Here is the thing about the NHRA Countdown to the Championship as it has existed for the better part of two decades: everybody knew where they were going. Charlotte, Reading, St. Louis, Dallas, Vegas, Pomona. Crew Chiefs had 15 years of run sheets on every one of them. You could argue the playoffs rewarded institutional memory as much as performance or driver ability.
For the next couple of weeks, that’s over.
The 2026 Countdown opens Friday at US 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan, a track NHRA has never raced its professional categories at, in a state NHRA hasn’t visited for a national event in roughly 66 years. Then the whole traveling circus loads up and heads to Rockingham Dragway for the NHRA Nationals at The Rock, a facility the sport walked away from a generation ago and is now walking back into with a fresh surface and a lot of foggy memories. After that is St. Louis. Three in a row, two of them cold.
“A great way to kick off the Countdown and kick off the playoffs is start out at a new track that nobody has any notes on,” Shawn Langdon said Monday on NHRA’s pre-Countdown media call. “And we’ll go from there.”
Langdon can afford to be relaxed. He and teammate Doug Kalitta enter Top Fuel first and second: Kalitta the two-time reigning champion who held off Langdon by eight points for the regular season title and its $150,000 bonus, Langdon the driver who just won the U.S. Nationals for the second time. Two cars out of a single Ypsilanti shop under the ownership of the one-and-only Connie “The Bounty Hunter” Kalitta.
“Our nice little points cushion has gone away, unfortunately,” Kalitta said. “But no, we’re looking good.”
Langdon’s take on the whole in-house arrangement was more direct.
“If you’re going to lose it, might as well lose it to your teammate,” he said. “At the end of the day, we just want to keep everything in-house. Whatever the order is, as long as they’re one and two, that’s the goal.”
The reason the Kalitta camp isn’t sweating the no-notes problem is that they already solved it twice this year. NHRA added four new facilities to the 2026 tour, and when the tour hit South Georgia Motorsports Park in May and Maryland International Raceway at the end of that month, Langdon won both. He also went 345 mph at Valdosta on a Friday night that will get talked about for a long time.
“Not to toot our own horns, but we’ve had pretty good success at the first two with nobody having any notes,” Langdon said. “We won those two events.”
Funny Car is a different animal entirely. Matt Hagan carries the No. 1 seed and the regular season title after a semifinal win over Ron Capps at Indy that came down to Capps striking the tires in the right lane. Hagan didn’t gloat about it. He did the opposite.
“It was one of those deals where it helped us win the regular season championship against Ron, and you had to feel for Ron about that,” Hagan said. “Just knowing that you’re stuck in that right lane and not really have an opportunity to run real hard.”
Capps, for his part, called it “tough” and said it “still hurts.” Then he did what Capps does, which is remind everybody that Funny Car in 2026 has more legitimate title cars than any one bracket can hold.
“I think it was on a call with Phil Burgess at the beginning of the year, and we just started counting cars,” Capps said. “There’s like 11 or 12 cars that could win any given weekend. And really probably close to that could win a championship.”
Hagan agreed and rattled off the names without prompting: Beckman, tried and true with the battle scars. J.R. Todd, “a great leaver” who now has Dickie Venables in his corner. Jordan Vandergriff, the rookie doing “a heck of a job wheeling” the car Austin Prock drove to two championships. And Prock himself.
“I don’t think we have an easy pick on any of that,” Hagan said. “It’s just going to be a dog fight.”
In Pro Stock, Dallas Glenn arrives as regular season champion after a Monday at Indy that started with him writing off the points and ended with him holding both the Wally and the No. 1 seed. He’s also the driver in this field with the most Rockingham laps, having tested there for five years with KB Titan.
“I’ve made probably a few hundred runs there over the last five years,” Glenn said. “So there’s definitely a little bit of a home court advantage. At least we kind of have an idea of where some of the bumps are.”
Richard Gadson has even more. The reigning Pro Stock Motorcycle champion came up through the MIROCK series, which split its schedule between Maryland International Raceway and Rockingham, and he put in the strongest endorsement of the weekend for a facility that spent years off the national radar.
“That’s one of the best racing surfaces, for sure, on the East Coast, if not in the country right now,” Gadson said. “They’ve done an amazing job with turning that into one of the baddest places to race right now.”
Both Glenn and Gadson volunteered the same warning about The Rock without being asked: around five or six in the evening, the sun sets straight down the racetrack and into the driver’s face. Eliminations start at 11 a.m. If the final rounds run late, that’s going to matter.
Capps, a three-time champion with 33 years in the seat, also laid out the actual math of this Countdown, and why teams need to be looking at it differently.
“You can’t say six races now because Pomona’s points and a half,” Capps said. “So we sort of look at it like Dallas. You’ve got to leave Dallas and be either in it or not. So it’s a four-race deal. Let the smoke clear on Monday morning after Dallas and then see if you’re going to have a legitimate chance at winning the championship.”
Four races. Two of them on tracks nobody has ever raced a nitro car at in the modern era. One of them, Rockingham, where the last two Funny Cars to make a pass were Hagan and Paul Lee in an IHRA final that Hagan won.
“Crew chiefs are going to be scratching their heads, man,” Hagan said. “We got a lot of big races coming up and a lot of unknown variables. I’m glad I’m not a crew chief. I’m glad I’m a driver. I get to stab and steer and hang on and hope for the best.”
Capps put a bow on what that means for the guys who aren’t seeded.
“You’re going to see these teams that have sort of been in the middle of the ground find themselves,” he said. “And they do it every single year. We’re going to find [Dan] Wilkerson running at the top of the heap, Cruz [Pedregon], all those guys.”
He also made the prediction that should worry every one of the championship contenders in each class: non-Countdown teams are going to decide this championship. Not because they’re better on paper, but because when a playoff car smokes the tires, somebody with nothing to lose is going to be in the other lane with a win light.
“It happens every year,” Capps said. “Those are going to be the bigger story.”
Friday evening in Martin, Michigan will feature nitro under the lights on a racetrack that has hosted million-dollar bracket races, but never an NHRA national event at the professional level. Then Rockingham, St. Louis, and if Capps is right, everybody will find out in Dallas whether they were ever really in it.
The 2026 Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals presented by MOPAR runs Sept. 18-20, with eliminations airing on FS1 at 2 p.m. ET Sunday.
This story was originally published on September 15, 2026. 
