Some might have thought Pro Stock regular-season champion Dallas Glenn leaned a bit on the exaggerated side when he declared the 2026 Countdown to the Championship was going to be a bloodbath. Somewhere in the other three Mission Foods Drag Racing Series professional pits, there are racers ready to step up to the microphone and say, “Hold my beer.”
If the 2026 regular season is an indicator of what is coming over the next six races, Glenn might have undersold it. Top Fuel has largely become a Kalitta Motorsports family fight, Funny Car looks capable of changing direction every 15 minutes, Pro Stock has become downright hostile on race day, and Pro Stock Motorcycle has a defending champion who openly admits he races better when there is something eating at him.
Ron Capps has been through enough of these championship fights to know the pretty part ends when the points are reset.
“You fight all year long, you win a bunch of races, you go in as one of the top three cars, and then you have a couple bad races and everything you’ve dreamt about doing your whole life is gone basically, or close to being gone until you get to Vegas and realize you’re not mathematically,” Capps said. “So it is an immense amount of, I don’t want to say pressure, it’s like the thing everybody wants to say.”
Pressure works, even if Capps doesn’t particularly care for the word. So does survival.
There won’t be much time to recover during the opening half of this Countdown. The first three races are on consecutive weekends, beginning at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Mich., followed by Rockingham Dragway and World Wide Technology Raceway near St. Louis.
Martin and Rockingham are both new stops on the NHRA national-event schedule. Some racers have history there, some have testing laps, and others will unload with little more than what their crew chiefs can learn walking the track.
Doug Kalitta and Shawn Langdon don’t need introductions to one another. Their Top Fuel teams work out of the same Kalitta Motorsports shop and have spent much of 2026 taking turns making life miserable for everybody else.
Each has won three consecutive races this season. Together, they won nine of the first 14 events, with Kalitta opening the Countdown as the points leader and Langdon carrying the U.S. Nationals trophy.
“It’s been definitely a battle with Shawn and I,” Kalitta said. “Our nice little points cushion has gone away unfortunately. No, we’re looking good. I think my guys and really both of our cars are in the same area of our shop, so they share space. It’s a cool deal because it’s bragging rights too a little bit with the two teams right next to one another.”
Langdon knows the deal. Crew chief Brian Husen has told him he intends to give him the same kind of race car Kalitta has and let the drivers sort it out.
“It’s always fun racing with Doug, but it’s always neat to have what we feel is the top two cars in the category,” Langdon said.
Calling it a two-car race would be dangerous. Leah Pruett starts third and Tony Stewart fourth, while Antron Brown, Maddi Gordon, Josh Hart, Justin Ashley and Billy Torrence are capable of knocking somebody out before the championship contenders ever get a chance to race one another.
Langdon’s larger objective is keeping the trophy in the Kalitta family.
“Ultimately, we want to keep these cars one and two, and however it falls, it falls,” Langdon said. “But as long as we keep these cars one and two, one of us gets a championship, that’s really the ultimate goal.”
Funny Car doesn’t have anything nearly that orderly.
Matt Hagan went to Indianapolis fifth in points and left as the regular-season champion.
Four Funny Car drivers entered the U.S. Nationals separated by less than one round. Capps starts the Countdown second, U.S. Nationals winner Jack Beckman is third, rookie Jordan Vandergriff fourth, J.R. Todd fifth and two-time defending champion Austin Prock sixth.
Hagan was asked which one concerned him.
“I think they’re all tough, man,” Hagan said. “I don’t think we have an easy pick on any of that.”
Beckman has been in these fights before. Prock has won the last two championships, while Vandergriff and Todd have given Hagan enough reasons not to dismiss them.
“And Beckman, he’s tried and true, man,” Hagan said. “He’s been there, I mean, he’s got the battle scars to prove it and so dealt with the pressure. So I think between all these guys out here, it’s just going to be a dogfight and I think that’s what the fans want. That’s what I want.”
Dogfight is probably safer than bloodbath for family reading. It means roughly the same thing.
Capps has lived enough Countdown seasons to understand what happens when a three-race stretch starts badly. There isn’t a weekend off after Martin to take the car home and reinvent it, and there isn’t one after Rockingham, either.
Hagan isn’t immune to any of it despite four championships. He says the nervousness is supposed to be there.
“And so mentally, I think it’s super exhausting,” Hagan said. “But I think when that goes away and you’re not nervous the first round and you don’t have that knotted up gut sensation, it’s probably time for you to stop because you don’t care anymore.”
Dallas Glenn can relate.
Glenn went through the 2024 championship fight with four drivers still alive when Pomona reached the semifinals. Somewhere in that mess, he asked six-time champion Erica Enders how she had managed to do this so many times.
The answer wasn’t reassuring. It doesn’t get easier. Glenn survived that experience, then came back in 2025 and won four of five Countdown races on the way to the Pro Stock championship. He enters this one as the regular-season champion after winning Indianapolis.
He and Greg Anderson won four races apiece during the regular season, but the class hasn’t given either of them much breathing room. Matt Hartford has three victories, and Greg Stanfield, Enders, Jeg Coughlin Jr. and others have kept Sundays dangerous.
Five times this season, the Pro Stock No. 1 qualifier has lost in the first round.
“Definitely this season, it definitely seems like we’ve seen more number one qualifier first round upsets,” Glenn said. “It almost seems like the number one qualifier is not where you want to be for whatever reason, whether one person is struggling a little bit, but I really feel like the entire class has tightened up as a whole.”
Glenn has also learned being the guy everybody is chasing feels different than doing the chasing. The 2024 experience helped with that, even if the lesson wasn’t particularly enjoyable.
“I don’t know, burned all of my stress sensors out or what, but it had definitely helped prepare me for the added mental load that comes from being right in the thick and being hunted in the countdown,” Glenn said.
Richard Gadson doesn’t sound like a man whose stress sensors are burned out.
He feels everything.
Gadson arrives as the defending Pro Stock Motorcycle world champion and the 2026 regular-season champion. He’s held the points lead since Charlotte last season, yet the way the 2025 championship ended still bothers him.
Rain stopped the season finale at Pomona before the class could finish things on the racetrack. Gadson got the championship, but not the finish he wanted. People wondered what would have happened. So did he.
“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times where I questioned myself,” Gadson said. “I’m like, ‘What would’ve happened that day?’”
Winning Gainesville this season helped. Winning the regular-season championship answered a little more, but now Gaige Herrera, Matt Smith, Angie Smith and the rest of the class get six races to come after him.
Smith arrives with some momentum of his own after beating Angie in the Indianapolis final. He’s chasing a seventh championship, which would break the tie he shares with Andrew Hines and Dave Schultz.
Gadson isn’t pretending he can shut any of that out.
“No, I just don’t try to play it too cool,” Gadson said. “If I’m not cool, I allow myself to feel what I feel, and I trust myself that those things are the things that drive me.”
There might be more truth in that than all the usual championship talk about taking things one round at a time.
Hagan talks about the knot in his stomach. Glenn jokes about burned-out stress sensors. Capps says a Countdown can age a racer 10 years.
Capps doesn’t really look at the Countdown as six races. Martin, Rockingham and St. Louis come first, then Dallas.
Get through Texas still breathing and there is something left to fight for in Las Vegas and Pomona.
“So it’s both sides of it, but at the same time, it’s a lot to be really, and you can’t say six races now because Pomona’s points and a half,” Capps said. “So we sort of look at it like Dallas. You’ve got to leave Dallas and be either in it or not. So it’s a four race for everything and let the smoke clear on Monday morning after Dallas and then see if you’re going to have a legitimate chance at winning the championship.”
Nobody in the other three classes appears interested in correcting him.
Gadson might have explained the whole thing best, and he didn’t need a points chart to do it.
“I’m not sitting there cool, calm, and collected at all, but I say, ‘You know what? This is your moment. This is what you were born for. This is where you got to go perform. This ain’t nothing new to you. This is a grudge race,’” Gadson said. “All of my emotions aren’t always outward, but I’m a fighter at heart. I’m a grudge racer at heart, and I think that that’s what I carry with me every time I go up there for a big round or for a championship or whatever the case may be.”
