Mike Bowman has a line about the Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod, and he has been saying it for years.
“If you win this race, you’re a certified badass forever.”
He would know. Seven drivers have won it. Nobody has won it twice. And only one of them will ever be able to say he won the first one.
Bowman was not short on trophies before August of 2017. He had NMCA championships. He had been the first Pro Mod racer on the West Coast to run in the fives. He had won the Street Car Super Nationals in Las Vegas the year before. Ask him today which win sits at the top, and he does not hesitate.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the biggest race I ever won was WSOPM.”
He almost was not in it.
The first World Series of Pro Mod was a 16-car invitational at Bandimere Speedway, $100,000 to the winner and not a dollar to anyone else. A couple of weeks before the race, one of the invited drivers blew up his engine. Wes Buck had a hole in the most talked-about field in doorslammer racing, and fans online were already making noise about who should fill it.
“Mike was the first guy I thought of,” Buck says.
When the call came, Bowman had about a day to change the converter and the gears, rework the tune-up and point the truck at Denver. He put a crew together when he got there. First, though, he had to ask his boss at Coburn Equipment for the time off. Ray Coburn’s answer has become part of the race’s history: “Heck yeah! It’s a hundred thousand dollars; you better go get you some of that!”
That is the part Buck keeps coming back to. Not that the last man into the field won it, but who that man was.
“I love all these guys, but I don’t know that we could have asked for a better inaugural champion than Mike Bowman,” Buck says. “He’s an incredible representation of what Pro Mod drag racing is all about. He works on the car himself, he can fabricate, he can build engines – hell, he drives his own rig to the track. He’s been successful in his life, but he’s a blue collar dude, works his ass off, and he’s just about the last person anyone wants to see in the opposing lane. He’s a racer’s racer.”
The race was run in the dark, in a manner of speaking. Drag Illustrated had shut the scoreboards off for the entire week and cut the time slips in half. Nobody knew what anybody ran. So almost nobody knew that in testing, Bowman’s ’69 Chevelle had made the first five-second pass by a door car in the history of Bandimere Speedway. He made six runs and parked it.
He beat Derek Menholt. He ran 5.997 to beat Michael Biehle and 6.024 to beat Shane Molinari. In the final he lined up against Steven Whiteley, who had beaten him on the starting line in Charlotte earlier that year. “I can’t let him beat me again on the tree,” Bowman told himself. He left first, .024 to .029. Both cars overpowered the racetrack. Bowman gathered his up and got there first.
His wife, Kristy, his daughters, and his stepson were all there to see it.
“The emotions in the winner’s circle were insane,” Buck says. “Mike was beside himself. I think he was in shock. And we’re not talking about a guy who’d never won a drag race before. This is a champion, a guy who’s won a lot of big races.”
Bowman tried to put a number on it afterward. “This was like winning 10 NHRA Pro Mod races all at once.”
Buck was not doing much better.
“When Mike won, honestly, I teared up,” he says. “And it wasn’t really because Mike won. It was because I knew we’d done something big. I knew this was the start of something special. A drag racing tradition was born in that moment, and I don’t think there was a person on the property that night who didn’t feel it.”
Here is what the win did to Mike Bowman. He came back the next year to defend it and lost to the eventual champion by seven thousandths of a second. He spent years racing on television with Street Outlaws: No Prep Kings. At one point he put his Pro Mod Chevelle, a near replica of the car that won in Denver, up for sale. Then the World Series of Pro Mod came back, and he took the for-sale sign off it. He could not watch that field roll through the gate without him.
“Maybe my heart’s just with the Pro Mod,” he said.
He has been chasing the second one ever since, and he is not shy about why. “I’m not coming because I want to be second.” And if he ever does it? “That’d be off the charts insane. It would mean everything.”
Something else came out of that night. “It really was the beginning of what has been a long-lasting friendship,” Buck says. “Mike and I have been close ever since. I’ve gotten to know his family, watched his daughters grow up, and it’s just been a joy and a privilege.”
Six more names have gone on the list since 2017: Stevens. Oksas. Hyde. Ward. King. Stanfield. None of them can have what Bowman has.
“Nobody can ever take away that first race for me,” he says. “I know what it feels like to win a hundred grand and to win the most badass race there is.”
Buck puts it this way.
“There can only be one first-ever. That’ll always be Mike Bowman. Despite all that he’s accomplished in drag racing, that’s how this sport knows him and will forever recognize him – the winner of the first World Series of Pro Mod. When Pro Mod went mainstream, Mike Bowman was the last man standing.”
The Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod returns March 5-7, 2027, at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas.
