As the NHRA celebrates its 75th anniversary this season, fans can expect to see plenty of familiar and even nostalgic elements – the return of legends, the celebration of the people and moments that made NHRA history, and even official uniforms that harken back to the “glory days” of the sport.
But the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series tour will also see some new scenery as an unprecedented four new venues join the national event tour. It’s the first time a new track has joined the lineup since the inaugural New England Nationals at Epping, New Hampshire’s New England Dragway in 2013. And excluding the formative years of the NHRA professional series, it’s the first time four new venues join the tour in one season.
Two of these new tracks are owned and operated by longtime track operators with extensive experience outside of hosting NHRA national events, while the other two are led by comparatively green owners. In the days leading into the 2026 season, Drag Illustrated spoke with these new NHRA national event track owners to get their perspectives on all the things that come with hosting an NHRA national event for the first time.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from a roundtable interview that originally appeared in DI #199, the Interview Issue, in March/April 2026. The first in this series featured South Georgia Motorsports Park’s Raul Torres. Stay tuned for interviews from U.S. 131 Motorsports Park’s Jason Peterson and Rockingham Dragway’s Dan VanHorn.
Royce Miller is the owner of Maryland International Raceway in Budds Creek, Maryland. MIR will host the inaugural NHRA Potomac Nationals May 29-31. Miller and his family have owned and operated MIR since 1989. Though he sold the track to IHRA’s former parent company, IRG, in 2015, he stayed on as track GM and reacquired the track in 2021. Located around an hour south of downtown Washington D.C., MIR and its Potomac Nationals will introduce fans around the nation’s capital to NHRA professional drag racing during the United States’ 250th anniversary. MIR will also host a Division 1 double divisional in mid-June.
How long has hosting an NHRA national event been on your wish list?
Well, we had talked to NHRA for probably the last four or five years. We’ve had informal discussions about it. I was just looking for the window of opportunity, and they called me when they were ready.
What are the opportunities that come with hosting one? What are the challenges?
The World Cup Finals, the largest event we do, we are at capacity, so the NHRA race won’t be bigger than that because we can’t physically hold any more than what we hold for that event. World Cup is the template we’re using for all of our logistics here: food, parking, things like that. As far as the facility stuff goes, NHRA is going to handle what they’re going to put where, and all those kind of things.
I own a farm next door that we use for parking. We have a great relationship with the motocross track next door to us. During their National, we provide space and the logistics for their event, and they are, in kind, doing it for the NHRA event and the World Cup. So for that reason, we have enough parking for the capacity of seating.
This is just one more major event that we add to our facility here, which increases economic impact in the region, and notoriety, as far as the visibility of the raceway to new companies and racers that run national events only. Those are all pluses. We have a great relationship with our community and our county government. We are seen as an asset and not a liability with the powers-to-be.
What have you done already to prepare and what’s left to do?
The main thing we had to do that NHRA and Top Fuel racing in general required was replacing the jersey walls with the poured walls, and the higher walls that we need for the fuel cars, where it steps up at the 1,000-foot mark. Then, the gravel trap and the catch system for these cars is more elaborate than what we had prior because we didn’t run those type of cars. Those are the biggest things that we’re doing.
Now, we’re also taking advantage of this opportunity to rewire the Compulink timing system. Bob Brockmeyer, Larry Crispe, and myself wired it in ’92 together. And the three of us are going to rewire it. We’re putting all the conduit in now. We just finished, actually today, all the new conduit on the back of the walls and getting everything out of the ground that’s been there for 35 years. I’m excited about that improvement.
All the concrete walls are done in the gravel trap. The poles are set. It’s a new longer and wider gravel trap over what we did have. Larry Crispe is going to get the nets here and installed. We still have some debris fencing to build around it. But we’ll have all those well before the national though.
At the turnoff, we are widening that about 12 foot to help with the turn radius and stacking on the sides.
The rest is more cosmetic. This is year one. We’re trying to be careful on what all we do, and find out after year one, what’s the priority after that. But there’s only so much we can get done in the amount of time that we’ve had. This winter has been hateful with the weather we’ve had in February and late January.
What do you hope this event accomplishes for your track, your fans, racers, community?
The NHRA national event is the pinnacle of our sport. If you’d have seen the track when I took over in 1990, it looked like a deserted airport. So to be able to have navigated over the 38 years that I’ve been here to get to this point, personally, it’s very satisfying. I’m looking forward to standing between the first pair of Top Fuel cars going down the track, knowing that we took it from where it was to this level. I’m proud of that point, to have brought that to this area, with the exposure, it’s wonderful.
I do believe this will bring in more notoriety for the track and this area, between the people that attend the event and people that will see us on television, and think “I wondered what that place looked like,” because we have a very limited road frontage here. When you drive by, if you don’t pull in, you don’t know how big we really are.
We’re the first Fox network televised event of the year. So you want to make sure you’re ready for it and dot your Is and cross your Ts the best you can.
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