NORWALK, Ohio (Aug. 2, 2026) – In a historic Top Fuel vs. Funny Car final round between Ron Capps Motorsports teammates Ron Capps and Maddi Gordon, Capps raced to victory to earn the inaugural “King of Nitro” title Saturday night at Summit Motorsports Park’s 49th annual Night Under Fire. The unique match race format featured four-car shootouts in Top Fuel and Funny Car, with the winners advancing to face each other in the $100,000 final round. Capps in his NAPA Auto Care Funny Car fired off a 3.843-second pass to hold off the hard-charging Gordon, who ran a 3.733 E.T. at 338 mph in her Carlyle Tools Top Fuel dragster. Just one month prior, Summit Motorsports Park hosted the first RCM nitro double-up at the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals, where Gordon earned her first career Top Fuel victory and Capps scored his 80th national event win.
Before Saturday’s primetime show, the King of Nitro participants completed one qualifying session on Friday night to set the eliminations ladder. In Funny Car, Capps qualified No. 1 by a hundredth of a second with his 3.895-second pass at 330.72 mph. Gordon qualified third in Top Fuel with a 3.821 at 322 mph.
Capps continued his consistency in eliminations, running just a thousandth of a second off his qualifying time with a 3.896 E.T. at 331.94 mph to defeat Funny Car rookie Jordan Vandergriff in the opening round. In the final round, with a trip to the “King of Nitro” final match on the line, Capps left ahead of 2025 NHRA Rookie of the Year Spencer Hyde and powered to a 3.892 E.T. at 334.90 mph to hold off Hyde’s 3.948-second effort.
Gordon kicked off the shootout with a side-by-side race against Norwalk fan favorite Clay Millican, with Gordon using a 3.770 E.T. at 330.07 mph to beat Millican’s 3.800 E.T. Two-time and reigning NHRA Top Fuel world champion Doug Kalitta got a slight starting line edge over Gordon in the final round, but Gordon charged past him with a winning 3.723-second pass at 336.49 mph to Kalitta’s 3.741 E.T.
To address the elapsed time discrepancy between Top Fuel and Funny Car, race officials staggered the Christmas tree so Capps’ side of the tree would drop .180 seconds before Gordon’s side. Capps cut a .045 reaction time to take a holeshot advantage over Gordon, and crew chief Dean ‘Guido’ Antonelli was equally aggressive, tuning the NAPA Auto Care Funny Car to a victorious 3.843-second blast at 333.91 mph. Gordon with crew chiefs Rob Flynn and Troy Fasching made a big-speed run, a 3.733 E.T. at 338.09 mph, but it wasn’t enough to reel in Capps.
“You can’t even dream up something like this,” said Capps, the current NHRA Mission Foods Series Funny Car points leader with three wins this season. “We thought we had the disadvantage with the stagger. Guido wanted to test something since we got here and we didn’t get a chance to do that with the weather today, so he leaned in and said, ‘We’re testing it right now in the final against Maddi,’ and I was like, ‘Oh no.’ But I stepped on the gas and around 300 feet out, this thing put me in the trunk and just took off. I was looking for Maddi’s little wheel out the side the whole way down, then all of a sudden my scoreboard came on.
“What a great night,” Capps continued. “It’s a win-win, obviously, and I would have been just as happy if Maddi had won, but I would have also heard about it for a year from Maddi about beating me. There’s no doubt about it. But it’s a pretty cool win for everybody. We had all of our people watching on FloRacing with NAPA and Carlyle, and our Monster people were here. It was just a great event. The weather was a threat all day, but you roll around from the staging lanes to the starting line and look up into the grandstands and the place is completely packed. These fans are unbelievable.”
Gordon, who added a first-time Night Under Fire appearance to her whirlwind rookie season, also counted the performance as a collective victory for RCM in its first year as a two-car operation.
“It’s one thing to be invited to this race as performer – because we are way more than drag racers right now, we are performers at this event,” said Gordon, currently ranked sixth in the Top Fuel points standings. “But to get past Clay Millican and Doug Kalitta to then get to race the boss man in the final, it does not get any better than that. Well, it would’ve been really cool if we won. But that was one of the coolest runs of my entire career. To have NAPA, Carlyle Tools, Monster Energy, and all of our other partners represented in the final was awesome. We are two cars, one team, so we all won no matter what. Thank you, Bill Bader Jr. (track president), for having us, and thank you, FloRacing, for streaming it so my whole family could watch at home. Man, what a weekend.”
After three consecutive weekends on track, the NAPA Auto Care Funny Car team and the Carlyle Tools Top Fuel team will have a couple weekends off before the next stop on the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series tour, the NHRA Brainerd Nationals, Aug. 20-23, at Brainerd International Raceway.
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Before Saturday’s primetime show, the King of Nitro participants completed one qualifying session on Friday night to set the eliminations ladder. In Funny Car, Capps qualified No. 1 by a hundredth of a second with his 3.895-second pass at 330.72 mph. Gordon qualified third in Top Fuel with a 3.821 at 322 mph.
Capps continued his consistency in eliminations, running just a thousandth of a second off his qualifying time with a 3.896 E.T. at 331.94 mph to defeat Funny Car rookie Jordan Vandergriff in the opening round. In the final round, with a trip to the “King of Nitro” final match on the line, Capps left ahead of 2025 NHRA Rookie of the Year Spencer Hyde and powered to a 3.892 E.T. at 334.90 mph to hold off Hyde’s 3.948-second effort.
To address the elapsed time discrepancy between Top Fuel and Funny Car, race officials staggered the Christmas tree so Capps’ side of the tree would drop .180 seconds before Gordon’s side. Capps cut a .045 reaction time to take a holeshot advantage over Gordon, and crew chief Dean ‘Guido’ Antonelli was equally aggressive, tuning the NAPA Auto Care Funny Car to a victorious 3.843-second blast at 333.91 mph. Gordon with crew chiefs Rob Flynn and Troy Fasching made a big-speed run, a 3.733 E.T. at 338.09 mph, but it wasn’t enough to reel in Capps.
“You can’t even dream up something like this,” said Capps, the current NHRA Mission Foods Series Funny Car points leader with three wins this season. “We thought we had the disadvantage with the stagger. Guido wanted to test something since we got here and we didn’t get a chance to do that with the weather today, so he leaned in and said, ‘We’re testing it right now in the final against Maddi,’ and I was like, ‘Oh no.’ But I stepped on the gas and around 300 feet out, this thing put me in the trunk and just took off. I was looking for Maddi’s little wheel out the side the whole way down, then all of a sudden my scoreboard came on.
“What a great night,” Capps continued. “It’s a win-win, obviously, and I would have been just as happy if Maddi had won, but I would have also heard about it for a year from Maddi about beating me. There’s no doubt about it. But it’s a pretty cool win for everybody. We had all of our people watching on FloRacing with NAPA and Carlyle, and our Monster people were here. It was just a great event. The weather was a threat all day, but you roll around from the staging lanes to the starting line and look up into the grandstands and the place is completely packed. These fans are unbelievable.”
Gordon, who added a first-time Night Under Fire appearance to her whirlwind rookie season, also counted the performance as a collective victory for RCM in its first year as a two-car operation.
“It’s one thing to be invited to this race as performer – because we are way more than drag racers right now, we are performers at this event,” said Gordon, currently ranked sixth in the Top Fuel points standings. “But to get past Clay Millican and Doug Kalitta to then get to race the boss man in the final, it does not get any better than that. Well, it would’ve been really cool if we won. But that was one of the coolest runs of my entire career. To have NAPA, Carlyle Tools, Monster Energy, and all of our other partners represented in the final was awesome. We are two cars, one team, so we all won no matter what. Thank you, Bill Bader Jr. (track president), for having us, and thank you, FloRacing, for streaming it so my whole family could watch at home. Man, what a weekend.”
After three consecutive weekends on track, the NAPA Auto Care Funny Car team and the Carlyle Tools Top Fuel team will have a couple weekends off before the next stop on the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series tour, the NHRA Brainerd Nationals, Aug. 20-23, at Brainerd International Raceway.
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