Jake Sanders didn’t come out of nowhere. He just showed up at the NHRA U.S. Nationals driving a Top Fuel dragster he owned.
And on his first qualifying attempt at drag racing’s biggest event, Sanders clocked a career-best 3.878 seconds at 306.26 mph. Not bad for a guy who, until recently, was better known for turning wrenches than turning on win lights in Top Fuel.
But there’s a lot more to Sanders than a respectable run at Indianapolis.
For years, Sanders worked alongside brothers Bobby and Dom Lagana, learning the intricacies of nitro racing from two men who know what it takes to keep a Top Fuel operation alive without an unlimited budget. He eventually moved into the driver’s seat of a front-engine dragster after winning two Nitro Chaos national events.
Still, there was something about Top Fuel he couldn’t shake.
Sanders wanted his own big show dragster, and not just any dragster. He wanted the Lagana brothers’ former Nitro Ninja, a car with a history that included Dominic Lagana, Gary Pritchett, Leah Pruett and former IHRA champion Clay Millican behind the wheel.
It was also a car that helped drivers such as Tripp Tatum and Ashley Sanford earn their Top Fuel licenses.
One day, Sanders approached his wife, Katie, with an idea that might have sounded ridiculous to someone outside drag racing.
He wanted to buy a Top Fuel dragster. Katie didn’t object but Bobby and Dom, on the other hand, tried talking him out of it.
They knew exactly what Sanders was getting himself into. They also knew him well enough to understand that telling him not to do something wasn’t necessarily going to stop him.
Sanders bought the car anyway.
He renamed it “The Menace,” and suddenly the longtime crew member had become a Top Fuel team owner, driver, mechanic and, when necessary, truck driver.
The operation doesn’t have a major primary sponsor, and Sanders isn’t pretending otherwise. What he does have is a collection of experienced friends, family members and a wife who is every bit as invested in the operation as he is.
“I really love the sport. I love working on them,” Sanders said. “That’s the thing is, I’m the clutch guy on this thing, still and I drive it, but I enjoy it. My wife and I do all the maintenance work at the shop. I build the short blocks; I build the heads. She does the racks. She cuts all the clutches. I set up all the clutch stuff. And so I, as a crew guy, enjoy that type of work. And I don’t mind driving the truck either. It’s fun. It’s our way of having fun, so we get to reap the benefits of driving it now.”
That’s the part of Sanders’ story that makes him different from many of the drivers competing in Top Fuel.
He isn’t just writing checks to race. Instead, he’s doing much of the work required to make those checks go a little further.
Sanders gained additional Top Fuel experience in 2025, finishing runner-up to Dan Mercier at an IHRA Outlaw Nitro Series event in West Salem, Ohio. He also drove Mitch King’s Top Fuel dragster at another IHRA event.
By 2026, Sanders was ready to take his own operation into NHRA competition.
His first outing at Columbus, Ohio, provided experience but no qualifying position. Indianapolis, however, was another matter.
The U.S. Nationals is where the sport’s biggest names gather, where part-time teams try to make their mark and where even experienced drivers can find themselves watching eliminations from outside the field.
Sanders arrived with modest expectations.
He wanted to make clean runs, learn how to drive the car and, if everything worked out, break the 300-mph barrier.
He accomplished all three on his first qualifying pass.
“It was unbelievable. I could not have asked for a better first lap,” Sanders said. “It was dark, it was truly the first run I made it to the finish line. In Columbus, I showed off a little early just learning how to drive. I hadn’t driven past the eighth mile in a long time. My chaos car only runs eighth mile, so just holding the throttle down for a thousand feet, it was getting used to it, just a change. It’s just so much more acceleration. So, it was pretty wild to whistle it down through there for Q1 and run 3.87, go 300. I only even wanted to go to Indy to go 300 miles an hour. After that, I didn’t care what happened.”
Sanders didn’t qualify for the U.S. Nationals, but the weekend gave him something he couldn’t buy off a parts shelf and that was experience.
Driving a front-engine nitro dragster to the eighth-mile is one thing but staying in the throttle for the full 1,000 feet in a modern Top Fuel dragster is something else entirely.
Sanders was learning both the car and himself.
“We’ve been out twice. We competed in Columbus and then we went to Indy, and we’re just making laps,” Sanders said. “I’m learning how to drive. Dom’s helping me with the tune-up and it’s his old stuff. So we’re just trying to go up and down the racetrack, make good clean runs. We perform far better than we expected to in Indy, so the car’s running good, the parts are looking good.”
The performance also gave Sanders a moment he won’t soon forget.
“Man, I just ran Indy in my own car,” Sanders recalled thinking afterward. “Not a lot of people could say that they have their own top fuel car and they ran Indy, I think.”
That realization might have meant as much to Sanders as the numbers on the scoreboard.
He had spent years helping other racers chase their dreams. Now he was chasing his own, and the name on the ownership paperwork belonged to him.
Sanders headed into the NHRA Texas FallNationals at Texas Motorplex with more information than he had when the season began. The team also had access to data from Kyle Wurtzel’s appearances in Michigan and St. Louis, giving Sanders and the Laganas additional information to work with. He ended up qualifying on the bubble with a 3.844 elapsed time at 319.78 miles per hour, and while he lost in the first round to Shawn Langdon, the knowledge taken away from the experience was priceless.
For a small-budget operation, every successful pass provides another piece of the puzzle.
Sanders isn’t promising a full NHRA schedule in 2027. His goal is to compete at three to six events, depending on funding, available parts and the people willing to help keep The Menace on the racetrack.
There will be plenty of work between now and then.
“I write the check for it, I got a lot of friends that help me, but we don’t have a big title sponsor,” Sanders said. “I got a lot of good people to help me get here and we can’t do it without them. So, we’ll have a little bit of a meeting over the winter after this one and see who wants to keep going and what guys we got to work. And how much work I do over the winter and how many parts we can buy. So, we’ll take it out a few times next year for sure.”
