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The Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals was packed with wild action and some crazy performances and near-firsts. Here’s our five big takeaways from the event.

Greg vs. Dallas again

These are great days for the KB Titan Racing team with Greg Anderson and Dallas Glenn squaring off against one another in the final round for the fourth straight time dating back to last year's 91���� Finals in Pomona.

While the Elite Performance team, which had been a juggernaut over the last half-dozen seasons, continues to struggle without tuners Mark Ingersoll and Jake Hairston, the KB team is making hay while the sun shines. 

Anderson admittedly has had quite a bit of luck in 2025 — witness his weird final-round win over Glenn a week ago at the NHRA Arizona Nationals — and this time the sport’s most decorated Pro Stock racer won it with a combination of dazzling power and strong reaction times. 

Anderson has won an incredible 16 times at In-N-Out Pomona Dragstrip — seven now at the Winternationals and nine at the Finals — and he credits a lot of his success to the cool and often cloudy conditions in Pomona, which works for him behind the wheel because he's not having to squint or have sweat rolling down his face while he's staging. 

It's been a long time since we've seen domination like this in the Pro Stock final, where the same two guys go at it race after race after race. You have to go all the way back to 1980 when Bob Glidden and Lee Shepherd appeared in six straight final rounds together — each won three times — from Columbus through the 91���� Fallnationals in Seattle. 

It was a successful weekend all around for the KB Titan team, who put eight drivers — Anderson, Glenn, Matt Hartford, Cory Reed, Eric and Matt Latino, Deric Kramer, and Cody Coughlin — in the field to hog up half of the 16 starting positions. 

Although it appears that the KB Titan team has Elite Performance on the ropes, Anderson made it plain in his post-race comments that he expects this will not last forever, as he knows that the proud Elite team left Pomona determined to turn things around before we resume racing in two weeks in Las Vegas.

Wild start to Funny Car season

After what could conceivably be called relatively unexpected wins by Chad Green and Paul Lee to open the 2025 Funny Car season — who had that on their Bingo cards? — a sense of normalcy returned when Jack Beckman took home the Winternationals title, defeating Daniel Wilkerson, who was trying to extend the streak with what would have been his first win.

Green, the winner in Gainesville, showed that he's still got the right stuff by qualifying fifth and reaching the second round before Beckman ended his day, while Phoenix winner Paul Lee qualified an impressive No. 2 and laid down a 3.84 in round one before losing in the second round to Wilkerson. 

But Beckman's Peak Auto Chevy certainly seems to be the class of the Funny Car field. Through the season's first 10 qualifying sessions, the Chris Cunningham/Danny Hood/Tim Fabrizi-tuned Chevy has earned qualifying bonus points in each of them, probably setting some kind of record. The car continued its reign of terror in eliminations, flashing three 3.8-second runs before breaking traction in the final but nonetheless taking the win.

The win was Beckman's second straight at the Winternationals, coming five years after his last win there after having to sit out the last three seasons. Beckman has had a lot of success in Pomona, winning the Winternationals twice in Super Comp before he began his nitro Funny Car career.

The win is also Beckman’s second straight in Pomona after winning the 2024 season finale over his world champion teammate Austin Prock and was the milestone 300th Funny Car win for John Force Racing.

It’s not the first time that Beckman has gone back-to-back in Pomona. He also won the 2019 Finals over Prock's predecessor, Robert Hight, then turned around and won the Winternationals in 2020, defeating his current boss, John Force.

After starting out last year on fire, Prock seems a little jinxed early in 2025 with two first-round losses in the year’s first three events after only losing just twice all of last year, but there’s no doubt he’ll soon be back to championship form.

First all-three-second FC field continues to elude us

Over the last half-dozen years, we've come tantalizingly close to putting 16 qualifiers under the four-second barrier at the same event, but we just keep falling short. The current record bump for the Funny Car field is a tantalizingly close 4.005, set at the 2019 NHRA U.S. Nationals, and although there have been a number of events where we had double-digit numbers of Funny Cars in the threes, we always fall one or two or three cars shy of making history. 

That milestone seemed sure to be broken at the Winternationals under what eventual Funny Car winner Jack Beckman called “A++ conditions,” both in terms of weather temperature and track temperature and grip, and as the three-second qualifiers piled up over the first three sessions, it looked like a for-sure bet that we would finally get it done this weekend. 

At the end of Q3, we had 14 cars in the threes and the other five cars below Alexis DeJoria — Bob Tasca III, Blake Alexander, Daniel Wilkerson, Jason Rupert, and Buddy Hull — all were three-second-capable. Surely this would happen, right? Wrong.

After Wilkerson, who entered the final qualifying session outside the field, raced to a solid 3.924, you could taste it. Then Alexander, also not in the show, ran 4.01. Close, but no cigar.

Hull ran just 4.348, but surely Tasca, who hadn’t failed to qualify since late 2015, would run a three, right? Nope. He ran 4.05 and DNQ’d. The last hope was local favorite Jason Rupert, who ran 3.91 at last year’s Finals. We weren’t asking for that — heck, we’d have swooned at a 3.999 — but it just wasn’t in the cards as Rupert lost traction and ran a 7.38. 

Four first-time Pro qualifiers

It's always good to have new blood in the sport, but sometimes those teething pains can take some of the excitement out of these debuts, but in Pomona, we saw four first-time qualifiers among rookie drivers. Certainly Spencer Hyde, driving Jim Head's Funny Car, made the biggest impression.

Hyde, who made a brief stop in Top Fuel after a Pro Mod career, took over the wheel of Head’s Funny Car this year after Head and Blake Alexander split, but the team DNQ’d at the first two events, in Gainesville and Phoenix. We know that Jim Head knows how to tune a Funny Car deep into the threes, and Hyde likely lost his first three-second run and his first qualifying berth when the car veered across the centerline in Q2 in Gainesville. Of course, that race was shortened to just two qualifying sessions by rain, so who knows what could have happened?

The team also didn't make the cut in Phoenix but came into Pomona and ran 3.97 right off the trailer, practically assuring Hyde’s first race-day start, and things only got better for the team in eliminations, where Hyde not only got his first race-day round-win, upsetting Ron Capps in the opening stanza, but then took out Cruz Pedregon in the second round to reach the semi's, where his day ended against Daniel Wilkerson. 

In Pro Stock, Stephen Bell, a standout in the 91���� Factory Stock Showdown class, made his first race-day start, as did third-generation racer Cody Coughlin and Matt Latino, son of KB Titan leader Eric Latino. Matt and Eric met in round one, and the win surprisingly went to the son on a holeshot over his dad. Coughlin fell to Deric Kramer, and Bell lost to Coughlin’s uncle, Jeg Coughlin Sr., who welcomed Bell to Pro Stock with a deadly .007 light, but all three rookie Pro Stock drivers still had to be proud of their efforts and the progress they’ve made.

Westerfield almost makes double history

Ever since Pat Austin made NHRA history with the first double-up victory — winning in two different classes at the same national event — it's happened 44 more times, but never in the manner we came close to this weekend. 

Austin's historic double-up, which came in Topeka in 1991, was a rarity as it was a double in Top Fuel and Top Alcohol Funny Car, a feat that Austin incredibly repeated just months later at the early-season Phoenix event in 1992, and since then, no other Alcohol Funny Car racer has come close to scoring a double with their methanol-fueled flopper and a second entry, but former Top Alcohol Funny Car champ Shane Westerfield sure gave it a ride this weekend. 

Since Austin's win, the next 43 doubles came in a variety of Sportsman classes with combinations of Super-class wins or Stock and Super Stock, even Comp and Super Comp, but never had it involved a Funny Car again, and only one of them — Aaron Stanfield's double in Pro Stock and Factory Stock five years ago in Houston — even involved a Pro class. 

Flash forward to this year's Winternationals where Westerfield was competing in both Top Alcohol Funny Car and the Extreme Steel Legends Funny Car field and made the final round in both. Could we have a new type of double and two different types of Funny Car? Unfortunately not. 

Westerfield lost in both finals, falling on a holeshot to Derrick Moreira in the Legends Funny Car final and then to Brian Hough, again on a holeshot, in the Alcohol Funny Car final.

What I found extremely interesting was the differences and similarities between the two cars, the blown nitro Legends car, which only races to 1,000 feet, and the blown alcohol car, which runs the traditional 1,320-foot quarter-mile.

Interestingly, the Alcohol Funny Car destroys the nitro burner early in the run. On Westerfield’s 5.44 final-round effort in the alky car, it went to 60 feet in just .933 compared to an event-best of .980 in the nitro burner. The alky car also beat the nitro car to 330 feet (2.435 to 2.487), to 660 feet (3.602 to 3.658, and in halftrack speed, 213.13 to 211.36), and even to 1,000 feet (4.598 to 4.660), but the nitro burner’s speed at 1,000 feet was light years better, 243.15 to 211.83 (event best of 213.13). For the record, the alky car picked up more than 50 mph from 1,000 feet to the quarter-mile, from 213.13 to 266.32 on his semifinal run.