Two of the best door car racers alive made their first passes in a nitro dragster Wednesday at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park. What they felt is the easy part of the story. The hard part is what Richard Freeman is building behind it.
Erica Enders did not sleep the night before.
Six Pro Stock world championships, 22 years in the class, a résumé that stacks up against anybody who has ever strapped into a factory hot rod, and she was up at three and four in the morning going over notes and watching video like a rookie the week of her first race.
“It’s not really a comforting feeling knowing that you’re going to strap into a bomb,” says Enders. “So the night before, I didn’t sleep much. I went over notes and videos at three and four in the morning and was just trying to be as prepared as possible, because despite the fact that I’ve driven a lot of different race cars, it’s a huge learning curve diving into Top Fuel. There’s an expectation there that because you can drive other cars, you should be able to drive anything. So I didn’t want to look like a dumbass. I want to do a good job, especially for the guys that are working their butts off to let me do it. I think that’s where the nerves came from.”
That is the part nobody sees. The part everybody saw was Enders and teammate Aaron Stanfield taking their first swings at a Top Fuel dragster Wednesday at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park, four attempts apiece, no licenses handed out, and both of them climbing out wanting more.
The nitro car does not care what you have won. Enders found that out somewhere around the point where the clutch starts locking up.
“The initial hit, the 60, 100 foot, it’s nothing, it’s fine… So you’re okay there,” says Enders. “It’s when the clutch comes in and it freaking takes your breath from you, and it doesn’t stop pulling. It sets you back and then it just [keeps] planting you in the seat even further, and your vision changes.”
Stanfield reported the same thing. Vision blurred, down track, in the part of the run where a Pro Stock car has stopped pulling and a fuel car is still stacking on speed.
“I would have lost money,” says Stanfield. “I had a thought that when you first stomp on the gas, it would have shocked me pretty good and made me feel behind the car immediately. But it wasn’t until probably 400 feet and past half-track where it starts coming in. When that clutch starts coming in, you realize, holy shit, this thing’s really fast.”
Later in the same conversation he found the shorter version.
“The speed was definitely understated,” says Stanfield.
Understated is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Stanfield is the reigning Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod champion. He won $150,000 in a Pro Mod at Bradenton in March. He races a Pro Stock car for a living and grew up inside a Pro Stock engine shop. He is not a man easily impressed by acceleration, and he sat in a Top Fuel car for four runs and came away telling you the speed is worse than advertised.
Both of them will tell you the physical part was not the hard part. The hard part was the procedure.
Everything a professional door car driver has trained his or her body to do on a starting line for two decades is wrong in a Top Fuel car. There is no clutch pedal work at the hit. Static clutch pressure holds the car, the driver’s left foot comes off the clutch entirely before staging, and the car is held on the line with a hand brake while the driver stands on the throttle. In a Pro Stock car, letting the clutch out before you launch means the engine dies and your day is over.
“I told the crew chiefs when I came back, I said that is the most unnatural move slash feeling,” says Enders. “You go up there and you completely step off the clutch before you stage the car. You do that in a Pro Stock car or any other car I’ve driven, you do an accidental dry hop and the car dies. So that is a very unnatural part of the process. You really had to overpower your brain to be like, this is going to be okay to step off the clutch. It’s not going to die. It’s part of the procedure.”
Stanfield’s body tried to file an objection on his very first attempt.
“My very first attempt, somehow I didn’t hit the gas, but I had a leg twitch, because everything else I’ve ever raced, you deck it as soon as you stage to get up on the two-step,” says Stanfield. “So I had a little leg twitch and luckily it didn’t do anything. It’s different. You stage, you let off the clutch and you’re staging with the hand brake. So it’s different.”
Neither one of them got here the normal way, and both know it. The conventional path into a nitro car runs through an alcohol car, a handful of runs in something that will teach you the shape of the run at a fraction of the violence. Enders and Stanfield skipped it.
“I think most people that drive those cars go through the Top Alcohol process first, at least for a few runs, to understand the process and get a little closer to that speed,” says Stanfield. “We went from a Pro Mod car to a Top Fuel car, so it was a pretty serious jump.”
What he leaned on instead was volume.
“Throughout my career I’ve driven a lot of different stuff, and that definitely helps me adapt quickly,” says Stanfield. “Everything I’ve done to this point has definitely helped me for that moment.”
Enders put her version more bluntly. “I’ve driven everything there is to drive except Top Fuel,” she says.
What she and Stanfield did have was months of standing next to the thing. Neither one of them waited for a test date to start studying, which is why the sheer violence of a fuel car at idle, the part that rattles almost everybody the first time, did not surprise her at all.
“Since we’ve acquired a Top Fuel operation, Aaron and I have been paying pretty close attention, and we go over there for warmups and make sure that we’re watching everything so that we could learn, because we knew that this was on the horizon,” says Enders. “I wasn’t surprised at how violent they are at idle because I stand right next to him when Tony warms up.”
What made the jump survivable, both drivers volunteered without being asked, was who was standing there when they got in. Tony Stewart and Leah Pruett coached them through it. Enders said Stewart and team owner Richard Freeman were the first two people at her car when she shut off on the track after her first pass.
“I think for both Erica and I, I definitely think we were nervous about it,” says Stanfield. “But I feel like Tony and Leah and Mike [Green, crew chief] and all those guys had us as prepared as we could have possibly been. So it made the experience pretty damn good.”
By the time he got to the starting line, he says, there was nothing left to learn secondhand.
“I mentally knew exactly every part of the process up to the point of making a run,” says Stanfield. “And all I needed to do was just feel it.”
Enders leaned on the same preparation, and on having a partner in it.
“Everybody told me, oh, this is a man’s car. You can’t do this. And they psych you out and they half-ass want you to fail,” says Enders. “But after the first time I was like, okay, I can do this. I get the procedure.”
“Aaron and I, we kind of downloaded with each other after we both drove,” she says. “That was kind of a cool part of it, is I had a partner in all of it that we could bounce things off of. He learned from what I did the first day, and vice versa.”
Here is where this stops being a story about two door car racers having a hell of a Wednesday and becomes something considerably bigger.
Nobody got licensed. Freeman says that was never the objective.
“Aaron, I think, was a run away from being able to get his license,” says Freeman. “We’re not doing that. That was never one of the things we were trying to accomplish.”
The point, he says, was seat time. Give them the runs, let them process it, come back and do it again when it makes sense.
“We’ll do it again when the time is right, and see if we can put a deal together for a second fuel car or a third,” says Freeman.
A second fuel car or a third. Read that again.
Eleven months ago Richard Freeman did not own a Top Fuel car. He bought Josh Hart’s operation in September of 2025 and has said since that not a single running race car came with the deal. He hired Mike Green, a crew chief with two Top Fuel championships on his card who started with Darrell Gwynn in 1987, and brought in Joe Barlam alongside him. He built cars over the winter, put Tony Stewart in the seat under a marketing alliance with Tony Stewart Racing, and won the Winternationals at Pomona in the program’s third race of the 2026 season.
Now he has run two of the best drivers in his building down the racetrack in a nitro car, and he is telling anybody who will listen that this was never a photo op.
“At the end of the day, for our program in general, it is a huge step,” says Freeman. “But we couldn’t do none of this without the personnel that we’ve put together. Mike Green, Joe Barlam, that entire team made it seamless for these guys. The car was there, it was ready. Erica was first. She did a warm up. We went through all these steps. Tony and Leah were a big part of making sure that they had some kind of comfortable deal, if you could call it that. But as comfortable as you can be strapping into one of those [things].”
His read on how it went is exactly as unsentimental as you would expect.
“Erica went first. She made four attempts, went to the, I don’t know, a few hundred foot,” says Freeman. “And it was good. Another couple of test sessions and we’ll be there, now they know what to expect.”
The reason behind all of it is succession, and Freeman is unusually direct about it.
“We don’t know how long Tony’s going to do it,” says Freeman. “So the main thing is making sure somebody from inside of our group is ready to go when he is ready to go, when it’s time.”
That is a philosophy statement as much as a business plan. The default move in professional drag racing when a nitro seat opens up is to find somebody with a checkbook. Freeman is doing the opposite on purpose.
“We’re building our program around the stars… loyalty, the whole thing,” says Freeman. “Tony’s provided us a great opportunity to have somebody that is a really good race car driver in general. And so we can go out there again with a big plan in motion with TSR and Elite. We couldn’t have been more proud.”
There is an irony in all of it worth noting. Freeman has said publicly that the seed for this entire program was planted when NHRA president Glen Cromwell suggested to him at Pomona that he ought to put Enders in a Top Fuel car so she could be the star she was meant to be. Freeman took that as a comment on where Pro Stock sits in the pecking order, got his back up about it, and went and bought a nitro team. He now has the six-time Pro Stock champion making laps in one anyway, on his terms, in his equipment, with his people.
None of which means either driver is leaving the class that made them. Both went out of their way to say so.
“I’ve been racing Pro Stock for 22 years and I love it,” says Enders. “Then I got in a Top Fuel car and I’m like, okay, well I see why people like it. It’s fast and it’s fun and it’s cool. But nothing will ever take away from Pro Stock and Pro Mod for me.”
“I enjoyed the Pro Mod car and I don’t plan on leaving the Pro Stock car anytime soon,” says Stanfield. “I just look forward to where the process takes us.”
Ask Stanfield what he actually wants and the answer is not complicated.
“If it’s got four wheels, I want to race it. I don’t care what,” says Stanfield. “I want to race anything. I have a good opportunity to race with good people. I think that’s the main decider for me, is just racing with good people.”
The obstacle is not desire and it is not talent. NHRA rules currently prohibit a professional driver from competing in more than one pro category at the same national event, which makes a licensed Enders or a licensed Stanfield a scheduling problem before it is ever a competitive one. Stanfield has pointed out previously that Kenny Koretsky ran Top Fuel and Pro Stock at the same race in an earlier era. Whether that door reopens is a conversation for a different day and probably a different building.
What is not in question is the seat time still required. Enders says every fuel driver she talked to gave her the same number.
“You’re behind the car, no matter how much you’ve driven or whatever,” says Enders. “And everyone I talked to, from Tony and Leah who coached us to Steve-O [Torrence] and I talked, and [Shawn] Langdon and I talked, and [Matt] Hagan called, it takes 40 to 50 runs until you’re kind of one with the car. So we definitely got some seat time ahead of us to try to figure everything out. But I think that first step was definitely huge and I’m excited about it.”
She wanted to go back out again right away.
“I wish I had another day, while we were in Indy, while it was fresh,” says Enders.
Stanfield wants the same thing, and he has wanted it longer than anybody realized.
“When I was a kid running around my dad’s Pro Stock engine shop, all the guys, my nickname used to be ‘Top Fuel’,” says Stanfield. “Cause I was wide open.”
Thirty-odd years later the nickname finally caught up with the job description. Stanfield made it damn near all the way down the racetrack on his third run. On his fourth he smoked the tires, which cost him the license attempt the people around the car were quietly hoping for, and he could not have been happier about it.
“They were all kind of disappointed, because I think that was the run I could have gotten my license, assuming I could have made it the same amount down the racetrack as the run before,” says Stanfield. “But I told him, it’s all good. I’m honestly glad that I felt that quickly. So I know what it feels like.”
He will get his chance. So will Enders. Freeman is already talking about the next test session, and about a second car, and about a third, and about who is going to be sitting in Tony Stewart’s seat on the day Tony Stewart decides he is finished with it.
That answer is going to come from inside the building. Wednesday was the first proof of it.
This story was originally published on August 25, 2026. 
The post Freeman’s Long Game: Enders, Stanfield Make First Top Fuel Runs at Indy first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
