There are some who talk about supporting drag racing, and there are those who do. Then there’s what Rodger Brogdon has done.
Over the last three seasons, Brogdon has poured over $1,500,000 of his own personal money into ensuring the growth of a class near and dear to his heart — NHRA’s Competition Eliminator. To understand how he was able to pull this off is where the real story is.
For this reason alone, the team at CompetitionPlus.com has selected Brogdon as the recipient of the Mike Aiello Spirit of Drag Racing Award.
This award, named after drag racing superfan Mike Aiello, is dedicated to individuals who overcame adversity in life and situations while racing to make an incredible difference in the straight-line sport.
“I never got the chance to meet Mike personally, but I know enough people who did, and he made an impact on their lives,” Brogdon “To get an award of this magnitude, named after what was an incredible human being, ranks as high if not higher than winning a race. An award like this truly means something, and I graciously accept it.”
Aiello, who passed in December 2006, was injured in a workplace accident that kept him confined to a wheelchair in the latter years of his life. He never let his physical limitations keep him from spreading cheer and encouragement to others. He befriended many of drag racing’s competitors as well as members of the media.
For Brogdon, his mountain to climb was a tough childhood, mired in less fortunate circumstances.
“When I was little, we were very poor, and I didn’t even know we were poor until I was about 12 years old and went to somebody else’s house with a swimming pool – a house much bigger than ours,” Brogdon admitted. “Hell, I thought everybody in the world lived in a trailer house until I got there. I went home; and told my mom; I said, ‘Mom, we’re poor.”
Being poor was a major motivator for Brogdon, who worked his way through school and college, developing an entrepreneurial spirit along the way that included a paper route and a one-kid landscaping business.
After Brogdon proclaimed to his mother they were poor, he offered a solution, all the while being a pre-teen.
“I just said, ‘I don’t want to grow up to be poor. I’m going to do something about it.”
REMEMBERING MIKE AIELLO
During the early morning hours of December 29, 2006, drag racing lost a friend with the death of Mike Aiello.
Mike was a kind-hearted individual who never met a stranger. His positive attitude, despite such a bleak personal situation, was infectious. His knowledge of the stats and history of the sport was unparalleled.
“Big Mike” as we all referred to him, was a behind-the-scenes team player when it came to the success of CompetitionPlus.com. He made many friends in the sport and after reading a few of these tributes from his close friends and associates, you’ll end up with a piece of Mike in your heart as well.
Along the way, Brogdon grew from humble beginnings to something tangible. He worked to the point he could afford to have a modest Super Stock team. He would eventually use this as an investment that would one day pay off major dividends for drag racing.
When it is said drag racing invested in RoofTec, that is not a play on words.
“In 1990, I had a Super Stock 1966 Chevy II with a 283 with a Powerglide, and it was one of the nicest things I had ever owned,” Brogdon said. “I also had one of the enclosed trailers for which I paid $5,500, and in the end, I sold the whole operation for $25,000.”
Brogdon used the proceeds from the sale to invest in his start-up roofing company. Just like Brogdon’s chances of hitting it big in life, given his challenging childhood, making a roofing company a successful enterprise during the standards of the early 1990s were longshot odds at best.
The one aspect of Brogdon’s youth that provided him with a modicum of a chance to succeed was his penchant for thinking outside of the box.
“For the first four or five years after I got started, I was wondering if I made a mistake, but I had to stick with it because that’s the only thing I had at the time,” Brogdon said. “I didn’t have any more money, and I just kept with it and tried to think out of the box ’cause I had so many people tell me, ‘You’re never going to make money in the roofing business.”
“My answer was always, ‘Well, maybe not the way you do it. I’m going to do stuff differently.”
Brogdon was a game changer back then, employing simple procedures as graphically wrapping his RoofTec trucks. He also ventured into getting billboards placed around Houston. Eventually, other procedures, such as not requiring customers to place a deposit on services and giving lifetime warranties, made RoofTec the business customers could trust.
“Everybody else was just convinced none of that stuff works,” Brogdon said. “Way back in the day, you had to get a telephone book ad. It was like $900 a year for a full page in the Houston Directory, in the Yellow Pages, and that was so much money back then. It was incredible, incredible the things we went through to get as big as we are and as successful as we are today.”
It was Brogdon’s thinking-outside-the-box process that led to a rebirth of sorts for NHRA’s Competition Eliminator. He started off small, in providing bonus monies to the Competition Eliminator winners in his home division of NHRA Division 4, initially with then racing partner Steve Kent.
Brogdon eventually took the program to the next level through his RoofTec brand, investing $750,000 of not only his money this past year but also a number of sponsors who saw the same vision. He added another $250,000 to the promotion of the program, going as far as to create his own in-house promotional team.
For the last two seasons in particular, any racer who won a RoofTec Competition Eliminator Bonus Fund race had to win at least five rounds of competition, and it didn’t matter if it was a national or divisional event. The competition was so fierce in the last three seasons that up until late in 2024, no one driver had scored race wins in the same season.
To give an idea of how richly blessed the Competition Eliminator racers were in 2024, series champion Don Thomas pocketed $250,000 for his ten-race series win. The series also hosted not one but two big-stakes shootouts with over $150,000 in prize money available.
There were many racers who supported the series religiously, and for this Brogdon is grateful for them. But as odd as it may seem, the idea of a racer providing more money to the racers wasn’t well received by all, primarily those who stood to benefit the most.
“Let’s put it this way, it wasn’t well accepted by everybody,” Brogdon admitted. “Some people did wonder what the hell I was doing, why I was doing it. It’s the same old thing, as you can imagine, but you’re never going to make everybody happy, and I was just trying to help our class. We did that for a couple of years, and we went away. I went Pro Stock racing for a few years, and when I came back to Comp, man, I noticed instantly; I went back and checked the car counts and things of when I used to race, and I won the Division 4 Championship the first time in 2004, and I won again I think 2005. And man, we had 38 to 43 cars at every division for racing, and it was very competitive. It was hard to win back then.
“When I got ready to come back to Comp, I looked for the last year or two, and hell, we probably hadn’t been averaging 10, maybe 15 cars a race at the most. I said, ‘What happened when I’d been gone?”
Brogdon will soon find out if his investment of the last few years made an impact, as he has decided to step away from racing to concentrate on life at a slower pace. He feels as if he’s helped Competition Eliminator get a new lease on life.
Now, he will see if it will use the momentum to continue growth or slip back into declining status.
“Well, the optimistic part of me says yeah, it will continue to grow, I think so,” Brogdon said. “We will see where it goes from here.”
Brogdon will be watching from a distance because, as he puts it, “I don’t make a good spectator.”
Brogdon joins a storied list of recipients of the Mike Aiello Spirit of Drag Racing Award winners including John Medlen, Tim Wilkerson, Mike Edwards, Michael Beard, Jack Beckman, Aaron Polburn, Antron Brown, Shawn Cowie, Steve Johnson, Leah Pritchett, Lagana Brothers, Terry McMillen, Rickie Smith, Steve Torrence and most recently Erica Enders.
“When you do stuff as we did with Competition Eliminator, we did so with the intention of giving back to a sport that has so richly blessed us beyond anything we could gain monetarily,” Brogdon said. “You have to be prepared to give without the concern of getting a return. In this case, we all had a great time and are glad we had the opportunity to pull it off.”
