“Brian always just tells me, he says, I’m just going to give you a car, and I’m going to try to give you the car that they’re going to have,” Shawn Langdon said. “And I’ll just leave it up to you and Doug, and you guys can battle it out.” The Brian in question is Brian Husen, Langdon’s crew chief at Kalitta Motorsports, the “they” is the Mac Tools dragster parked right next door with Doug Kalitta in the seat and Alan Johnson making the calls, and that one sentence is about as good a summary as you’re going to find of how this outfit has gone about its business in Top Fuel in 2026. Two cars in the same corner of the same shop, sharing data, sharing parts and sharing a boss, that then roll up to the starting line and try to beat each other’s brains in.
So far it’s working out alright. Kalitta won the regular season championship by eight points, Langdon won the U.S. Nationals, and they’ll start the Countdown to the Championship this weekend in Michigan seeded first and second. On Monday’s NHRA pre-playoff media call, neither one of them tried to dress it up as anything other than what it is. “It’s a cool deal because it’s kind of bragging rights, too, a little bit, with the two teams right next to one another,” Kalitta said. I’ve been around enough two-car deals to know that “teammate” is often just a word on the press release, but in my opinion this one is the real thing, and I think a lot of that traces back to the two guys tuning the cars. Johnson and Husen go way back (Husen was the crew chief on Del Worsham’s Al-Anabi dragster under Johnson when I wrote a cover story on Worsham in 2011, and Langdon won his 2013 championship with that same bunch), so when Husen says he’s going to give Langdon the car they’re going to have, he knows better than just about anybody alive what that car is going to be.
What gets lost if you only look at the final regular season standings is that this was anything but a runaway. Langdon came out of the gate hot, then cooled off for a stretch, and while he was scuffling Kalitta reeled off what Langdon described as three wins in a row, which is where the cushion came from. Then Langdon and Husen got it back together in a big way, went 345 mph at South Georgia Motorsports Park, won there and again at Maryland (two tracks that were brand new to the tour this year), and by the time everybody got to Indy the whole deal came down to whether Kalitta could go enough rounds on Monday to hold him off. “Getting to the third round was a huge relief for me, because we were trying to definitely stay ahead, and it was going to be a tough day with the way Shawn’s car was running,” Kalitta admitted.
Langdon won the race, Kalitta won the season and, as far as I can tell, nobody at Kalitta Motorsports went home unhappy. “Obviously we had our sights set on the regular season championship, but if you’re going to lose it, might as well lose it to your teammate,” Langdon said. “We want to keep everything for Connie Kalitta, everything he’s done for us, everything he’s done for the sport. That’s our main goal, is to keep these cars one and two.” Connie is the reason both of them talk the way they do. Doug is his nephew, and Langdon has said more than once that handing the boss a championship would mean as much to him as winning one himself.
He said it again Monday, and made a point to bring up somebody else while he was at it. “Brian Husen, getting him a world championship as a crew chief would mean a lot to me as well,” Langdon said. “And a lot of the guys on the team that put in all those hard hours. It’s not like the pressure thing isn’t there, but ultimately we want to keep these cars one and two. However it falls, it falls. As long as we keep these cars one and two, one of us gets a championship.”
If you’re thinking that all sounds a little too friendly for the top two seeds in a playoff, I get it. But consider where they’re headed. The Countdown opens at US 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan, a couple hours from the Kalitta shop, and Doug Kalitta, 62, a two-time world champion who has been doing this at the highest level for the better part of three decades, has never once gotten to race an NHRA national event in his home state. By the sound of it, the whole company is coming. “We’ve had a lot of excitement with our employees and just sponsors,” Kalitta said. “We have Applied Innovations, which is kind of headquartered over in that part of the state, on my car this weekend, so we look forward to hosting those guys.” As for his notebook on the place, there isn’t one. “I’ve been there just testing back in the day when I think Connie was driving,” he said. “So really I can’t even remember the place very well.”
Funny enough, it’s the California kid who knows the joint. Langdon has been going to 131 for years, just never in a fuel car, to run the big-money bracket races (in his words, the “half a million dollars, a million dollars” deals) that made the track famous in a completely different corner of our sport. “I’ve always felt like it’s got national event potential,” Langdon said. “I was really glad when the opportunity came about and Chad [Head, Kalitta Motorsports General Manager] had started talking about the potential of that track. I was all in for that.”
Kalitta will have something else on his mind this weekend, too, and it doesn’t have anything to do with points. His son, Mitch, recently won in Top Alcohol Dragster at Bowling Green driving for Randy Meyer Racing, and he’ll be in Michigan before sitting out Rockingham and St. Louis and coming back for the rest of the year. “The last couple of years, it started with Shawn giving him an opportunity to drive his Super Comp car,” Kalitta said. “So we’ve been gradually working our way up to where we’re at today. And he’s doing a great job. I’m super proud of him.”
The kid is cutting lights, according to his dad, and that kind of thing has a way of spreading through a race team. “I think it all kind of motivates all of us, because he’s really hitting it hard.” (And how about Langdon, in the middle of a championship fight with the guy, being the one who put his son in a race car in the first place? That tells you about all you need to know about how this group operates.)
Langdon, for his part, can’t stop looking for reasons to run two cars at a national event. He was at Indy on Wednesday making laps in his sportsman car a full two days before Top Fuel qualifying started, and he’s convinced it makes him better at his day job. “So much of what we do is mental, and just kind of building that confidence up early and getting some extra hits on the tree,” Langdon said. “I feel like I drive a little bit better when I’m kind of in race mode already before the race starts.” The problem is Sunday. He’s been to the final round in two classes on the same day at Bristol, which he called “pretty hectic,” and he isn’t sure that’s something he wants to sign up for in a Countdown race. “If it was up to me, I would run both. Heck, I’d run four or five if NHRA allowed it,” Langdon said. “But at the end of the day, my job is to drive a Top Fuel car. Maybe St. Louis, I don’t know. I’m contemplating that one.”
Then there’s Rockingham next weekend, which is the one wrinkle in all of this for a guy who has raced just about everywhere. “I’ve never been to Rockingham, no,” Langdon said when he was asked point blank. The NHRA tour has never been there, either, which means that for the first two weeks of this Countdown nobody in Top Fuel has a page of notes to fall back on. Personally, I think that plays right into the hands of a team with two cars that have kept finding their way down the racetrack when others couldn’t, and a crew chief in Husen who, by Langdon’s account, does his homework and looks pretty deep at things.
Does it hold up when the tune-up sheet is blank? That’s what we’re about to find out. Husen’s going to give Langdon the car they’re going to have, same as always. After that it’s up to him and Doug.
