Sep 17, 2026 · 8 min · 6 segments
It’s that time of year again...**The NERD OUT is back!** With the NHRA season entering its final stretch, I'm deep diving into the championship picture across the Lucas Oil categories. First up…
We're going to have several updates, obviously, as the NHRA season winds to a close here over the next two months, a little less than two months at this point.
That's kind of wild to think about, isn't it? But I wanted to kind of set the stage and I actually just wrote a pretty lengthy column for NHRA's National Dragster.
where we're at in terms of ultimately determining a world champion, right? So we're at that point in the season, Indy's over, right? Big goes in the rear view mirror.
Likewise, the Lucas Oil Series championship pictures, they're beginning to gain some clarity, right? And we're To be completely transparent, it's early enough in the season that there's no way we can accurately predict champions across the board.
And then my favorite part of the exercise this time of year is to talk about the long shot.
The long shot is someone that's typically outside of the current top 10 usually we're talking about a race here that's only been to a handful of events but has done really well at those handful events so the path is there they just have to hit the road and that's exciting this time of year it also like may be more logistically impossible is not the right word but challenging than it's ever been in the past like I don't think we've ever done this when diesel's six plus dollars a gallon.
So maybe it's, you know, discretion is the better part of valor or however that goes.
I think Jimmy only had six events on his points ledger in Top Sportsman that year.
If memory serves, it was St. Louis to Dallas to Tucson, and then turn the whole thing around to go to Rockingham, only to turn back around and go to Vegas and Pomona to end the season and ultimately win the World Championship.
Now, for every story like Jimmy's, there's probably five of racers that have tried to do some version of running down that late season dream, only to fall short, sometimes in heartbreaking fashion.
Um, so obviously at this point, the picture is going to change and the picture is going to change repeatedly, but I wanted to take a minute to, uh, to, to set the stage for here's, here's what to look forward to.
We're going to have several updates, obviously, as the NHRA season winds to a close here over the next two months, a little less than two months at this point.
That's kind of wild to think about, isn't it? But I wanted to kind of set the stage and I actually just wrote a pretty lengthy column for NHRA's National Dragster.
where we're at in terms of ultimately determining a world champion, right? So we're at that point in the season, Indy's over, right? Big goes in the rear view mirror.
Likewise, the Lucas Oil Series championship pictures, they're beginning to gain some clarity, right? And we're To be completely transparent, it's early enough in the season that there's no way we can accurately predict champions across the board.
And then my favorite part of the exercise this time of year is to talk about the long shot.
The long shot is someone that's typically outside of the current top 10 usually we're talking about a race here that's only been to a handful of events but has done really well at those handful events so the path is there they just have to hit the road and that's exciting this time of year it also like may be more logistically impossible is not the right word but challenging than it's ever been in the past like I don't think we've ever done this when diesel's six plus dollars a gallon.
So maybe it's, you know, discretion is the better part of valor or however that goes.
I think Jimmy only had six events on his points ledger in Top Sportsman that year.
If memory serves, it was St. Louis to Dallas to Tucson, and then turn the whole thing around to go to Rockingham, only to turn back around and go to Vegas and Pomona to end the season and ultimately win the World Championship.
Now, for every story like Jimmy's, there's probably five of racers that have tried to do some version of running down that late season dream, only to fall short, sometimes in heartbreaking fashion.
Um, so obviously at this point, the picture is going to change and the picture is going to change repeatedly, but I wanted to take a minute to, uh, to, to set the stage for here's, here's what to look forward to.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
