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 previous interviews in this series featured South Georgia Motorsports Park’s Raul Torres and Maryland International Raceway’s Royce Miller. Stay tuned for an interview with Rockingham Dragway’s Dan VanHorn.
The NHRA Countdown to the Championship will begin September 18-20 at the inaugural Great Lakes Nationals at Martin, Michigan’s U.S. 131 Motorsports Park led by Jason Peterson and his wife, Stephanie, for the last 23 years. It’s a multi-generational facility, as the Petersons’ son, 2025 DI 30 Under 30 honoree Samuel Peterson, leads the track prep program, and Stephanie’s father, former Rockingham Dragway owner Steve Earwood, recently came on board as an advisor. Martin held its first NHRA Division 3 divisional event in July as well.
How long has hosting an NHRA national event been on your wish list?
We have been courted by NHRA for years, and for whatever reason, it wasn’t the right move for us at that time. Now, the time became right.
One of our requests was that if we did switch [to NHRA], we wanted an NHRA national event. When they first started courting us, we were hosting IHRA national events already. Then when IHRA stopped doing their national event stuff, we actually kept the Northern Nationals going ourselves, with our own produced event since then. It’s been many years now that we’ve been doing our own event in August to substitute that national event. But that was one of our criteria: we wanted a national event.
What are the opportunities that come with hosting one? What are the challenges?
I’d say a challenge that we’re running into right now – and it’s not just because of the national event, it’s just the overall switch – is all of the different personnel within NHRA that we deal with now. I went 24 years dealing with the same people at IHRA/WDRA, and now I’ve got to learn everybody. I think, “Who do I call for this? Who do I call for that?”
We’re dealing with the local bracket program, but we’re also dealing with the Lucas Oil race and then dealing with national events. We have been in meetings after meetings after meetings, one, just trying to learn who everybody is, and then two, trying to figure out how to put the event on, where to park racers, what classes are going to come, etc. So that’s been the biggest challenge so far.
The biggest benefit so far is that we’re able to get better sponsorship dollars for signage, both with our local sponsors and then bigger corporate organizations, just because we’re hosting a national event on national TV.
What have you done already to prepare and what’s left to do?
We kind of got thrown to the wolves in the offseason because it was early December when everything got figured out. We were already behind the eight-ball trying to do things. We’ve got a major paving project that we’re doing to support the nitro teams. We’re looking to pave somewhere between seven and nine acres of property. That’s a major overcoming. We’ve got to get engineering drawings up. You’ve got to get permits from the drainage things, and then you’ve just got to line things up to get it done. And then we’ve got to hope in the spring, come April, that we get the asphalt in a respectable time so we can get the paving done. But that’s our biggest project, as far as what we need to do to host the national event.
What do you hope this event accomplishes for your track, your fans, racers, community?
We are now on the elite side. We are an NHRA national event track. We’ve always known or always felt within that we were able to host one of these types of events, and now we’re going to go out and prove it. Our fans are already supporting it. Our ticket sales, according to NHRA, are really good. Especially in mid-September, our air quality and temperatures should be really good to produce some good elapsed times and speeds. We’re very excited to see that and to prove to those racers that we have a facility that they can race on.
This story was originally published on September 15, 2026. 
The post U.S. 131 Motorsports Park’s Jason Peterson Talks Prep For Inaugural NHRA Great Lakes Nationals first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
