Tony Wilson did not win a round at the 2026 NHRA U.S. Nationals.
He was, without question, the biggest story in the Pro Mod pits at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park, and depending on who you ask, the biggest story at the race, period.
Here is the short version. After three qualifying sessions, Wilson and the white-and-purple “Barney” ‘41 Willys were outside a 16-car JBS Equipment NHRA Pro Mod Drag Racing Series field. Saturday night, sun going down, last chance, he went 5.710 at 249.39 mph. For most of the session, the nitrous-fed Willys that everybody in the sport told him could not be competitive in the quarter-mile was sitting on the pole at “The Big Go.”
Then the parachutes hit and tore the back of the chassis out of the car.
In a wild turn of events, a tow truck picked the car up at 2 a.m., a chassis shop put it back together for the price of a few T-shirts, and Monday morning he rolled into round one with the wrong wheelie bars, stood the Willys on its back tires and carried the front end for what looked like the entire eighth mile before he lifted to save the only car of its kind on the planet.
By Wednesday morning, the video on his Facebook page had 800,000 views. People were calling for T-shirts and hero cards. He does not have a merch page.
“I don’t know much about computers. I don’t know much about Facebook. I can use it,” Wilson said on this week’s Wes Buck Show. “But I had 800,000 views on my Facebook page this morning. And people are calling wanting T-shirts and hero cards.”
That is the short version. The long version is better.
Wilson is 39 years old, a concrete contractor from Kannapolis, North Carolina, and a lifer. He grew up five minutes from Mooresville Dragway in the heyday of Carolina Pro Mod, watching guys like Buzz Varner and Randy Weatherford on Saturday nights. His dad worked for Al-Anabi Racing and spent time overseas with Shannon Jenkins. Wilson has driven other people’s Pro Mods, including Tim Wallace’s ‘55 Chevy in NHRA competition and Ed Burnley’s Harts Charger-equipped “Iron Man” Camaro to an IHRA win, but this car is different.
This car is his, and there is only one.
Tommy Mauney built the original Barney in 1994 and drove it to the 1995 IHRA Pro Modified championship, ending Scotty Cannon’s run at the top. The Parsons Brothers bought it, and Jenkins, “The Iceman,” won IHRA titles behind the wheel of it in 1997 and 1999. Thirty years later, Mauney built a new one for Wilson, a modern take on the same ‘41 Willys silhouette with a Pat Musi 998-cubic-inch nitrous engine and a Liberty transmission. It debuted at GALOT for the IHRA opener with Mauney himself in the seat. Jenkins is in an advisory role on the deal, and the car carries the white-and-purple scheme that made the original famous.
“There’s a lot of people that still don’t realize that the Barney car that we’re racing is not the original Barney car,” Wilson said. “That is not the car from 30 years ago.”
It was never supposed to run the quarter-mile.
“I had no intention of doing this until we were at GALOT with Tommy driving it,” Wilson said. “Rickie [Smith] come up to us and I said, man, maybe I’ll just run this thing in NHRA because it gets a 75-pound weight break. He said, you can’t do it. And I said, okay, I’m doing it. And then they said, you can’t do it with a 998. And I’m going to be honest with you, it’s cost the hell out of me. But me and Pat and Shannon have worked on this thing. And this is a bad bitch.”
Rickie is Rickie Smith, who knows a thing or two about nitrous Pro Mods and the NHRA rulebook. The 75-pound break is real. NHRA’s Pro Mod rules allow 1959-and-older body styles to deduct 75 pounds from their combination’s minimum weight. Nobody had bothered to take advantage of it with a nitrous car because the conventional wisdom, for a decade or more, has been that nitrous cannot win in the quarter mile anymore, and a Willys is an aerodynamic brick.
Wilson’s answer to the aero question is that this is not that Willys.
“I think this body that we created, because there’s not another one of these cars in the world, this is the one and only, I think this car is definitely better than the original Willys body,” he said. “But that’s the problem. If I wreck this car, it’s not like I call up my buddy and say, ‘Hey, send me that Willys car that’s just like mine.’ There’s not another one of these cars. So I have to be very careful. There’s no body. There’s no nothing.”
Before Wilson started this program, the fastest a Willys-bodied car had ever gone in the quarter mile, by his count, was 236 mph. His car had been 246 and 247 earlier this season, and he had run a 5.69 at Norwalk. In testing a couple months back, he went 5.65 and lifted early, 3.69 to the eighth-mile.
So the number was in the car. The problem at Indy was getting it down the racetrack.
“We felt like we could go 75, 74. That’s kind of what we was after,” Wilson said. “And when they told me it went 71, I was pretty surprised myself because it wasn’t supposed to do that. We botched up qualifying the first two days and we just knew we had to get down the racetrack. I wanted to be number one qualifier in Indy. And if I could have got them other runs in, I feel like we had a pretty good chance of being number one.”
The Q3 miss on Saturday afternoon left him on the outside, and it produced the moment Wilson will probably remember longer than anything that happened on the track. His three-year-old grandson, Memphis, was in the push car.
“Q3, we don’t go down. And over the PA system they’re like, oh, Tony Wilson isn’t in the field,” Wilson said, describing the call from the tower. “My little man is in the push car and just drops in the floorboard and bawls his eyes out. He’s upset. Papa didn’t do good. We’re not qualified. He’s three years old. He’s not supposed to understand this. He looks up at my wife and says, tell Papa to get the other motor out of the trailer. I want to go fast.”
Q4, Saturday night. Wilson had gone to a 10-foot parachute for Indy because the 8-foot chutes he runs in PDRA eighth-mile competition were not getting the car slowed down at 246. At 249.39, the car found something new.
“We also hadn’t been 250 miles an hour with the car. It had only been 246, 247. And at that point, we were fine. But I guess somewhere between 247 and 250, there’s a problem,” Wilson said. “It ripped the whole underslung out from the car, because Tommy’s cars are underslung chassis, meaning that it’s got two down bars that go behind the rear end housing and then up to the main frame rail. Well, it ripped all that shit out. And it even had weight bolted to it. That flew across the racetrack and landed by the scale house and about hit some people on a golf cart.”
Inside the car, he felt the chutes hit and then felt nothing.
“Thank God I had Strange brakes on this car,” Wilson said. “I had no problem getting stopped. It was scary for a moment, but we made the turn off, and I sit in the car, and I didn’t know how fast I went because I had a whole hell of a lot going on in there. And they come over to me, and Jake, the NHRA tech guy, he’s like, hey, you went 71. You’re on the pole. I’m like, holy shit. He’s like, hey, but your race car is wrecked.”
He did not stay on the pole. Justin Bond went 5.654 at 255.00 mph and JR Gray went 5.693 later in the same session, and Wilson ended up third in one of the deepest Pro Mod fields NHRA has assembled. In this field, in this car, with this combination, third was a headline all by itself. Wilson’s grandson had a different read on it.
“Memphis gets down there, and my wife and Dave, and it sinks in, and he looks at me, and he’s just like, Papa, we did it. You won,” Wilson said. “He doesn’t realize that we’re just qualified. He says, we win. And we just cry. I know people talk. They laugh at Rickie Smith because he cries a lot, but I’m telling you, we cry because we are passionate. We don’t buy our seats. We don’t have people working on our stuff. We do it all. We do everything, and we’re passionate about what we do. And I bawled my eyes out down there. I cried going up the staging lanes. I cried when I got back to the trailer.”
Then the thrash started, and Indy did what Indy does.
Brian Lohnes and Joe Castello put the word out over the intercom that Wilson needed help, and the pits responded.
“It’s not just a couple people that’s hearing this. It’s the whole place,” Wilson said. “It looked like ants in the pit trying to figure out where we were going and what we were doing. But everyone come together, and we made this work.”
The guys from PBRC, the Brownsburg chassis shop a few minutes from the track, walked into the pit and said they wanted to fix the car.
“So a towing company come and pick the car up, no cost. They went and picked the car up at two o’clock in the morning. And PBRC just wanted some T-shirts for helping us,” Wilson said. “They did an awesome job. They collaborated with Mauney on what they wanted to do to fix this thing. And we did go back with eight-foot chutes for the rest of the weekend. We weren’t even going to try that again.”
Mauney called him Wednesday morning to talk it through.
“Tommy said, ‘Tony, when I built this car, I didn’t have any idea of it doing this. It needed more support right there,’” Wilson said. “And so now we know.”
Which brings us to Monday morning and the wheelstand.
Wilson drew DI Winter series champion Peter Norton in round one. The chute incident had destroyed the top bars on his wheelie bar setup, and the replacement set that showed up Monday morning was too short. The bars ended up two inches too high. Wilson figured the car would yank the front end up, shake, and he would be done early. Instead, the Willys left hard, stood up, and kept pulling.
“You can’t tune this thing up to do that,” Wilson said. “It takes off. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Here we go. This is crazy.’ And I knew I had to let off. And then with the Liberty, if you let off of it, it goes to neutral. So it slammed it down.”
From the seat, he was steering off the wall.
“I couldn’t see nothing. I was looking out of the side window, judging off the wall where I was at on the racetrack. And then I knew I was in fifth gear. And I said, okay, I got to be at the eighth-mile mark. And then I felt the car get light,” Wilson said. “And I can’t crash this car. If I crash this car, I have nothing else. And there’s not another one in the world. So what do I do?”
He lifted. Norton went 5.751 at 248.29 to advance; Wilson coasted through at 6.381 and 164.97 mph, front end back on the ground, car in one piece. The Facebook comment section has a lot of people who believe he should have ridden it out. Wilson has a message for them.
“I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Man, you should have rode it out.’ There was no riding that out. You don’t know what I felt in the seat,” he said. “I’ve drove these things a long time. I feel everything in them. And I knew it was time.”
How the car stayed straight and kept applying power through a wheelstand that long is a question Wilson answered without hesitation.
“I’ll tell you how that’s possible. A Tommy Mauney race car. I could do this with a 30-year-old Tommy Mauney car. I could do this with the original Barney if it had some updated parts,” he said. “These cars are solid. They don’t move underneath you.” He credited Adam Lambert at PRS on the shock side and called the run “a testament to MVM wheelie bars. They’re perfect.”
The return road at Indy runs right back up in front of the grandstands, and Wilson got the full Indy treatment. “There’s people hollering. There’s people got T-shirts. Both sides as we’re coming back up the return road, you can hear people just screaming,” he said.
NHRA noticed. Wilson said word came directly to the Pro Mod pits from Ned Walliser, NHRA’s vice president of competition: “Thank you for being here. We need you here.”
None of this is cheap, and Wilson does not pretend otherwise. He signed a couple of short-term sponsorships for Indy and Rockingham that added up to about $15,000. Indy cost him roughly $40,000 once he bought the spares he needed. His engine has 30 runs on it and has never had the heads off, because he cannot afford to hurt it. He is taking three engines to Rockingham anyway, because he is going after the national record.
“I’m a good nitrous racer. I’ve done it for a long time. But you get Brandon Switzer, you get Jeff Pierce, you get some of these people. And Jay Cox. I’m going to say it. I hate saying it. It hurts me. But Jay Cox is a bad dude on the keyboard. And if you would get them guys over here, it would show what could really be done,” Wilson said. “Me and Shannon are doing our job. But we can’t afford to race the way that the Marcus Butners race or the Tommy Franklins race. We can’t afford that.”
That is the crusade underneath all of this. Wilson is not in NHRA Pro Mod to make a point about Willys bodies. He is there because he refuses to let nitrous go away.
“I can’t let nitrous die. I’m not going to let nitrous die, whatever it takes for me to do it,” he said. “It has been said that nitrous cars can’t run NHRA, but it’s also people saying that that does it for a living. That’s playing the rulebook. I’m not playing the rulebook. I’m going out there to smash it, crush it. I’m going to go 5.50-something at some point.”
He credits Musi for making that possible. “Pat builds a solid foundation,” Wilson said. “You have to be able to know how to run it. You’ve got to be able to read your spark plugs. But Pat can provide you with what it takes to do this, and you can go run fast right out of the box.”
Wilson has a case to make about the nostalgia bodies, too, and it is aimed squarely at the eighth-mile world where he does most of his racing.
“Let’s take the quarter-mile out of it for just a second. If you go to eighth-mile racing, there’s none of these nostalgia-bodied cars there either. I can tell you, to the eighth mile there’s no difference,” he said. “Why would you not have a ‘55 Chevrolet or a ‘57 Chevrolet or a Willys or a ‘37 Chevrolet? Why not?”
He also said what a lot of nitrous racers have been thinking out loud about the World Series of Pro Mod: “I wish we had a nitrous class with you guys at the World Series.”
Noted.
The Willys is about to become less lonely. Riding home from Indy, Wilson called Mauney about having Hairy Glass pull a mold off the body so that if the worst happened, he would at least have a shell. Mauney had a different idea.
“He said, ‘Yeah, how about I call and order some new pipe?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ So me and Dean’s bored down here, and I think I got one more left in me. How about let’s build you a spare race car?” Wilson said. “I said, you know what? If you and Dean feel up to it, let’s do it.”
Barney No. 2 is officially in the works. It will wear a throwback to the Parsons Brothers-era scheme Jenkins won his two championships in, and Jenkins did not know about any of it as of Wednesday afternoon. Mauney and Dean work four days a week and limited hours, so Wilson does not expect the second car until the 2028 season, but the plan is a complete rolling chassis, tabbed out and painted, so the running gear can swap over if the unthinkable happens. Hairy Glass will take the car after Rockingham to pull molds, and Wilson expects the body to be available to the public sometime in 2027.
For the first time in three decades, there could be a new Willys in the Pro Mod catalog.
Rockingham is next, September 25-27, the inaugural NHRA Nationals at The Rock, and it is Wilson’s home track. He tests there. He is convinced the record is on the table.
“You go to Rockingham and it’s going to be 80 degrees. We already know that track has good rubber. It takes rubber well,” he said. “If we can catch the air and we can catch the track prep, the record will fall.”
He, Jenkins and Mauney will be at NitroFest in downtown Rockingham on Thursday night, September 24, signing autographs. The car has 30 runs on it and has never won an NHRA round. Wilson thinks that changes at The Rock, and he wants to run for a championship next year. That takes help, and he is not shy about asking.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever get a sponsor. I’ve tried for 40 years. I feel like if I’m ever going to get a sponsor, maybe right now is going to be my best shot ever,” he said. “We want to race all 10 races. And I think NHRA wants us there right now. But we need help. If it’s just one race, if it’s just somebody giving me a fuel card or some parts, I want to be able to keep this car out there.”
Monday morning, before the wheelstand, Wilson was drinking his coffee and got a message from a 30-year-old who wants to drag race so badly it hurts, asking how he did it.
“I said, well, at 30 years old, I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I had nothing. I’m going to be 40 this year. In 10 years, I created a business. I put people in the right place, and I still struggle to race. The burden’s heavy for me. I said, you just can’t stop. You can’t stop trying to do this. It’ll come if it’s meant to be,” Wilson said.
“I had Pro Mod raced some before then, but I didn’t have nothing. I was renting a house. I had financed my appliances. I had nothing. I sat in a trailer one night and bawled my eyes out because I couldn’t pay rent because I burned a motor up, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. So I want everybody to try, and don’t laugh at us if you see us emotional, because we are passionate. This isn’t a hobby. This is our life. I’ve never been good at nothing. I’m not the greatest husband. I’m not the greatest business owner, but I damn sure know how to drive a race car, and when I die, I don’t want to be known as a concrete finisher. I want to be known as one of the best Pro Mod drivers in the world, and I’m going to try to do that.”
He came to Indy for a week. He has been coming to Indy his whole life.
“Indy is not seven days. Indy is 40 years for me. From the time I was born until today, I’m still living Indy,” Wilson said. “I got to live out a dream this weekend if I never get to go back. I think we have a story that will be told for a long time. I could have won the race, and that would have been cool. I would have had that Wally, and JR Gray, I’m so thankful. Congratulations to them guys. But what happened to us, even though we didn’t win a round, I don’t think we could have scripted this.”
This story was originally published on September 11, 2026. 
The post The Wheelstand Heard ‘Round the World: Tony Wilson, the Barney Willys, and the Best Story at Indy That Didn’t Win a Round first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
