Three-time Funny Car champion Ron Capps is overwhelmingly popular in NHRA and motorsports circles. He’s a master at staying true to the brand he has crafted for himself in more than 30 years of drag racing. But he’s not always so swell at keeping secrets.
It’s no secret that he planned to become a mentor to a deserving young racer, to give back to one who has shown potential, personality, and perseverance. He said he’d be doing that when he announced at the December 2021 PRI Show that he was forming his own team. But he didn’t go around trumpeting his pick, and he still hasn’t made a formal declaration.
He indicated to Competition Plus months ago that he would be expanding Ron Capps Motorsports and revealed at first only that his choice would be a woman. But in a game of “Twenty Questions” – Julie Nataas? “Nope.” Madison Payne? “Close.” Maddi Gordon? “Um…our families have been friends for a long time” – Capps shared that he would be hiring 20-year-old Top Alcohol Funny Car dynamo Maddi Gordon to drive a Top Fuel dragster for his team, starting in 2026.
“Originally,” Capps said, the plan was “to keep it sort of just on the down-low and just go about our business. But right now, we’re just kind of going forward.” And the NHRA, proud of its surplus of achieving women, would like to showcase Gordon at various marketing events as it promotes its 75th anniversary season in 2026. And that’ll start with next weekend’s Four-Wide Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
So, Capps said, “We’re going to do a little announcement at the Las Vegas race, with a no sponsor details or anything, but just kind of bring it out there and then get Maddi involved in some of the activities. She’s an important part of history with NHRA, being the 100th” [different woman to win at a national event.]
Gordon, daughter of recently retired three-time Top Alcohol Funny Car champion Doug Gordon, earned the distinction by winning at the July 2024 Northwest Nationals at Seattle’s Pacific Raceway.
This year, her agenda is to chase her own championship in Top Alcohol Funny Car and not look ahead to the career-changing move to a nitro-guzzling dragster. So she’s in for a dramatic change in a matter of months, and she knows it. By year’s end, she’ll leave her cocoon of the family racing business. All she has known in the drag-racing world is that dad Doug oversees the organization, younger sister Macie (a racer in her own right) serves as engine builder and car chief, mom Christina works on the crew, and car-owner grandparents Mike and Cheryl Gordon are crew chief and team manager. Away from the dragstrip, they all work together at Mike’s and Cheryl’s custom cabinet-building company, Morro Bay Cabinets in their Paso Robles, Calif., hometown.
So it will be a stark contrast to her familiar environment. She’ll move from a 3500-horsepower, full-bodied, 120-125-inch-wheelbase, front-engine race car that covers the quarter-mile in five seconds at about 280 mph to a 12,000-horsepower, 300-inch-long, rear-engine beast that’s the quickest-accelerating vehicle on the planet at zero to 100 mph in less than a second on a 1,000-foot course.
Gordon said it will be “different, yeah – I’m assuming way different than what I’m driving right now. But I feel like I’m extremely, extremely fortunate to be surrounded by the people that I am. I’m sure there’s going to be learning curves. Absolutely. Before I ran this car, the Funny Car, I watched hundreds of in-car videos of my dad just to learn the basic procedures. So I would literally sit in my room and watch a video and just clutch, pedal, throttle, brake, just trying to understand the procedures. And I feel like that really helped me in this car just to get just the basic routine down. So I mean, I’ll talk to Ron and whatever he says to do is what I’m going to do as far as preparing.
“We really haven’t gotten too far into detail just because it is still a ways away,” she said, “but I’m sure he’s got some ideas and things he wants me to try. But I’m all game for whatever he says to do. He’s obviously the man, so he knows what he’s doing.”
Just the same, Gordon said, “Heck, it’s hard not to think about it, but with the way that Ron handles everything . . . He’s so respectful with it, just like, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t stress on this. You do your thing. You run for your championship. We’ll handle it over here [‘we’ being himself and crew chief Dean “Guido” Antonelli] . But I think about it all the time, seriously, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And it’s so hard to fathom or just surreal to think that I really, hopefully I’m really going to drive a Top Fuel dragster next year. And it’s just like once it gets closer, I’ll start being, get more nervous, stuff like that.”
For now, she’s in the pinch-me, this-is-surreal phase. And Capps is in the I-have-lots-of-work to do phase. They haven’t ironed out sponsorship. He doesn’t have all the necessary equipment yet, and he doesn’t have a crew assembled, but he said, “We have the luxury of having time. We don’t have trucks and trailers right now.” As for the second crew, he said Antonelli will select the new hires when the timing is right: “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’ve got some partners that are interested, 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.”
Just as Roger Primm Capps had a hunch about Capps when he put him in a dragster in 1995 and Don Prudhomme saw Capps’ potential and hired him to drive a Funny Car in 1997, Capps discovered a kinship with Gordon.
“I just love that she grew up like I did, where she builds the cars, she works on ’em, she works with her family (at the racetrack and at her grandparents’ Morro Bay Cabinets). She’s very involved in the mechanical side. I knew she would be great at it, but I came up in a sport and never having to luckily bring any sponsor money to any of my rides, I was lucky. They hired me because they thought I’d do a good job. And that doesn’t happen anymore,” Capps said.
“And in today’s day and age, there are so many social-media influencers who are girls and women who are working on cars. And it’s really fun. And that just goes right into our sport: We don’t just have girls who compete. We’ve got girls who win championships and races and are very good from Jr. Dragster on up,” he said. (NHRA women have won races 387 times and on the pro level, earned 14 championships.) “So I just felt like it was the perfect opportunity. You could certainly build a team around somebody like her easily. But for me also, the first thing was my partners – I know that my partners would love [that].”
He said he planned Gordon’s pro debut for 2026 to “give us time.” But he didn’t make a move to grow his team until now, as well, because, he said, he didn’t want to disrupt the success he was experiencing with his new team. He scored a second straight title and third overall in his first year after separating from Don Schumacher Racing. But, he said, “I always had Maddi in mind.”
Capps said, “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.”
Whatever Capps’ reasons, Gordon said, “It’s really, it’s just a dream. The way that he just chose me is, I mean, seriously, I am picking my jaw off the floor. It’s just a dream come true. We’re super-fortunate to have the backing that we have for our Funny Car. We have so many great sponsors that help us to be as successful like we are, but we don’t have the funding to go [pro]. And I’ve known that. We don’t have the funding for that. It’s not something that we can afford.
“But with Ron, he’s just like, ‘I want to choose you because of who you are and how you drive and all that stuff, not because you have the money to do it.’ Seriously, I’m at a loss for words. It’s just an honor. And that doesn’t happen in drag racing. That opportunity is unheard of. And so the fact that he chose me and saw something in me is, I don’t know. I don’t even have the right words for it. It just, it’s amazing,” she said. “And I feel like I have the best coaches and teachers to learn from. But right now I’m just kind of in awe.
“I’m only 20 years old, and I could never be in this situation without my family, our backing, our sponsors. So much has to come together to make just an Alcohol Funny Car operation happen, let alone a Top Fuel operation. So it’s a lot. I’m very excited right now. But I know as soon as it starts getting closer and things start – seat pouring, all that kind of stuff – then the nerves are going to start hitting, for sure,” Gordon said. And that truth her parents taught her – “You have to learn to lose, because you will lose” – will echo.
“I want to be good, and I want to be successful, but I know that doesn’t come right away. I know that’s not an expectation. I can’t expect to be the best right off the bat. That’s hard. You got to have a different mindset when you go into something knowing ‘I’m not going to win every time.’ You have to learn to lose. You really do. I know that’s hard. Losing is very humbling. It’s very frustrating, but it makes you so much hungrier,” she said. “But I’m going to 100 percent put in the work and effort to hopefully be the best I can as soon as possible. I feel confident with Ron as my mentor and everybody that he’s surrounded with, that I’ll have the best team that can help prepare me.”
Gordon might be just 20 years old, but already she understands that “in order to be successful, you have to dedicate your whole life to it. Literally, this has to be your life or there’s just no way to be successful. It takes too much time. It takes too much effort. You’re gone from home all the time. It’s tough when you come back [from a race], because your work stacks up. So you got to work extra hard when you get home. You have to love it. You have to love it. And if you don’t love it, you’re going to end up hating it, because it’s way too much work.”
Work is what Maddi Gordon does. It’s not uncommon to see her elbow-deep into the engine of her Top Alcohol Funny Car. She’s completely confident as she navigates the snarl of wires, turns knobs, and yanks on a torque wrench like she’s pulling the handle on a Las Vegas slot machine that she’s too young to play. She knows exactly what she needs to do to make her clutch transfer power to the pavement.
And Ron Capps is confident she’ll know how to transfer her skill in driving a Top Alcohol Funny Car to driving a Top Fuel dragster. And that’s not a secret anymore.
