My wife grabbed me by the shoulder.
We were standing on the waterbox at Texas Motorplex Saturday night, right behind the starting line, right under that three-story tower. They’d painted a Texas flag on the concrete there, fifty feet wide, and I was doing what I do. Shaking hands. Chatting up a couple racers who were hanging around.
The staff had started killing the track lights so they wouldn’t wash out the music festival on the other side of the property, and for a minute the only thing still lit up on the whole drag strip was that flag, and us on it. Like a stagehand over on the concert side had spun a light around and pointed it at us by accident.
Alisha said, “Babe, you need to take this in. This is where the World Series of Pro Mod is going to happen.”
She was right. I walked to the middle of the flag and looked up, and the first thing my eyes landed on wasn’t the tower or the suites or the scoreboards. It was the grandstands. Empty, dark, and enormous. Exciting and terrifying at the exact same time. I looked at my son, Max, and we both had the same thought, but he said it out loud. “Man, Dad, those grandstands are big.”
The chills had actually started an hour earlier, on Highway 287. Cars as far as you could see. Thousands of them. Traffic backed up in both directions, police waving people through, the highway signs reading SPECIAL EVENT TRAFFIC. Before we’d even turned into the lot I knew something was happening in Ennis that doesn’t happen in very many places in our sport.
The first time I saw this place was the fall of 2007. ADRL World Finals. I drove down overnight from Kirksville, Missouri, in a 1996 Chevy Lumina, eleven hours straight through, because Drag Illustrated was a handful of people wearing every hat we owned and I was going as the reporter, the photographer, the ad salesman and whatever else it took to keep the lights on.
Back then, I was walking around at about 255 – maybe a little heavier. My mom lovingly called me husky. My jeans told the same story. I remember being thankful it wasn’t terribly hot, so I might not sweat through my socks and/or have to change shirts three or four times a day. The ADRL had been running its finals at Texas Raceway in Kennedale, a little honky tonk of a drag strip I loved, and moving to the Motorplex was a big step for them. I remember thinking it was the biggest building I’d ever seen cars drag race in.
Twenty years later, I’m bringing my race there.
We started Saturday night in the Meyer family’s suite in the tower, which is exactly what it sounds like. Family friends, special guests, a bunch of kids running around, which I love to see.
Every suite has its own little outdoor seating area out front, so I walked out there to watch the junior dragsters and the alcohol cars run between the music acts. I saw Christie Meyer Johnson off in the distance, down by the starting line, and hollered her name and waved. She came walking over and I bent over that fence as far as I could to give her a hug. And without any prompting, she said, “Does it look different now?”
It does. It’s crazy. Six years earlier, at this same event, the two of us sat at a high-top table and joked that we ought to do something together someday. Now we are.
Let me be clear about something. I love a honky tonk. Some of my favorite drag strips on earth are small places that make up for whatever they’re missing with heart and soul, and I will be at those places until they put me in the ground. But who doesn’t want to feel progress? Who doesn’t want to grow? I think feeling progress is about as close to a tenet of human happiness as there is, and that’s what the Motorplex represents to me, and I believe to Pro Mod.
We’ve done this dance before. The World Series was born at Bandimere Speedway, which was probably too big a building for us at the time and too far up a mountain, and we sold north of 6,000 tickets to a Pro Mod-only show anyway. No nitro. I was really, really proud of that. Then we moved it to Bradenton and spent four years proving the concept, and that race became one of the most watched and most talked-about drag races on the planet. Now, it’s time to take the leap again.
Here’s what I see when I look at the Motorplex. I see pavement for every one of my racers, million-dollar rigs and two-car teams and sponsors and families, my entire cast of characters parked on concrete. I see a paddock we can turn into a destination inside the venue. I see hospitality at a scale that brings new partners in, which is how we generate the money that lets us take better care of the people in the cars. A building like this is how you change the economics of drag racing. Especially when you fill it.
And that’s the part I’m not going to pretend doesn’t scare me. Forty thousand seats. We’ve packed Bradenton more than once, but this is a big bite, and I’ll tell you the thing every promoter thinks and nobody says: what if nobody shows up? I think about it. I thought about it standing on that flag. And then I think about the lot on 287 and I think, these people are already here. They just haven’t seen Pro Mod yet – at least not how we do it. Our sport plays too small. I want to play big. And, at least to me, this is what playing big looks like.
I didn’t invent Pro Mod. Not even close. This class had a storied history long before me and long before Drag Illustrated. I watched the IHRA, its original home, lose its grip on doorslammer racing. I watched Kenny Nowling and the ADRL show the world what this brand of racing looked like at its absolute best, packed houses and all, and then I watched that go away, too. The best racers in the class ended up scattered across sanctioning bodies and regions and pockets, and there wasn’t one place, one weekend, where they all showed up to find out who was who.
That’s what I wanted to change. In the spring of 2017 we announced the first World Series of Pro Mod and I planted a flag. One race that brought the best together at one time in one place, paid real money, and treated the people in the cars like the rock stars they are. Not as filler. Not as the help. Not as interchangeable numbers. The show.
Nobody believes in this brand of drag racing like I do. Nobody.
I’ve been in the thick of it with these racers for twenty years. I’ve watched their kids grow up. I know their wives. I love them. Every day of my life for a decade now, I’ve been working on Pro Mod. Helping racers. Helping other series. Working on rules. Selling sponsorships. Everything I do, I do because I love this class. And it seems like every time I turn around lately there’s a new promoter, a new guy with money who wants to give back. Good. The more the better. But we aren’t going anywhere.
I don’t want Pro Mod to take part. I want it to take over. I want every person in the world to know who Lyle Barnett is. Who Mark Micke is. Who Aaron Stanfield and Spencer Hyde and Melanie Salemi are. I want these people landing sponsorship deals and getting recognized in airports. I want them to be the show, and I want the show to be in a building that looks like it.
The racer I thought about on that flag was Mike Bowman. He got into the first one on a fan vote and ended up winning the damn thing, and he still wears the ring. I pictured him rolling up that return road, the one that runs right in front of the grandstands, with forty thousand people on their feet. That’s the picture. That’s the whole reason. That’s the moment he deserves. It’s the moment Pro Mod deserves.
Somebody asked me Saturday night why I’m bringing the World Series of Pro Mod to Texas Motorplex. I didn’t have to think about it.
This is where it belongs.
Wes Buck is the founder of Drag Illustrated and the World Series of Pro Mod. The 2027 World Series of Pro Mod runs March 5-7 at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas. Get on the ticket list.
This story was originally published on October 12, 2026. 
