The U.S. Street Nationals presented by M&M Transmission just wrapped up, and the pit area of event winner “Stevie Fast” Jackson is oddly silent. Soon the bourbon will be flowing like water, but for the moment, crew members are busy discussing a variety of other topics – what all needs to be repaired on the car; what time do they need to leave the following morning to get back to the shop; and how bad has the weekend’s winter storm affected their area.
Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared as the cover story in DI #199, the Interview Issue, in March/April 2026.
Jackson has ridden off to racer registration to pick up his winner’s check. Tuner Jeff Pierce is sitting inside the rig, already busy going through the recent data on his laptop. Doug Cook, owner of Motion Raceworks – Jackson’s primary sponsor – has to leave the festivities early due to his 6 a.m. flight the following morning. It’s a brief moment of quiet after one of the most grueling and historic weeks ever seen in Pro Modified.
After years of trying and many close calls during the history of the Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod and now the Drag Illustrated Winter Series presented by J&A Service, the fan-favorite Jackson finally broke through at the U.S. Street Nationals, taking home $75,000 and the title of Pro Mod Champion at Bradenton Motorsports Park.
Piloting his screw-blown, Killin’ Time Racing “Shadow 3.0” ‘68 Camaro, Jackson defeated Derek Menholt in his Harts Charger-equipped 2019 Corvette in the final round, cutting a .011 reaction time en route to a 3.566-second pass at 210.80 mph. Menholt gave up the race at the starting line, going -.006 red before running a 3.570 at 211.36. The relief was evident on Jackson’s face as he celebrated in the winner’s circle, doused in champagne while standing atop his car with showers of pyro as a backdrop.
Jackson qualified sixth in the quickest field in Pro Mod history, with all 32 cars running in the 3.50s. Jackson ran a 3.564 at 211.53 mph, the quickest screw-blown car in the field. With the unique chip draw format, Jackson didn’t benefit from a high qualifying position. He drew 2024 No Prep Kings champion Shawn “Murder Nova” Ellington in the first round. Ellington suffered tire shake in “Blue,” his Keith Haney Racing twin-turbo ‘69 Camaro, and had to let off early. Jackson cruised to a 3.562 at 211.69 mph.
In round two, Jackson used a 3.583 at 210.11 to defeat Pro Mod newcomer and second-generation racer Brylon Holder in his orange screw-blown Camaro. Holder, the 2025 Street Car Super Nationals Pro Mod winner, threw away a quicker 3.581 pass by going -.010 red. In a difficult quarterfinal round, Jackson managed to get by 2023 WSOPM champion Spencer Hyde in a pedalfest. Jackson cut a .009 light and muscled his way down the track to a 3.771; Hyde, meanwhile, suffered severe tire shake, causing his chutes to deploy early. The victory earned Jackson a date with the quickest car of the entire weekend in the semifinals – the ProCharged Coast Packing Co. “Lard Machine” ‘69 Camaro driven by 2020 NMCA Xtreme Pro Mod championEric Gustafson. Jackson once again got the reaction time advantage, .026 to .080, and used it to earn a holeshot win, with his 3.602 staying ahead of Gustafson’s quicker 3.591.
Despite this being Jackson’s first event win in the Winter Series, he and his team are no strangers to success. This is the third consecutive race in the Winter Series featuring a car from the KTR camp in the final round. Jackson fell to Steve King in the 2025 WSOPM finals, while teammate Sidnei Frigo made it to the finals in early December at the Snowbird Outlaw Nationals presented by Motion Raceworks against Jason Harris.
With the win, Jackson moved into second place in the DIWS points championship, behind only Harris. With points and a half available at the WSOPM, everything is still on the table for the two-time NHRA Pro Mod champion.
Before long, Jackson comes riding back to his pits with a wide grin on his face, despite being exhausted. It’s been a week that was long on stress and short on sleep. Jackson is finally ready to celebrate with his team, but first, he sits down with Drag Illustrated to discuss what is arguably the biggest win of his storied career.
You’ve supported the WSOPM and the Winter Series since the very first event in Denver. You’ve been close before, but how does it feel to finally get that monkey off your back?
Man, it feels awesome. Ever since Wes had a dream of doing the World Series of Pro Mod in Denver in 2017 and we hauled that thing out there, I saw what he was building and I really wanted to win one of these races. I’ve won U.S. Street on radials a bunch, but I think this is the first time I’ve won it in Pro Mod, and it’s definitely the first Winter Series race. We missed winning World Series of Pro Mod last year by a thousandth. You don’t ever learn anything in life from winning. You learn by failing, dusting yourself off, and going to work.
It’s a surreal feeling to have the team that I have around me. Everybody’s ‘Stevie, Stevie, Stevie.’ This doesn’t mean anything about Stevie. Stevie can only do what he does because I’ve got people like Jeff Pierce tuning the car, people like Bob Reinhardt building the engines, people like Alicia Davis who runs the company when I’m gone. All the crew guys that brought this together. KTR is a big operation with a lot of moving parts. I don’t get to race a lot, but when I do get to bring my car out and have fun with it, it’s awesome to know that they have done everything they can to give me the piece to go do it. So today we’re just out here trying to make it look boring and that’s my motto for 2026: I’m going to make racing boring again.
The U.S. Street Nationals was also the third straight Winter Series final round appearance for Killin’ Time Racing. What does that performance say about the team you’ve assembled?
It really shows that we have the right people in the right places. A lot of companies have very talented people and they just don’t put them in the right places. KTR has a culture of letting dynamic, really talented people thrive in their environment. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s putting the right people in the right place to let them thrive. These races are hard to win and they’re hard to go rounds. It’s hard just to qualify. We’ve never not qualified for one. And like you said, if you got a KTR-powered car in a final for three races in a row, it shows that everything we’re doing off the track is correct.
You don’t win these things at the racetrack – you win them at the shop. Nobody in this industry works harder at the shop than we do. My guys, I have to make them go home every day. It’ll be nine o’clock at night and I’m like, ‘You guys have to go home,’ and they won’t. Their answer to me is, ‘When we get to Bradenton, we don’t work on the race cars at the track.’ We don’t build racks here. We don’t put spare parts together. All that’s done at the shop. And that’s because of the culture that we’ve built.
Everybody says they have a good culture, but there’s not a company in motorsports that has a culture like us. We’re a family. We take care of each other, we love each other, we pick each other up when we’re down. When you can get that type of environment…it took me a long time in business to realize that. I used to think Stevie Fast can tune it, drive it, and do it all – and I can, but not at the level of people that are working together with a common goal of winning. 2026 is our year. 2024 was building, 2025 was learning, and in 2026, we’re on the gas and it is our year.
With your victory, you jumped up to second in the DIWS points standings. You’ve won championships before, but how would this one rank, considering the level of competition?
The unique nature of this race is that you have the most condensed field of talented human beings on the planet running these types of cars, so it’s so hard to qualify. If you miss the wrong run, if you don’t make a good run in the good session, you’re not in. When you talk about winning one of these championships and saying you bested 80 of the baddest door cars on the planet, it’s really an impossible feat. I would call it an impossible task, but we’re built for chasing after impossible tasks. That’s the dreams we all had as a kid when we decided we wanted to drag race cars.
People have been asking me when I was going to get a real job my whole life. And it’s because I have made it my passion in life to build drag racing and to chase after impossible dreams. Can we do it? Yes, we have a team that can absolutely do it. Can 20 other people do it? Absolutely.
We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of engine development. I’m going to continue to try to drive better. I drove decent this weekend, but don’t think I drove great. If you look at reaction times, I was killing everyone, but we want to be better. I want to be an elite driver. We just got to keep working on all the pieces.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently on parity between centrifugal superchargers and screw blowers. As someone who is carrying the torch for the screw combination, where do you stand?
I’m a firm believer that if you do not have the fastest and quickest car of your combination, you can’t talk shit about the rules. I can’t stand it when I hear people that are the 12th or 15th car from the fastest one bitching about rules. But we’ve had the quickest and fastest screw blower combination for over a year.
The centrifugals have a large rule advantage. We don’t know how much. At the end of the day, I have a lot of centrifugal customers, so for me as a business owner, we manage every type of power adder there is at KTR. My goal is always to make them all run the same. Let the drivers do the racing, let the crew chiefs do the racing. We don’t know how much they got, but I know it’s a lot. It’s not 25 pounds’ worth.
Our engine has to be rebuilt. We knocked six pistons out of it in the final round to do that. We were very lucky in the chip draw to stay away from the centrifugals until the end. We made a really good run, but we burned it up.
Looking ahead, how does this win to kick off 2026 help propel you into the rest of the season?
The guys at the engine shop are already working on the developmental engine that we’ll run at World Series of Pro Mod. I’ll be in a different car for World Series of Pro Mod than I’ve ever driven before. So there’s some pieces in the puzzle that we’re moving around. We’re getting ready to do a complete power adder platform change. If we can’t get the rules fair, we’re just gonna race what they have. It’s the easiest thing to do.
If 75% of the field is screw blowers and there were four screw blowers in the top 15, that’s not Stevie carrying a torch. That’s just somebody who knows how to run a calculator and knows we got something going on. We need a little bit of adjustment to help us out.
I’m not worried about me. I have more power than anybody here. I can almost beat them. But what about the other 40 guys that have normal engines that are six or seven hundredths back? I had customers of mine that left the track on Friday because they know they got nothing for them.
But one thing that’s awesome is you have a lot of people running the Winter Series that really love the sport. And when you have that, you’re going to get good parity. No doubt things are going to get where they need to be.
And I am really, really excited about World Series of Pro Mod. The best thing about it is it’s only four weeks away, so we get to carry this momentum and not have to think about it for six months.
This story was originally published on May 21, 2026. 
The post DI Interview: Stevie Jackson on Winning U.S. Street Nationals, Teamwork and ‘Making Racing Boring Again’ first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
