As one of the most respected and busiest publicity directors in NHRA, Elon Werner has spent his career helping drivers and teams get the news about themselves and turn their dreams into reality. Werner is always ready with story-worthy ideas and stats that journalists turn into attention-getting stories for fans to enjoy and helping them learn more about their favorite racers.
But drivers and teams weren’t the only ones with a dream. For years, Werner had a dream that through patience and trial and error turned into what has become the wildly popular Drag Racing Bracket Bonanza (DRBB).
Debuting at the 2023 U.S. Nationals, DRBB has quickly become a fan favorite, with several thousand drag racing fans playing the game during each of the 20 national event race weekends, including numerous players around the globe from places including the Philippines, Europe and Australia.
“This is the third full season and it’s growing every race,” Werner told CompetitionPlus.com Saturday between qualifying rounds of the Gerber Collision & Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals at Route 66 Raceway in the Chicago suburb of Joliet, Ill. “We have great sponsors like Peak and Summit Racing involved and we’re working to get more sponsors.”
A resident of the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Werner has been involved in drag racing for nearly three decades. He thought for several years about coming up with a game that was similar to other fantasy sports games.
“I’m a huge sports fan, so I always do my March Madness bracket,” Werner said. “Our sport is just inherently set up with the brackets, like March Madness. For like two years, I just talked about, ‘Man, we should really have some kind of bracket game.’ And then going into 2023, a friend, the son of one of my really good friends, Aiden Lamkin, is a computer genius.
“I asked if he thought he could build a bracket website for me, so we started in early 2023 building Bracket Bonanza. I was like, you know what, I’m gonna quit talking about it, I’m just gonna do it. It was a complete Werner Communications project, and we started testing around the Western Swing of 2023.
“We started with like 10 people, and then 30 people, and then by Brainerd, I opened it up to a wider circle of media people because we were going to launch it at the next race, the U.S. Nationals. I probably had a hundred people really truly trying to break it, trying to find bugs to make sure it was ready to go. Through the beta process, my neighbors were playing and people who had never cared about drag racing before.”
And the rest has become history for Werner and DRBB.
While one of the key concepts of DRBB is for fans to have fun, it’s also to educate fans about the nuances of the sport as well as attract new fans to join the NHRA world. Now, not only do fans take part every race, numerous pro and sportsman drivers take part, as well as crew chiefs, crew members, team PR representatives, drag racing media, even racers’ wives and kids.
And that has spawned things like fans talking on Twitter/X, Facebook and other forms of social media to trade pick ideas or ask friends if they have any inside information.
“They’re coming up to me and they’re like, ‘Man, I’m not gonna sleep on J.R. Todd or Gaige Herrera or they’re talking to me about Pro Stock guys,’” Werner said.
