driven.
“It’s definitely closer than it’s ever been,” Enders said. “I think Richard started blabbing his mouth about this opportunity a little over a year ago, and it finally all came to fruition. But all of this is going to be purely dependent on partnerships and sponsorship dollars. But it’s definitely something that I feel like is on the horizon for our group. Look how much we’ve expanded from a one-car Pro Stock operation. Sometimes we have almost 10 cars out here, a handful of Pro Mod cars, Mountain Motor cars, and now we own a Top Fuel operation. So why not two or three, right? So that’s the Richard Freeman motto, but we’re going to take the right steps, the baby steps to get there. We’re not forcing anything and just going to add another class to my license.”
There is no announced Top Fuel debut for Enders, and sponsorship will have plenty to say about whether the experiment eventually becomes another full-time racing program. For now, the objective is considerably less complicated: make more runs, learn the car and earn another category on her NHRA competition license.
For Freeman he pulls no punches that when he started his operation, it was Enders who provided the perfect cornerstone for which to build his program on back in 2013.
“Me and Aaron Stanfield were talking at breakfast and I said, ‘A lot of people don’t get it,” Freeman said. “Erica is the one that really was the caveat that made all this other stuff happen. When I say that, that doesn’t mean Erica did it. She was a huge component of hiring the right person to get behind the wheel and be a partner and loyal. And all of the things that she’s been to our family, our employees, and we’ve grown off of that.
“She takes a lot of crap being a female. She gets insulted. She gets all kinds of stuff that she doesn’t deserve. But that’s just what people do when they’re jealous. When Erica started driving Pro Stock, she crashed cars. She never stopped pushing. Victor Cagnazi gave her an opportunity. She drove. She had some success.
“She had different people that are always stumbling blocks for her. She drove cars that never going to go nowhere. And so when Erica come here at the end of ’13, started in ’14, and you really think about it. We’re just a little over a decade in and she’s won six world championships. And 46 national events with me. It says a lot about all of us.”
