When Elite Motorsports rolled out the 2027-spec Pro Stock car at the end of Q1 in Ennis, the grandstands answered before the car ever moved. Wes Buck on what that reaction should tell the people making the decisions.
The near-capacity crowd in the grandstands at the Texas Motorplex cheered, and I mean really cheered, the kind of noise you don’t usually hear for a race car that hasn’t even fired yet. The first session of Pro Stock qualifying at the NHRA Texas FallNationals was drawing to a close on Friday, and there was one lone car left under the tower: a flat-black Chevy Camaro out of the Elite Motorsports camp with a two-inch-plus cowl hood and a monster hood scoop sticking straight up through it.
For as modern a machine as it is (fuel injection and all), there was something undeniably nostalgic about the thing, and you could feel the folks in the stands starting to figure out what they were looking at. Then NHRA announcer Jason Galvin came over the PA, explained that everybody in attendance was about to get the first look at the 2027 NHRA Pro Stock car, and finished with a question: who’s excited to see hood scoops back on Pro Stock cars?
The place popped. It wasn’t the polite, scattered applause you get from people killing time before the next pair of Funny Cars, either. It was a legit crowd pop, loud and immediate and from all over the grandstands, and I’ll admit it caught me completely off guard. I was standing there for it, I’ve been to more Pro Stock qualifying sessions than I could ever count, and I was genuinely surprised.
If you’ve ever watched pro wrestling, you know exactly the sound I’m talking about. When the good guy makes the walk to the ring and the building comes unglued, that’s called a pop, and anybody who has ever booked a wrestling show will tell you it’s the most important signal in the business (the bad guy gets heat, which is a whole different deal). The office hears that reaction and the decision pretty much makes itself: more of this guy, more of this angle, more of whatever it was that just got the whole building out of their seats. Do it more. In just about any other form of sports and entertainment, that’s how a reaction like that gets read, and I don’t see why ours should be any different.
The car itself was no slouch, either. Mike DePalma Jr., the longtime Comp Eliminator and Super Stock racer who is also general manager at Elite High Performance in Fort Worth, did the driving, and the black Camaro went 6.515 at 211.69 mph right out of the box. Over the course of the weekend it went 6.476 at 212.90, 6.491 at 211.59 and 6.488 at 211.46, and three of those four would have qualified it for the Pro Stock field in Ennis. Keep in mind this was the race where Dallas Glenn went 6.434 to reset the national record and Aaron Stanfield matched Greg Anderson’s year-old 6.443, in what Autoweek’s Susan Wade reported was the class’s first all-6.4-second field. For the very first laps on a brand-new combination, that’s not bad. Not bad at all.
Richard Freeman led the project, and he’s been chasing it since NHRA announced the change back in April. Elite started dynoing engines right away and bolted a similar setup onto his brother Royce Freeman’s B/Altered Automatic Comp Eliminator car to get a jump on the research and development. When Richard was on the show, he told me the two throttle bodies on top, “instead of that front air albatross” the cars run now, simply make the thing easier to live with.
“It just cleans it up,” he said. “It just does. And so, we did need a change. Race cars have hood scoops.” He told NHRA.com much the same before the weekend, adding that the factories are gone and “the class has kind of stalemated,” and that Elite has already seen “five to ten” horsepower, “which in our world is a lot.”
In the Elite pits in Ennis, Freeman walked me through why he likes it. The tune-up is easier, which in his view should cut down on manpower and brain drain, and the cars quit sucking air through a snorkel just inches off of a hot racetrack. He figures it’ll probably take half a season for the combination to find its true potential, and once it does he expects e.t.’s to drop by several hundredths, which would put us flirting with a 6.3-second Pro Stocker. One of the crew chiefs in that same pit area put it even more plainly. He told me the hood scoop car has low 6.40 potential, “no doubt.” Personally, I don’t think the numbers are the point of any of this, but if those guys are right, the quickest and fastest Pro Stock racing in history could be right around the corner.
For anyone who missed it, the rules package NHRA announced in April brings hood scoops back for 2027 and swaps the single forward-facing throttle body for two top-mounted, four-barrel-style throttle bodies. EFI stays. The fuel-injected, flat-hood era began in 2016 and has two races left, and NHRA Director of Engineering Clinton Snead said at the time that the current low, front air-entry setup “makes the engines more difficult to tune and creates more variation from car to car than it should.” The rules on throttle bodies, manifolds and air inlets are loosening up too, which, for my two cents, might be the biggest part of the whole announcement.
Mike Carpenter and I talked about it on the show the day the news broke, and I went back and listened to what I said. I said a hood scoop wasn’t going to make “television ratings spike” or bring some huge influx of new fans. I also said Pro Stock has a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore, cult-like fan following, and that this was “giving a little something back to the people that do stay in the stands.” I grew up as one of those people, going to the Midwest races with my dad and trying to snap pictures of four-link bars from outside the ropes, back when Pro Stock was secret squirrel black magic voodoo. In April it was a theory. In Ennis, those people were in the stands, and they let everybody know how they felt.
Now, I’m not going to pretend the racers are all on board, because they’re not. According to Wade’s reporting, Stanfield likes it (“The Pro Stock I grew up watching had hood scoops, so it kind of excites me,” he told Competition Plus), and Chris McGaha is somewhere in the middle, saying he’s “still” excited but expects the cars to be “about the same as they are right now to start off with.” From there it gets rough. Kenny Delco said “they should have never taken it off,” but now that teams have spent “all that time and money,” he doesn’t understand going back. Deric Kramer, who has driven both versions, said looking around a scoop at the tree is “just going to be harder to see the tree for frankly not a lot of benefit.” Matt Hartford called it “an absolute waste of money for every single team” and said “it’s going to hurt the small teams.” KB Titan’s Eric Latino said the cars “look like they’re back at frigging 2010.”
I get it. I really do. Nobody wants these guys spending more money, especially when the purse hasn’t moved, and Freeman, for what it’s worth, told NHRA.com that “it will save us money in the long run, no doubt.” But let’s be honest with each other for a second. NHRA Pro Stock has not, at any point in recent memory, been some sort of super intelligent financial investment, and nothing about hood scoops changes that racer pay, specifically in Pro Stock, needs to get better. Some of NHRA drag racing’s biggest stars and most promising young talents call Pro Stock home, and they deserve to be paid like it, scoop or no scoop. Latino also raised a fair point, that Mountain Motor Pro Stock will show up next year with scoops, run 6.20s and leave the crowd confused about why the 500-inch cars are slower, and I hear him (he’s a friend). Truth be told, I’d question whether NHRA needs to add that class at all when there were some 600 race cars in Ennis, but that’s a column for another day.
So I went looking to see if the internet felt the way the grandstands did. NHRA’s reels of the exhibition pass on Facebook and Instagram drew 1,173 reactions and 1,517 likes, respectively, and the comments were split right down the middle, 30 in favor and 32 against by our count. On one side you had “Now that looks like a Pro Stock car again” and “Actually looks like a race car again” (and Elite’s own account chiming in with “HOOD SCOOPS 4 LYFEEEEE,” which, shocker). On the other you had “I’m sorry but that’s ugly as hell,” plus a whole lot of “Camarostock.” Read them closely, though, and a big chunk of the negative comments are really about sixteen Camaros racing each other, which is a real problem and a separate one from the scoop. And, I mean, it’s the comment section. In my opinion, I’ll take the people who bought a ticket and sat in the stands at the Motorplex over the comment section every single time.
The car was scheduled to test again Monday in Ennis, and Freeman told me Kenny Delco and Mason McGaha are expected to make exhibition runs in Las Vegas in 2027-edition cars, so we’ll get another read soon enough. Fans are the boss, and we don’t factor their feelings into nearly enough of the decisions that get made in drag racing. I heard them in Texas. In that moment, as that vintage-looking Pro Stocker rolled out from under the tower at the Motorplex, the fans cast their vote.
This story was originally published on October 20, 2026. 
The post The Fans Cast Their Vote: Elite’s 2027 Pro Stock Preview Brings the House Down in Texas first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
