Doug Kalitta and In-N-Out Burger Dragstrip share quite a storied history, and Kalitta’s Mac Tools Toyota team is hungry to add another gripping chapter this weekend. The 2025 NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series continues March 28-30, 2025, at the Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals in Pomona, Calif.
Kalitta has seven wins in 15 final rounds at In-N-Out Burger Dragstrip, and this suburban Los Angeles race track is loaded with NHRA history. The most significant of Kalitta’s seven Pomona wins happened in November of 2023 when he defeated Leah Pruett in a winner-take-all final round to clinch the 2023 NHRA Top Fuel championship, the first of his career.
“Pomona has been a really good track for us over the years, and we’d like to make more memories there this weekend,” Kalitta said. “We’ve done well there, but so has Alan (Crew Chief Alan Johnson) so that’s a lot of track knowledge that is an added bonus for our Mac Tools Toyota team. Hopefully, things will line up well for us, and we can have a shot at a win this weekend.
“The Winternationals is a race with so much incredible history. It’s at one of the NHRA’s most historic tracks, and you could call it the birthplace of the NHRA so it’s always fun to race there. Southern California race fans are passionate, and they know their drag racing. We always have great crowds there, and that only adds to the excitement of racing at Pomona.”
Kalitta enters this weekend’s race in third place in the NHRA Top Fuel point standings on the strength of his runner-up finish last weekend in Phoenix. He lost a close final-round race to his teammate, Shawn Langdon, in an all-Kalitta Motorsports final round. Both cars made good runs, but Langdon came out on top. That runner-up result pushed the 2023 champion to third in points entering the season’s third race.
“At the end of last year, we were running well, and all through testing, my car was running well. We’ve had a lot of good runs. We qualified fourth at Gainesville but then had that issue with the car in the second round. We qualified No. 1 in Phoenix but lost a good race to Shawn in the final. We’re looking forward to going some rounds this weekend and taking it one more step. My team is hungry, super motivated and our confidence is high – that’s pretty cool. When you get someplace where you’ve had a lot of success, it always seems like maybe it’s just a little easier to have higher confidence.”
The Right Trailers Top Fuel All-Star Callout, postponed from Gainesville, Fla., earlier this month, will be run Friday, March 28 during Pomona, Calif., qualifying. In Gainesville, Kalitta, who is the second seed for the event, “called out” his opponent for the first round of the event and will race Clay Millican when the event begins. In addition, Kalitta will compete in Saturday’s Mission Foods NHRA Challenge, a rematch of the Phoenix, Ariz., semifinals and finals.
This story was originally published on March 25, 2025. 
