No one is wishing misfortune on NHRA Top Fuel points leader Shawn Langdon. It is true, though, that Alan Johnson, crew chief for Langdon’s keenest rival Doug Kalitta, is capable of orchestrating a repeat of perhaps the sport’s most improbable comeback—20 years later and this time at Langdon’s expense. The tale of “The Run,” Tony Schumacher’s seemingly impossible coup over Kalitta in 2006, has a thread of irony woven through it. Schumacher earned the fourth of his class-leading eight championships with what in drag-racing circles is known as “The Run,” which happened two decades ago at the NHRA Finals, the Southern California season-ending event that opened Friday at the In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip. Kalitta had entered the race with a 45-point advantage on Schumacher. To win the championship that year, Schumacher’s tall order for the final pass of the season was to win the race—and in the process, set the national elapsed-time (E.T.) record. At that time, the NHRA awarded 20 bonus points for a national E.T. record, a practice it stopped in 2016. Schumacher had to run quicker than 4.437 seconds in the quarter-mile, and he delivered with a 4.428-second clocking with Johnson’s tune-up. So, in less than five seconds, Kalitta’s dream of becoming an NHRA Top Fuel champion vanished, his lead flipping from 45 points to a 14-point deficit. Kalitta later shrugged off the disappointment, saying, “It’s drag racing. It’s not life or death.” But the whole collapse bugged him—perturbed him for years, until he earned his championships in 2023 and 2025. Between 2006 and 2023, Kalitta was saddled with the label of “winningest driver without a championship.” Kalitta, the 1994 USAC Sprint Car champion, was used to winning. Kalitta Motorsports team owner Connie Kalitta, Doug Kalitta’s uncle and a drag-racing legend, hired Johnson to spin his mechanical magic on nephew Doug’s Mac Tools Dragster. And Johnson earned his pay—and his 13th and 14th championships as a tuner. And he earned Kalitta two long-awaited championships. This weekend, Alan Johnson, Schumacher’s crew chief at the time, has the chance to spoil Shawn Langdon’s anticipated second championship—as Kalitta’s tuner. After Friday’s qualifying—after the final one of two scheduled sessions was rained out—Kalitta had earned four qualifying bonus points and reduced Langdon’s lead from 107 to 103 points. Two more sessions Saturday will set the field for Sunday’s eliminations. Langdon lost traction early in his lone run, and Kalitta blasted to the top of the first-day leaderboard with a 3.677-second elapsed time on the 1,000-foot course at 340.39 mph that nudged Maddi Gordon out of first place by two-thousandths of a second. Gordon set the track speed record at 342.11 mph. No. 3-ranked Antron Brown was fourth-quickest early Friday, and his single bonus point didn’t change his situation significantly. Leah Pruett was third-best Friday. “I’m glad we got one round of qualifying in today, because at this last race, you never know,” Kalitta said. “Alan, Mac [Savage], and all of my guys were real hungry to have a good qualifying effort. I’m still hoping we can pull off a championship. I’ve been part of a bunch of close ones, and we’re just looking to go out there, throw down on every run, and we’re going to try to get every point we can every round." With no 20-point bonus for a national record in the equation, Langdon neither could use that to stretch his lead nor cross his fingers that Kalitta won’t use it to overtake him. It’s strictly a matter of which of them has superior performance throughout qualifying and eliminations. Neither can afford to miss any more opportunities. Those are scarce at this point. And Alan Johnson has a pattern of pulling off the farfetched. Schumacher, who earned another championship in 2007 that was almost as epic as “The Run” the year before, saw a pattern with the tuner. Schumacher arrived at Pomona in fourth place in the standings, 67 points behind Hot Rod Fuller. Schumacher won his first-round match-up. Fuller came up after that, and all he had to do was win that round in 2007 [to become champion] and he smoked the tires. Schumacher said, “Alan Johnson turns around and looks at me. He goes, ‘He smoked the tires against [Bob] Vandergriff.’ So then he comes up to me, he looks at me, and he goes, ‘We just got to win the race’—just that nonchalant: ‘We just got to win the race.’ I ran [Brandon] Bernstein. If he beats me, he’s the champ. But we beat him. And I mean, it was a close race. Those are great moments, but that’s what we show up for. You show up waiting for that moment. It’s got to all go right.” He said, “Doug can win the race. He’s got a team capable of doing that. Shawn’s got an unbelievable car, but it’s those little things that you can have a car all year long, but it always comes down to this. Doug is one of the best drivers I’ve ever seen—and he’s had to win the race to be the champ. [He did in 2023 in a winner-take-all final round at Pomona against Leah Pruett.] This is a tough one. If Shawn loses first round, Doug will have to win four rounds. And that is when you find out that’s a crazy moment.” About Alan Johnson, Schumacher said, “When we were together, we were unbeatable. We were. We were a really good unit. So it is. Alan’s one of the best in the entire world that we’ll ever see—ever have, and ever will,” he said. “And I got to be a great part of it. Both sides of it. I had to beat him at the beginning. I had to beat him at the end. I had to work with him in the middle. It was fantastic. He’s a great guy to work with, because you learn so much about driving flawless.” And flawless is what both Langdon and Kalitta need to be Saturday and Sunday. Susan Wade has lived in the Seattle area for 40 years, but motorsports is in the Indianapolis native’s DNA. She has emerged as one of the leading drag-racing writers with nearly 30 seasons at the racetrack, focusing on the human-interest angle. She was the first non-NASCAR recipient of the prestigious Russ Catlin Award and has covered the sport for the Chicago Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger, and Seattle Times. She has contributed to Autoweek as a freelance writer since 2016.
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