We all have seen those football coaches and commentators, frantically scribbling Xs and Os and arrows to diagram a play.
That’s what someone following all the personnel moves in the NHRA for 2026 might have felt like.
Get the dry-erase board out and fresh markers handy. Here’s what we know so far about who’s where in 2026.
Maddi Gordon will make her Top Fuel debut for the expanded Ron Capps Motorsports. The former Top Alcohol Funny Car driver represents the fulfillment of Capps’ promise from 2022 to give aspiring young racers a shot at the pro ranks.
That sounds like a boost to the class that fell short of a full field an embarrassing number of times in 2025. But it’s a wash, considering Brittany Force is gone. Force stepped away from the sport to concentrate on family life with husband Bobby Lyons.
Leah Pruett will help, though. She revealed in September that she will be back in the seat of the dragster she exited to focus on starting a family with husband Tony Stewart. In her absence from the race track, she remained active in initiatives for the team, even after giving birth on the final day of the 2024 season to their son Dominic.
But this return won’t be without inevitable drama. Stewart was keeping the Top Fuel seat warm for his wife, earning the 2025 regular-season championship in it. But in September, he, too, had news – and it involved third party Josh Hart, the Top Fuel team owner. Hart decided to ditch team ownership and signed a multi-year agreement with John Force Racing – and sold his equipment to Elite Motorsports owner Richard Freeman, who happened to form an alliance with Tony Stewart Racing at the same time.
Stewart jumped into that dragster, and à la NASCAR’s Denny Hamlin, will field Pruett’s dragster and Matt Hagan’s Funny Car and drive for another team. Of course, they’ve joked and mock trash-talked already about Stewart sleeping on the couch if he wins their match-ups – and maybe if she wins, too. Who knows?
They won’t be the first husband-wife combo to drag-race against each other. Top Fuel racers John Smith and Rhonda Hartman-Smith split four meetings, and Pro Stock Motorcycle couple Matt and Angie Smith faced off 28 times with Matt winning 21 times.
Oh – and in another quirky wrinkle, Stewart is sharing the Freeman-owned dragster with a pair of key Pro Stock drivers. Six-time Pro Stock champion Erica Enders and perennial contender Aaron Stanfield are borrowing the dragster, going through the licensing process to explore switching to the 12,000-horsepower, nitro-powered category.
Funny Car racer Buddy Hull took the opposite path of Hart, moving from hired driver at Jim Dunn Racing to team owner.
At John Force Racing, Hart will join Alexis DeJoria, who drove under the JCM Racing banner – which in turn will collaborate with Ron Capps Motorsports in Gordon’s licensing process. Evidently JCM boss Joe Maynard has had a longstanding behind-the-scenes relationship with Capps’ operation, largely with hospitality.
(JCM still is associated with Top Fuel’s Ida Zetterström, who must find funding quickly if she is going to make any significant splash in the series this year.)
Hart also will be a teammate to Funny Car’s Jordan Vandergriff. Every situation seems to have a story that’s interwoven with at least one other. And Vandergriff’s arrival has quite a background story.
Vandergriff is replacing Austin Prock, who has won the Funny Car championship the past two years. And he is inheriting the Chevrolet Camaro in which Prock posted two 340-plus-mph speeds and set the NHRA Funny Car record for most No. 1 qualifying positions in a single season (15) en route to his two titles. What’s more, this move rekindles their keen rivalry.
The two broke into the pro ranks in 2019, both in the Top Fuel class. They chirped at and about each other until Vandergriff’s sponsorship went away and he was out of action for five years. Vandergriff hooked on with FOX Sports and was a pit and trackside reporter who occasionally interviewed Prock. Now Vandergriff has a chance to dethrone Prock – in Prock’s Funny Car that became known as “The Prock Rocket.” With young Jason Bunker defecting from Cruz Pedregon’s team and coming to Vandergriff’s to assist veteran tuner Chris Cunningham, perhaps the car’s nickname should change to the “The Bunker Buster.” (Pedregon coined that term with a nod to President Donald Trump’s use of it months before.)
So this John Force acquisition of Vandergriff just shifts the rivalry with Prock from Top Fuel to Funny Car.
And the reason Vandergriff is at John Force Racing, replacing Prock, is that Prock and his tuner extraordinaire father Jimmy Prock left John Force Racing. They haven’t disclosed where they will be next season, but it is widely anticipated that they will team with fellow Funny Car standout Bob Tasca III. Tasca said he’ll announce major plans for his operation in mid-January.
Tony Schumacher, who has earned eight overall championships with three different crew chiefs along the way, will have a fourth – seasoned Jim Oberhofer – in his first full season with Rick Ware Racing. Ironic, maybe, but for a number of years, Schumacher was Oberhofer’s biggest annoyance when the crew chief worked with Doug Kalitta and Schumacher always found a way to thwart Kalitta’s title bids.
Steve Torrence seems to be over all the drama, for the most part. He opted out of roughly one-third of the races last year just because he could. He didn’t broadcast all of his reasons, but he knows exactly why he makes his deliberate decisions. Most figure we’ll see him back at the dragstrip in 2026, but when and where we do is anybody’s guess.
But keep the markers handy still. The next season doesn’t start until March.
