Fast Bracket Racing At Its Best: PDRA’s MagnaFuel Top Sportsman Program Raises the Bar
In the spring of 2014, 21 Top Sportsman drivers entered the first-ever PDRA race, the inaugural Spring Open at Rockingham Dragway. The late, great Ronnie Davis was the No. 1 qualifier with a 4.032-second elapsed time in his iconic ’63 Corvette. In the final round, Stacy Hall ran a 4.30 on a 4.25 dial-in to defeat William Brown III, who also dialed a 4.25 but slowed to a 4.874. The biggest races that season drew around 30 cars, while car counts in the low 20s were average.
[Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in DI #190, the State of Drag Issue, in September/ October of 2024.]
“I went to that first race just wanting to qualify,” said Dan Ferguson, who went on to win the 2014 and 2016 PDRA Top Sportsman world championships. “There was a good energy around the place, all of the staff were really nice, and it was just a good experience all around. The payouts are good too; the best out there for any series, in my opinion.”
After the first five races of the 2024 Red Line Oil PDRA Drag Racing Series season, MagnaFuel Top Sportsman has averaged 62 entries, with a high of 71 at the North vs. South Shootout at Maryland International Raceway and a low of 42 at the Northern Nationals at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park.
The class has obviously grown and evolved in big ways since the inaugural PDRA season. One of the most obvious changes is the expansion into two classes after qualifying. Elite Top Sportsman, this season presented by PAR Racing Engines, takes the 16 quickest drivers. “Regular” Top Sportsman, presented by Corbin’s RV this year, will take the next eight, 16, 32, or 48 cars depending on the overall car count. This season, four out of five events have had enough cars for a Top Sportsman 48 field.
The increase in car count has also come with an increase in performance. Ferguson has tracked stats in Elite Top Sportsman for years. Specifically, he’s kept track of the E.T.s required to qualify in certain positions at each race. In 2021, the averages were 3.784 for No. 1, 3.917 for No. 8, and 4.01 for No. 16. In 2023, those averages dropped to 3.745 for No. 1, 3.872 for No. 8, and 4.009 for No. 16.
At the 2020 DragWars event at GALOT Motorsports Park in October, Elite Top Sportsman saw its first-ever all-3-second field. The following season, six out of eight races had all-3-second fields. The first and last races of the 2022 season had all-3-second fields, as did four out of eight races in 2023. This year’s season-opening East Coast Nationals featured a record 3.886-second bump spot.
The ability to go fast but not spend, spend, spend to keep up with the next fastest guy in a heads-up classes is one of the factors that draws in racers like Randy Perkinson, who’s competed in PDRA Top Sportsman since the inaugural season. Driving for his father, Christy Perkinson, he’s competed in both Elite and regular Top Sportsman. This season, the Perkinson duo unveiled a G-Force Race Cars-built, ProCharged ’67 Mustang that puts Randy solidly in the Elite field. He won in the car’s debut, then won again at Maryland to sit second in points going into the last three races of the season.
“It’s the ability to go out there and basically haul ass and look over at 500 feet, and say, ‘Oh crap, I need to hit the brakes,’” Perkinson says. “It’s a challenge. Buddy [Perkinson, cousin and past Elite Top Sportsman champion who recently moved up to Pro Nitrous] and I have talked about it a lot. In Pro Nitrous, it’s two different mental things: did I make all the right decisions to make this thing as fast as you can be and go A to B? Then it’s the challenge of, I’ve got to let go of the button on the starting line. Well, in Top Sportsman, there’s three challenges. Ultimately, you need to be as fast as you could be because they take the top 16 cars. You’ve got the driving aspect of it on the starting line, and then did we make the right decisions to go A to B?”
The competition level is another attractant. Longtime competitors like Glenn Butcher, Bruce Thrift, Tim Lawrence, and Cheyenne Stanley have been honing their craft since before the PDRA began. Quarter-mile NHRA Top Sportsman racers like Ronnie Proctor have leaned into the PDRA eighth-mile format, and West Coast drivers like Bryan LaFlam and Joe Roubicek have moved their operations to the East Coast to focus on PDRA competition. All of these groups coming together have created an intense level of competition.
“I think most Top Sportsman racers know that if you go run a PDRA race, there’s just a high concentration of bad dudes in both regular Top Sportsman – especially regular Top Sportsman – and Elite Top Sportsman,” says Ferguson, who won back-to-back races in Elite driving Dean Young’s nitrous-fed ’68 Camaro last season. “If a guy is competitive, he wants to win something where he knew he beat the best. You want to be a big fish in a big pond. The fastest of the fast Top Sportsman cars are here. Having to qualify to make the field makes it challenging and fun. An all-run race doesn’t really pull me towards it. Running fast and bracket racing adds a whole other layer of difficulty.”
Finally, one of the aspects of Top Sportsman and the PDRA in general that keeps drivers like Ferguson and Perkinson coming back is the camaraderie and the family atmosphere that exists in the series. The Top Sportsman group is especially tight-knit.
“I don’t think there’s a single person – and this goes for the Elite side and the back-half side – that you can’t walk over to their trailer and be like, ‘Hey man, I need that,’ and unless it’s bolted to their race car and they’re still in, you’re not going to get it,” Perkinson says. “It’s hard to beat an environment that makes everybody involved feel welcome.”
“I didn’t know anybody when I first started racing with PDRA,” adds Ferguson, who is now campaigning a Dodge Viper previously campaigned by former Pro Nitrous racer Billy Harper. “I was like the new kid on the block. Now, when I go to the racetrack, that’s where my friends are. That’s where I fit in. I have a lot of friends there, so that keeps me coming back.”
Many of the factors explained here can also be found in the PDRA’s Laris Motorsports Insurance Top Dragster divisions, Elite Top Dragster presented by Greenbrier Excavating & Paving and Top Dragster presented by Younce RV, but that’s a whole other story.
This story was originally published on October 17, 2024.
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