Rainy Gatornationals Weekend Ends With Exciting Sunday

After multiple delays on Friday, and a rain-shortened Saturday, Gatornationals came to an exciting close Sunday. Reigning champions Gaige Herrera and Anton Brown finished their dominant weekends with wins, while Dallas Glenn and Chad Green pulled off shocking upsets to claim wins of their own.

Herrera, the 2024 Pro Stock Motorcycle champion and reigning Gatornationals champion, took home another trophy. He beat out Matt Smith by 0.001 with a speed of 200.23 mph. In Pro Stock, Glenn took down Greg Anderson with a time of 6.549. After setting a world record on Friday, Anderson fell flat in the finals, spinning his tires at the starting line and fumbling his chance at victory.

Brown finished his dominant weekend with a win in the Nitro Top Fuel final over Shawn Langdon with a time of 3.673 to Langdon’s 3.684. This was his second Gatornationals win. Green pulled off a huge upset win in Nitro Funny Car. After qualifying 13th, Green beat three-time NHRA champion Ron Capps to claim his first Gatornationals victory. 

.@AntronBrown, @FastJackBeckman, @greganderson_ps and Gaige Herrera start the year off right, picking up the No. 1 qualifiers at the Amalie Motor Oil #Gatornats. #No1QualiferRundown powered by GESI pic.twitter.com/HIVir1GcpI

— NHRA (@NHRA) March 9, 2025

Midweek action

Gatornationals is one of the biggest events of the NHRA season. Teams have the opportunity to show off what they’ve worked on over the offseason. Drivers race with their new teams for the first time. Nearly 30,000 fans fill the stands. The first race of the season is quite a spectacle. Sunday’s weather didn’t look great at the beginning of the week. Rain was forecasted, which is bad news for drag racing. Racing is halted as soon as water hits the track because of the traction that drag racing requires. 

Teams get to the track early in the week to set up and get the lay of the land. They test their cars on Tuesday and Wednesday to make sure they work well. Thursday marks the start of qualifying for lower levels like Top Alcohol and Super Stock.

Friday Qualifying

Qualifying on Friday went without weather trouble. In Nitro qualifying, reigning Top Fuel champion Antron Brown claimed the top spot with a 3.685 at a blazing 334.24 mph. Langdon, last year’s Gatornationals champion, qualified 3rd with a 3.690 at 335.23 mph. Jack Beckman had the best Funny Car qualifying time with a 3.832 at 334.65 mph. This season is Beckman’s first full season since 2020. Drag racing legend John Force suffered a traumatic brain injury that sidelined him in the middle of the season. Beckman came out of retirement and took Force’s spot for the final eight races of the season. 

During Top Fuel qualifying, Austin Prock’s car broke coated the track with gear oil. Cleanup crews worked for an hour and a half to make the track safe for racing. The delay caused the final qualifying rounds of the night to be cancelled. However, the highlight of Friday’s qualifying came after the delay when Anderson set a world record for quickest pro stock run ever with an elapsed time of 6.443 seconds at 212.06 mph. 

As the sun was setting on Friday, NHRA rescheduled Sunday’s Nitro eliminations from 11 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. in anticipation of rain later in the day.

.@greganderson_ps makes the quickest pass in Pro Stock history with a 6.443 at 212.06 mph! #Gatornats • @KBTitanNHRA pic.twitter.com/qQszIZvqPg

— NHRA (@NHRA) March 8, 2025

Weekend Chaos

Nitro and Pro Stock qualifying rounds three and four were scheduled for Saturday, but none of them happened. Rain started early Saturday morning, and qualifying was over by 10. Rain continued for a few hours, but even when it ended, drying the track took at least an hour on its own.

A post on X by NHRA announced that Top Fuel qualifying would start at 3:30 p.m., nearly three hours after its scheduled start time. Then, it started raining again. At 4:35, just over an hour after racing was supposed to resume, NHRA announced that Saturday’s racing was over. This meant the lineup for Sunday’s eliminations would be set based on the teams’ limited runs on Friday.

Top Fuel eliminations started on time Sunday. Tripp Tatum crashed early in the morning during the first round of Top Fuel eliminations. After only six pairs, the dreaded rain arrived. Things looked bleak. Rain was on the menu all day. Miraculously, though, the Florida weather yielded for the first time of the weekend, and Sunday’s races ended without a hitch.