Matt Tucker, Michael Poland Dish on $150,000 Freedom of War No-Prep Shootout

Matt Tucker did the one thing almost nobody in drag racing does anymore: he said no prep, and he meant it.

This weekend, the WesTx Abilene Raceway owner and promoter is putting $150,000 in guaranteed money on the line at his Freedom of War, and he is doing it on a surface scraped down to nothing. No rubber. No glue. No groove built up over a season of Friday-night test-and-tunes. Tucker had the entire racetrack, and the parking lots around it, sandblasted to raw concrete.

“There is not rubber. It is the furthest thing away from WesTx Abilene Raceway right now,” Michael Poland said on The Wes Buck Show, where he and Tucker laid out the whole plan Wednesday afternoon. “Small tire off the trailer, which will be really cool.”

That phrase, off the trailer, is the entire point. Cars unload and race for a $75,000 top prize, with $20,000 to the runner-up, no time to lean on the track and no way to buy a shortcut around it.

A track that sat for seven years

Abilene was not supposed to matter again. The place had been dark for the better part of a decade, a former index track sitting quiet off I-20.

“It was a big index track right off of I-20. For years and years, it just sat,” Poland said. “And then Matt Tucker got a hold of it about a year and a half ago.”

For Tucker, a DFW guy, the racetrack solved a problem he had been chewing on for years.

“Years ago, I wanted to start something more like a street race, but in a pasture, with just a concrete road and a few lights, a flashlight start, and just let it rip,” he said. “In the DFW area where I live, the property is just so hard and so expensive and so limited. The constraints with the cities, it just started becoming impossible.”

Then somebody pointed him west.

“Somebody reached out and said, hey, have you thought about that track in Abilene? I said, no, I didn’t even know it existed,” Tucker said. “The owner didn’t want to let it go to just anybody. He wanted it to go to somebody that was going to continue the racing in this town.”

Tucker bought it and started spending. New paint on the shutdown and the starting line, a refreshed tower, redone bathrooms, and what Poland calls one of the biggest burnout pads in the country, ringed by cut-open shipping containers so fans can watch from inside the wall.

“When people come out, it’s very presentable, very new, very fresh,” Tucker said. “It’s kind of just a wow factor.”

The great equalizer

Strip a track to bare concrete and you change who can win. That is the thesis, and it is why Poland, who has been at the center of Drag Illustrated’s outlaw and small-tire coverage, is so fired up.

“If you’re going out there on fresh concrete, it’s pretty well anybody’s ballgame,” Poland said. “It’s not necessarily going to be the guy with a twin-turbo Pro Line Hemi.”

It is a deliberate break from the no-prep model that hardened over the last several years, where tracks ran on layers of built-up rubber and, as Poland put it, the money usually found a way to win. Tucker wanted the older, rawer version back, the one that feels less like a race and more like a street fight at 3 a.m.

“I wanted to do something that I feel like nobody is doing, which is sticking with what they say they’re going to do,” Tucker said. “If they want no prep, they stick with no prep. You start flipping back and forth, it really makes it tough. It’s easier to go prep than it is no prep.”

Poland has a name for the crowd this setup rewards. “I call them the street mutts,” he said. “They run around on backsides and streets. That’s what they do.”

Bigger than one weekend

The number that made the room stop was not the $150,000. It was what Tucker said comes next.

The Freedom of War, he said, is the first move in a much larger play. A second event is already booked for November with a $200,000 purse. Then, in 2027, Tucker wants to run a five-race series worth a total of $1 million.

“The first four races, that’s basically $600,000 we’re giving away,” Tucker said. “The fifth race, we’ll open it up, unlimited car count, and it’ll be for $400,000. All the winners from the first four will get free entry into the final.”

For a corner of the sport that spent the last few years watching purses and events dry up, it is a jolt in the other direction.

“You talk about this kind of purse money coming back into no-prep racing,” Wes Buck said on the show. “This is something a lot of people thought had gone the way of the dodo.”

A super solid turnout

By race weekend, WesTx Abilene Raceway had drawn a super solid turnout for the main event, 47 Small Tire cars strong. That is a healthy field for any small-tire race, and a real feather in the cap for a Fourth of July weekend, one of the toughest dates on the calendar to pull a field of racers to.

The field mixes true 10.5 no-prep machines with the street cars that live for this kind of surface. Poland pointed to a handful of hitters expected to be in the mix: Ryan Martin, Ryan Mitchell, Billy Hoskinson, Tom “Jimmy Dale” Gunner and Scott Taylor.

The format is built to spread the money around. First round of Small Tire and True Street run Friday night alongside Daily Driver, the Lil’ Gangsta 5.30 index and a slate of index classes. Saturday brings the smaller classes through the day before the Small Tire second chance and the main-event rounds off the trailer. True Street pays $10,000 guaranteed, courtesy of Ridgeway Fabrications.

Then, because this is Tucker, there are fireworks. “We’re the only fireworks show in town,” he said of the Saturday-night display, timed to the Fourth of July and the country’s 250th birthday.

The part that matters

Ask Tucker about Abilene and he does not lead with the purse. He leads with the town, a tight-knit West Texas community that rallied around the racetrack the moment he bought it.

“As soon as we bought it, I didn’t even have to advertise. People were just messaging: I heard you bought the track, when’s it going to open?” he said. “The local businesses, the radio stations, everybody has been very supportive. It’s been a blessing to be a part of Abilene.”

That is the version of this sport Drag Illustrated has always pulled for: an operator pouring money into a facility instead of walking away from one, betting that if you build a real place and keep your word about how it races, the racers and the fans will show up.

This weekend, on bare concrete off the trailer, Tucker finds out. Drag Illustrated will be on the property to tell the story.

Drag Illustrated’s live Freedom of War Event Hub, powered by WesTx Abilene Raceway, is updating all weekend with schedule, payouts, class rules, photos and results.

This story was originally published on July 3, 2026.

The post Matt Tucker, Michael Poland Dish on $150,000 Freedom of War No-Prep Shootout first appeared on Drag Illustrated.