Richard Freeman said when he boarded a plane for Ohio to visit with IHRA owner Darryl Cuttell, buying the sanctioning body wasn’t on his list of objectives. It wasn’t even on the same list.
Freeman went looking for trucks, trailers and other rolling assets. By the time he returned home, however, word had begun circulating that the Elite Motorsports owner might be interested in acquiring IHRA itself. He wasn’t.
“I didn’t go try to buy the IHRA. It wasn’t even in my mirror,” Freeman said. “I went over there to meet with Darryl to buy some of his rolling assets. Only after I left did the IHRA deal come up because I had an interested party. But I was never buying the IHRA.”
Freeman said the speculation became enough of a problem that racers began contacting him about unpaid purse money. That was when he decided the distinction needed to become public.
“And I tried to make that clear after I started getting phone calls from people wanting me to pay the purse,” Freeman said. “So that’s the reason I wanted to make sure that everybody understood that. Yeah, that deal’s a total cluster f****.”
There probably wasn’t much room on Freeman’s calendar for another sanctioning body anyway. He has enough going on with the racing empire already sitting in front of him.
If Freeman legitimately had considered buying IHRA, the better question might have been when he would have found the time.
Freeman has pushed Elite Motorsports well beyond the Pro Stock operation it once was, and his largest expansion yet is underway in Top Fuel. Tony Stewart is already racing beneath the Elite banner, while six-time Pro Stock champion Erica Enders and Aaron Stanfield recently made their first runs in an Elite Top Fuel dragster during testing at Indianapolis Raceway Park.
That is where Freeman says his attention belongs.
“Yeah. No interest,” Freeman said of IHRA. “And to clarify, all my chips are pushed in right here. I am a partner of the NHRA. I never darkened the gate over there to participate, nor would I have, no matter what the purse was.”
Freeman said he sympathizes with racers who committed themselves to IHRA’s ambitious 2026 program and were left without expected payments when the schedule collapsed. His sympathy, however, does not extend to believing the enormous financial promises ever made sense.
“So I feel bad for the people that did go over there and not get paid,” Freeman said. “But in the same voice, I could tell you that they’re a little bit culpable as well because anybody though that was real was crazy.”
Freeman’s position leaves little doubt about which side of drag racing’s sanctioning-body fence he occupies. His investment, his cars and his people are tied to NHRA, and he says that isn’t changing.
The clearest evidence was sitting at Indianapolis Raceway Park last week. Enders and Stanfield climbed into an Elite Top Fuel dragster as part of Freeman’s plan to develop drivers from within. Freeman conceded he had his own what-in-the-hell-am-I-doing moment long before the car ever fired.
“Oh yeah, I though about that long before we ever did that,” Freeman said. “So yeah, no, that was a really neat deal for our program. No meaning behind it at all besides if something were to come about, we have two drivers within our group that can step in and take over for either Tony or Leah or anyone else on these fuel cars.”
The Indianapolis laps weren’t intended as a signal that Enders or Stanfield was headed out of Pro Stock. Freeman wanted two more drivers in the Elite system capable of stepping into a fuel car if the need, or the right opportunity, presented itself.
“So building from within, as we’ve always done,” Freeman said. “Erica and Aaron are next in line. So that’s really all it was to it. They both did fantastic. Erica went first, so Aaron got to watch her and the few mistakes that she made and correct off of those. They worked really well together. Tony and Leah did a fantastic job. Pretty cool stuff.”
The car itself gave Freeman another reason to feel good about the direction of the program. Crew chiefs Mike Green and Joe Barlam took a new dragster to Indianapolis and produced clean runs with drivers who had never before experienced Top Fuel acceleration.
“No, we had talked about that stuff early on and I will say this,” Freeman said. “Those guys brought out, well, a brand new car, never been run. And it made it down the track every run with every one of them except for one. So says a lot about who they are over there, Mike and Joe and that whole entire group. Second to none. Maybe we can get off that second round bug that’s kind of bit us for the last four or five races, but keep doing what we do.”
What they do, in Freeman’s assessment, they do well without his chance to grab some glory. Freeman won’t be joining his drivers in the cockpit.
The man willing to hand more than 11,000 horsepower to Enders and Stanfield has drawn a considerably firmer line when the conversation turns toward putting himself in the car.
“No, I’m out. If I die, everybody here is in deep s****,” Freeman said. “So we’ll stay right where we’re at. I would drive it I mean it. Again, I think it’d be something to mark off your bucket list, but I like watching these younger guys get an opportunity to do that.”
Top Fuel might not be the end of Elite’s nitro ambitions, either. Freeman said a Funny Car program would receive consideration under one familiar condition.
“Oh yeah. We’re open to anything that somebody wants to do that makes sense financially,” Freeman said. “Yeah, absolutely. And I think both of them would be open to driving one.”
Freeman isn’t opposed to expansion, but expansion has to fit the business instead of the business being forced to fit the racing. He doesn’t view Elite solely as a collection of race cars. He views it as a business built around people, partners and opportunities, with the cars serving as the most visible part of something much larger.
What began with one Pro Stock operation has grown into one of the largest organizations in professional drag racing. Freeman doesn’t need much prompting to identify the person he considers the cornerstone of it.
Erica Enders.
“Me and Aaron Stanfield were leaving breakfast this morning,” Freeman explained. “We was riding in the car together and I said, ‘A lot of people don’t get it.’ Erica is the one that really was the caveat that made all this other stuff happen.”
Freeman isn’t suggesting Enders built Elite by herself. He is saying finding the right driver, partner and personality gave the organization something it could build around.
“When I say that, that doesn’t mean Erica did it, right?” Freeman said. “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.”
Freeman can look around today and see Enders, Stanfield, Jeg Coughlin Jr., Troy Coughlin Jr. and a collection of drivers, crew members and partners that would have been difficult to envision when the operation started. Now Tony Stewart is part of the picture, and Top Fuel has expanded Elite’s reach into territory Freeman once watched from a distance.
“Here’s what I can tell you. We are blessed beyond belief, right?” Freeman said. “God has blessed us more than we ever deserved. My dad got to witness a lot of it. He’d really like this deal with the top fuel car.”
The relationship with Enders began when she joined Freeman’s operation for the 2014 season. What followed was a run that transformed both careers and helped transform Elite from a Pro Stock team into something approaching a drag racing empire.
Freeman remembers the path Enders traveled before she arrived. He also remembers the criticism she absorbed while becoming one of the most successful drivers in Pro Stock history.
“No. No. I mean, a lot of people, she takes a lot of s**** being a female,” Freeman said. “She gets all kinds of s**** that she doesn’t deserve. But that’s just what people do, right, when they’re jealous.”
Her early Pro Stock career wasn’t a straight line toward championships.
“When Erica started driving Pro Stock, she crashed cars. She never stopped pushing,” Freeman said. “Victor Cagnazi gave her an opportunity. She drove. She had some success.”
Freeman said Enders went through operations and equipment that couldn’t consistently provide what she needed before landing with Elite. Once the combination came together, the results changed quickly.
“She had different people that are always stumbling blocks for her,” Freeman said. “She drove cars that were less than, 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 a ton of national events with me. But it says a lot about all of us.”
Loyalty has become one of Freeman’s recurring themes. Enders has it, and so does Stanfield, whose relationship with Elite grew from something more guarded into what Freeman considers family.
“And I’ve always been loyal to her. Always will be as long as she wants to do it,” Freeman said. “She has a home here as a lot of my other people. Aaron Stanfield being one of those. Me and him joke when he first come over, he’s very standoffish because his dad did this for a long time for himself. And they’ve become part of our family and it works out. It’s a badass. It’s cool.”
There was no bigger message behind the test, Freeman said. Enders and Stanfield got their first Top Fuel laps, and if Elite ever needs someone to climb into one of its fuel cars, now both have some experience.
He sees pieces worth borrowing and others worth leaving behind.
“I think Don Schumacher had some great ideas,” Freeman said. “I think sometimes Don put the racing too much at front. I mean, people think I’m crazy when I say this, but the racing is secondary here with Elite Motorsports.”
Coming from a team owner whose operation exists to win races and championships, the statement sounds backward until Freeman explains it.
“Now that doesn’t mean my drivers think that, or the people that drive over here, but Richard Freeman thinks that,” Freeman said. “I can do with or without it. The people, the partners, the things that we do in order to allow us to do that, that’s the things that I enjoy. And so I believe Don got a lot of it right. In today’s time, the racing is just a piece of it. And so we’re going to continue doing what we’re doing. It’s proved itself to be pretty productive and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Freeman said Schumacher and John Force were among the team owners he watched while developing his own philosophy. He borrowed concepts, not blueprints.
“There’s a lot of people out here that I’ve always looked up to and watched as a kid,” Freeman said. “And tried to take what they did do and change it to form around what I want to do.”
The biggest difference, Freeman believes, is the absence of internal walls.
“I do things much different than Don Schumacher. My vision is much different,” Freeman said. “While some of it looks familiar, this is about building a team. Not a team within a team, within a team, within a team. So there’s no walls up over here.”
Our driveres may race one another on Sunday. Afterward, Freeman says they go right back to being one organization.
“I’m telling you, when we come, we get back, we eat together, we stay together. It is a truly different field. Anybody that says different is not telling the truth.”
It is a long way from the Richard Freeman who showed up with a Mountain Motor Pro Stock car more than two decades ago. Freeman admits that version of himself wasn’t envisioning Top Fuel dragsters, six championships with Enders, Tony Stewart driving beneath his banner or rumors that he might buy an entire sanctioning body.
Back then, he was trying to find his own place.
“You know back in that time, I didn’t even know my own name,” Freeman said. “But I will tell you that I always wanted to run 500-inch pro stock. But I was veered off of it, right? And back then I couldn’t afford it.”
The education hasn’t stopped because the operation got bigger.
“So I got a lot of good, good… I learned a lot of lessons and still learn them today, right?” Freeman said. “You get up every day and something’s different all the time. We try to not put blinders on and just keep working on being better as not only people, person, but what we do out here.”
Freeman occasionally allows himself to look at what grew from that first race car. He thinks about his father getting to see much of it, Enders becoming the foundation, Stanfield joining the family and Stewart now carrying Elite into Top Fuel.
“To have people like Erica and Jeg and TJ and Greg and Aaron and all of the people, Tony Stewart driving under Elite Motorsports banner and be partners with Tony Stewart and I mean, how much better can it be?” Freeman said.
Which brings the conversation back to IHRA.
Forget for a moment that Freeman says he never intended to buy it. Suppose the trucks and trailers had somehow turned into the whole operation and Richard Freeman suddenly owned IHRA.
What was he going to do with it?
“Nothing,” Freeman said. “You can’t ever come back from that. Nothing you can do can you come back from that so I don’t… Again, you know what it’s done? It’s created more work for myself. The NHRA and any of these other series, the Midwest series, the PDRA. The people that thought they sold a track and didn’t sell their track.”
For Freeman, the fallout extends beyond the people who raced there. He believes the collapse left other sanctioning bodies, series and track operators dealing with problems they didn’t create.
“All it’s done is create us a lot more s**** to do,” Freeman said. “That’s what it’s done.”
For a man who has spent more than a decade building one racing operation, Freeman apparently knew another one wasn’t his to rebuild.
“I’ll keep doing what I do,” Freeman said.
