Antron Brown Hopes Toyota Exit From NHRA Will Open Doors to Other Manufacturers

Yahoo

03-03-2025

Antron Brown is not the only one brainstorming about how to attract more manufacturers into the sport.
Brown says NHRA has benefits beyond 'bang-for-buck' value.
Toyota has had connections with nine nitro-class teams.
The NHRA is going to miss Toyota and the symbiotic relationship when the automaker leaves the Mission Foods Drag Racing Series at the end of the 2025 season, Top Fuel team owner/driver Antron Brown said.
However, he said he's optimistic that 'there's a lot of auto manufacturers I think that could benefit from drag racing.'
Brown didn't sugarcoat the impact of Toyota's decision that became public last December, saying, 'It's always going to be a challenge because they bring [a} wealth of knowledge. Toyota's going to be a hard, hard one to replace, because the difference of it is they were in it. They lived it, ate it, slept it, and they brought a lot of new tools and raised a bar for all the other manufacturers that are in NHRA, for sure.'
The automaker has been working with the Top Fuel teams of Brown, Justin Ashley, Doug Kalitta, Shawn Langdon, and the father-son operation of Billy and Steve Torrence, as well as the Funny Car teams of Ron Capps, Alexis DeJoria, and J.R. Todd.
Brown's approach to this final season of Toyota, he said, is 'to celebrate what they've done for our sport, and then we're just going to figure out how we keep that same synergy amongst our teams. So, I think you're going to see a lot of collaboration with different teams and picking up on it and utilizing the tools that they gave all of us.'
The relationship wasn't one-sided.
'It wasn't them just doing it by themselves. They were doing it with all of our teams. They learned a lot from us as we learned from them,' Brown said. 'So, I think it's going to make us all elevate to a new level. And then, hopefully, we all could go out and bring newcomers in our sport, not just one more manufacturer. Hopefully we could use that same model and bring back three more.'
He mentioned Nissan, Honda, and Kia by way of brainstorming, but he said, 'There's a lot of auto manufacturers, I think, that could benefit from drag racing that fits their demographic and we could benefit from them on their technological side.'
Brown said he has not had any conversations with any of the possible Toyota-alliance replacements but that 'we kind of got a big old whiteboard right now, just jotting it down right now, going through ideas on who we could solicit and we could bring new to the sport and educate 'em on our sport.' He said drag racing offers a lot of benefits to offer manufacturers. Moreover, he said, 'This is the highest-rate value [regarding] the bang for their buck.'
Brown said Toyota's decision, which it has yet to explain, certainly couldn't have been based on performance.
'We could utilize what the information Toyota has and they've been assisting on that side of it too, saying, 'These are all the great things we got from drag racing.' Besides, we were their winning motor sport last year. They won, I forget how many races... it was like 18 races in drag racing last year in the Funny Car and Top Fuel ranks. They destroyed it last year. So it is kind of crazy how everything's transpired. It is just they're going in a totally different direction. So that was the plus about it.
"It was all positive things, so we just got to try to bring that with somebody else new that needs it to help elevate their level.'