It was pushing 7:30 on Friday night at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park. The Top Fuel and Funny Car fields were stacked up in the lanes waiting on their first shot at the 72nd running of the Cornwell Quality Tools NHRA U.S. Nationals, and the air was thick enough to chew. Miserable heat. Painfully high humidity. The kind of evening where the tuners in the pro pits were pulling timing out of their cars and praying.
That’s when Brian Hope rolled the Rat Trap into the water box.
If you don’t know the car, you know the shape. Bantam roadster body. Blown, 90-percent nitro Hemi hanging out in the wind. A driver perched so high he could see over the roof of everything else in the staging lanes. It’s the AA/Fuel Altered Don Green named in 1968 as a joke about trapping Chevy “rat motors” with a Chrysler, the car that toured with Winged Express and Pure Heaven II back when Fuel Altereds were the most violent things in drag racing, and the car Ron Hope recreated with Green 30 years ago and then hauled around the world for the better part of three decades.
Hope smashed the throttle. The tires went up in smoke, he backed off the loud pedal just enough to keep them sizzling, and he kept them boiling to damn near the eighth-mile mark. Then he stopped it, backed all the way up, staged it, and busted off a 6.48 at 226 mph in some of the worst air anybody at IRP will see all year.
It was poetic. It was a blast from the past. It was a piece of pure showmanship that, honestly, has gotten rare at highly professional drag races these days, and there’s no doubt the U.S. Nationals qualifies.
Here’s the thing, though. None of it was an accident.
“Going into Friday night, we were asked by the NHRA to be there, and that was very important to us, to be honored and asked to participate in that event,” Hope told me this week. “We’re gonna run right before Funny Car. We’re gonna run the quarter mile. I’ve sat there and watched nostalgia Funny Cars run, and not to knock nostalgia Funny Cars at all, either right before or right after the pros, doing a short burnout and a run right down the middle that’s a second or more slower and over 100 miles an hour slower. It’s not a good representation of what those cars are, and it’s really not good for the fans.”
“We wanted to go out and do what we do. Those cars have never really been competition cars throughout the history of Fuel Altereds. They’ve run in competition, but they’ve always just been show cars, and we wanted to go out and put on a good show. It’s hard on the equipment, doing an eighth-mile burnout and coming to a stop at a thousand foot and backing it up and staging it and running it through. But we’re out there to put on a show, and that’s what we went out to do.”
Read that again. Hope walked into the biggest drag race in the world, in the middle of NHRA’s 75th anniversary celebration, knowing full well the fastest Funny Cars on the planet were going to run right behind him and go a second quicker and 100 mph faster. He didn’t try to compete with them. He gave the crowd the one thing they can’t.
That’s the whole point of a Fuel Altered. It always has been.
And the other half of what makes it impressive is the car itself, which Hope is not remotely shy about.
“It drives like a 40-year-old International dump truck,” he said. “The steering’s horrible in it and the seating position’s horrible, but it’s just a fun car to go out and show off.”
Hope came to the Rat Trap by way of Pure Hell, Rich Guasco’s legendary Fuel Altered, which he drove for 15 years, most of that time racing against his own father. Those two cars are the only race cars Brian Hope has ever driven. The first time he ever ran against another car on a drag strip, any kind of car, he was in Pure Hell.
“Coming from Pure Hell, which is an amazingly built race car by Davey Uyehara that can go anywhere on the racetrack I want to take it at any speed, the Rat Trap is not that,” Hope said. “The Rat Trap is cumbersome. It’s difficult. For 28 years I watched Dad drive that thing, and everything that I said I would never do when I drove that car, I did in the first two runs. The very first race after Dad retired, we went to Nitro Revival at Irwindale and I ran over the 330-foot cone in the burnout. It was just the cone and I didn’t put it in the wall, but it becomes something you have to embrace. It’s not for everyone.”
Then there’s the view from up top.
“I feel like the giraffe a little bit out there,” he said. “That car sits very upright. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s distracting to sit that high because you can absolutely see everything. You have to train yourself to not pay attention to things that don’t matter, like what the front tires are running over. If you’re looking at the front tires, you’ve already hit whatever you’re pointing at anyway.”
So that’s the machine he stood on the gas in for 660 feet on Friday night. In front of the biggest crowd of the year. With the pros waiting behind him.
The car in the other lane deserves its own paragraph, because it’s every bit as much a piece of history. Randy Bradford was driving the Bradford’s Crank Service Fiat, a car whose lineage runs back to the family’s first altered in 1966. Sixty years, run out of Bradford’s Crank Service with Randy’s dad, Dexter Bradford. Randy started driving at 18, while he was still in high school, and he’s driven the car the entire time since except for his tour in Vietnam, when Frank Harris sat in for him. The car they brought to Indy was built in the late ‘90s, and Randy’s grandson, Mitchell Bradford, is listed as crew chief.
Which means you had two family Fuel Altereds, each tuned by a grandson, both of which were at Indy for the 50th U.S. Nationals and came back for the 75th anniversary. NHRA gave it one sentence in the legends press release. It deserved more than that.
Anyway. The 6.48 was a hell of a number for the air. The Hopes knew it, and they knew there was more in the car.
“We got back Friday night and Michael’s looking at me going, ‘Dad, we only ran a .48. We gotta pick it up,’” Hope said of his son and crew chief, Michael Hope. “I said, ‘All right, son, let’s look at this. We can get more out of it. We can squeeze it. But it means we can’t do a really long burnout, and it means we got to pick up our starting line procedure. And we’re still a full second and a hundred miles an hour slow of the car that’s going to run right behind us. What do these people want to see?’ He’s like, ‘All right, you got it.’”
They took Saturday off. In Hope’s words, they “shook babies and hugged hands” and got the social part of Indy out of the way, checked the rod bearings for peace of mind, and rolled it back to the lanes Sunday with the same timing and the same blower overdrive. Hope says the car doesn’t ask for much, and that Friday night they could have adjusted the clutch, changed the oil, screwed in eight plugs and run it right back in the lanes if they’d needed to.
“The weather came to us,” he said. “We didn’t change the timing, we didn’t change the blower percentage. The only thing that changed for us was the weather, and it ran a 6.33 Sunday afternoon, which is the quickest run that car’s ever made.”
Six-thirty-three at 227 mph. On a 105-inch wheelbase. In front of the U.S. Nationals crowd.
If 227 sounds soft for a 6.33, it is, and Hope knows exactly why. The Rat Trap turns 9,500 rpm through the lights, and once the fuel pump speed gets that high the car has more pump than the magneto can use. It goes fat on the top end and lays down. When the air is right, like it was at the Blue Suede Cruise at Norwalk, the car has run high 230s.
Now, full disclosure. I’m not objective about this car. The first major event I ever promoted, before I was married to Pro Mod, was the World Fuel Altered Nationals at Eddyville, Iowa, in August of 2005. I called every human being on the planet who owned a Fuel Altered, and I called Ron Hope more times than I can count. There was no appearance fee. He came anyway. Having the Rat Trap in Eddyville was the crowning achievement of that whole deal for me, and it still is.
Ron Hope drove that car for a quarter century before handing it to his son. He turned 80 on Father’s Day in 2024 and passed five days later. One week to the day before he died, Brian was in the Rat Trap at Bowling Green and Michael rolled Ron up from behind the burnout box so he could watch. The family takes that photo with them everywhere the car goes now.
“They didn’t call Brian Hope because they wanted to talk to Brian Hope,” he said of the NHRA invitation. “They called because of what Dad had done with that Rat Trap and where he had taken it and the legacy that he created with it. I’m proud to be able to get to do what he did.”
And here’s the part nobody in the stands Friday night knew. Indy was supposed to be the end.
“We had intended on the Rat Trap being at Indy for the last time. That was going to be it,” Hope said. “We didn’t want to say forever. We didn’t want to say we were retiring. We were just going to quietly go away.”
Then Bill Bader Jr. asked what would happen if he called about next year, and Hope told him the truth: if Bill calls, the car runs. Bill already called. The Rat Trap will be at Summit Motorsports Park in 2027. Hope says the same goes for Brock Porter at Bowling Green, and a short list of others who, when they ask for the car, get it.
“There is a history, there is a significance of that car,” Hope said, “and when people ask to see it, then it’s my responsibility to get it out there.”
Sixty-foot burnouts and runs down the middle are fine. That’s not what this car is for. Brian Hope reminded one of the biggest crowds in drag racing what a Fuel Altered is supposed to look like, and he did it in air that should have made it impossible.
Somebody needs to keep calling.
This story was originally published on September 11, 2026. 
The post Brian Hope Brought ‘The Show’ Back to Indy In The Rat Trap AA/Fuel Altered, And He Did It On Purpose first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
