MOORESVILLE, N.C. (April 6, 2026) – After dealing with air temperatures in excess of 100 degrees and surface temperatures hitting 150 degrees in its last event March 20-22 at Firebird Motorsports Park in Chandler, Arizona, the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series welcomes anything associated with the word “winter.”
Winter is coming to the world’s fastest motorsports attraction and, as always, the cool factor is high.
The 66th running of the Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals gets underway Friday in Pomona, California, beginning with qualifying and then culminating Sunday with eliminations. A 70-and-sunny forecast opens the event before brisk weather settles in for Saturday and Sunday.
Even without cooler temps bringing a reprieve from the heat endured in Arizona, the Winternationals is always circled on the calendars of competitors and fans. This drag racing major is one of NHRA’s crown jewels, joining the season-opening Gatornationals in Gainesville, Florida, and the end-of-summer U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis.
Rick Ware Racing (RWR) comes into Pomona as the defending winner of the Winternationals, as Top Fuel driver Clay Millican took the victory last year in an explosive matchup against Tony Stewart. With an impressive .038 of a second reaction time, Millican fired off the line and stayed ahead of Stewart all the way to the end, even as Millican’s 12,000-horsepower engine exploded at the finish. It was Millican’s eighth career NHRA victory, but first Winternationals triumph.
“It was a good day because we won it in a pedalfest,” said Millican, driver of the No. 51 Parts Plus Top Fuel dragster. “When we left the starting line, I knew I crushed the tree. I was .038 on the tree, which was phenomenal. I never heard Tony’s car, and as I was going down the racetrack, my car started laying down, laboring, and then ‘Kaboom!’ I’m coasting for the last 100 feet, and I’m like, ‘Oh please, finish line, hurry up and get here,’ and it did. The win light came on, and as it turned out, Tony had more problems in the other lane than what we had coming up on the finish line.
“It was a big deal to win the Winternationals because it is so iconic and so much a part of drag racing history. People who don’t follow drag racing all that closely, you say ‘Winternationals,’ they still know what you’re talking about.”
Millican’s RWR teammate, Tony Schumacher, is a two-time Winternationals victor, having won the event in 2004 and 2008.
“You show up and you bring your best,” said Schumacher, driver of the No. 15 American Communications Construction Top Fuel dragster. “You don’t want to sneak up at the end and be like, ‘Hey, here I am.’ You want to show them from the beginning that you’re a team to be reckoned with because if they’re not counting on you being good, they tune their cars differently. You need to be the car that makes them push it, makes them go out and make mistakes, because they have to beat you.”
Schumacher is NHRA’s all-time winningest driver with 88 career victories. He joined RWR for the final seven races of 2025 in a tune-up for a full assault on the 2026 schedule. His drive for an 89th win remains the same as when he was seeking his first career win.
“Everyone has a book that says, ‘You know how to go this fast,’” Schumacher said. “When you’re in the car running quicker than that, the other teams have to push it harder, so they smoke the tires, they make mistakes, drivers red light. You want to be the machine. You want to be the one that everyone else is looking at, going, ‘Uh-oh. All right, we’re going to have to do something outside the box and make them do things they’ve never done.’
“We want to be that team that runs quicker and faster than everybody, and makes people reach for greatness. And that’s awesome because, the fans, they’re the ones paying the money for the tickets, and what they deserve is a great race. We need to give them a great race. We have excellent competition, and we need to be one of the contenders at every race.”
The competition within NHRA’s Top Fuel ranks is stout. Fifteen drivers are entered in the Winternationals, and the bracket-style competition quickly whittles the field down to a single victor.
“When you make the show, you’re in the Sweet 16, and every round is the same as March Madness,” Millican said. “It’s one run at a time, one round at a time, and that is spectacular when you can go all the way to the end and hold that Wally.”
The path to a Wally – the winning trophy named after NHRA founder Wally Parks – begins Friday with two Top Fuel qualifying sessions at 2:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. PDT/5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. EDT, respectively. Saturday delivers two more qualifying sessions at 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. PDT/3:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. EDT. Eliminations on Sunday begin at 11 a.m. PDT/2 p.m. EDT. All of the action can be seen live on NHRA.tv. FS1 will broadcast a qualifying recap on Sunday from 8:30-10 a.m. PDT/11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. EDT with a finals package from 3:30-6:30 p.m. PDT/6:30-9:30 p.m. EDT.
About Rick Ware Racing:
Rick Ware has been a motorsports mainstay for more than 40 years. It began at age 6 when the third-generation racer began his driving career and has since spanned four wheels and two wheels on both asphalt and dirt. Competing in the SCCA Trans Am Series and other road-racing divisions led Ware to NASCAR in the early 1980s, where he finished third in his NASCAR debut – the 1983 Warner W. Hodgdon 300 NASCAR Grand American race at Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway. In 1995, Rick Ware Racing was formed, and with wife Lisa by his side, Ware transitioned out of the driver’s seat and into fulltime team ownership. He has since built his eponymous organization into an entity that competes full-time in the elite NASCAR Cup Series while simultaneously campaigning winning teams in the Top Fuel class of the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series, Progressive American Flat Track (AFT), FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) and zMAX CARS Tour.
