It started, like a lot of things in drag racing, with a text message.
The message landed on Wes Buck’s phone earlier this month. Buck, the founder of this publication, has spent his entire life around people buying and selling racing equipment. He grew up the son of a horse trader, a father who was forever moving trucks, trailers, engines, and whatever else changed hands in this business. So when a text came in floating the entire IHRA, its trucks and trailers and tractors and the sanctioning body itself, was for sale for a number that read like a phone bill from another planet, Buck did what a horse trader’s kid does. He looked at the chaos and wondered if there was an opportunity buried in it.
“$500 m and it’s yours everything,” the text read. “Tractors trucks trailers. There a lot.”
Half a billion dollars. It was not a serious number, and Buck knew it. But he also knew that somewhere underneath the noise, real assets were about to come loose, and that this was a moment worth taking seriously even if the opening pitch wasn’t. What Buck also knew, plainly, was that he was not the man to act on it. Drag Illustrated is a media company, not a war chest. Buying the physical guts of a national sanctioning body takes a level of financial firepower Buck doesn’t have and has never pretended to.
He knew exactly who did.
Richard Freeman owns Elite Motorsports, the largest and most decorated team in professional drag racing. Nobody in the sport has more equipment running down more racetracks. If anyone was positioned to put real eyes on this thing and make a real decision, it was Freeman. And Freeman, it turned out, had been watching the IHRA saga longer and more skeptically than almost anyone.
“Two years ago, at Wes Buck’s World Series of Pro Mod race, Darryl was standing there with Larry Morgan telling me their plans for the IHRA and all they were going to do,” Freeman says, referring to Darryl Cuttell, the man who has controlled the IHRA since December of 2024. “I asked him if he had lost his mind. And today is the day it becomes public that he in fact had lost his mind.”
Freeman had been asked to come all in on the IHRA from the very beginning. He passed. He says he saw red flags that plenty of people around him waved off, and he made a decision to keep his distance, betting he’d rather be on the right side of the story than in the middle of it. He held that line for roughly eighteen months while the operation spent, hired, poached, and churned through executives at a pace that became its own running headline.
Then the operation started coming apart, and the call came to actually buy it.
On Tuesday, July 14, Freeman flew to Hamilton, Ohio, home of Cuttell’s company, Darana Hybrid, Inc., to put official eyes on everything the IHRA had: tractors, trucks, trailers, pickups, and the sanctioning body itself. He did not go casually. He brought his brother, Royce Lee Freeman, a Ford dealer he works with, and Wes Buck, who had taken that first text. Drag Illustrated is disclosing its founder’s presence in the interest of transparency, and because DI had a firsthand line of sight into what happened next.
Freeman did it the right way. He walked the inventory, assessed it, and on Thursday, July 16, submitted a formal letter of intent to buy the rolling assets and the organization. A serious offer, from a serious buyer, in writing, inside 48 hours of landing.
What happened after that is the reason Freeman decided to talk.
By his account, and consistent with messages Drag Illustrated has reviewed, the deal never got a straight answer. There was a decline, then an opening back up. There was a stretch where Cuttell grew fixated on who had supposedly leaked the talks, convinced someone in Freeman’s group had told the world, when the truth, as Freeman told him, was simply that word travels fast in a small sport and everyone already knew. And there was the moment Freeman says gave the whole thing away: rather than close with the buyer standing right in front of him, Cuttell indicated he was still working out his best situation.
That was enough for Freeman. He put it in writing and pulled out.
“Daryl [sic], I appreciate the opportunity but as you might imagine I don’t work well with being a backup plan,” Freeman wrote. “Please take this email as declining my offer, maybe that can help you with your decision. Good luck moving forward and I truly wish you the best.”
Freeman says that once he walked, the posture flipped again. Suddenly there was urgency, suddenly it was let’s make it happen. He asked for a signed agreement to move forward. He says he was told terms still needed to be amended. Then he chased it for two days and got nothing back.
At two o’clock Thursday afternoon, July 23, the phone rang for the last time. The call lasted about thirty seconds. Cuttell told Freeman his offer was dead. Everything, he said, had already been sold to someone else.
Freeman hung up, turned to media member Courtney Enders, who was standing with him, and told her to call Wes Buck and put the whole thing on the record, immediately.
Then came the part that Freeman says should stop everyone in this sport cold. Racers, hearing secondhand that he’d bought the IHRA, began reaching out to him directly, congratulating him, and asking when they’d be paid. They were asking the wrong man. And that, Freeman says, is exactly the point.
Because the thing he can’t shake is a conversation from Ohio. Freeman says he asked Cuttell directly how he intended to handle the money the operation owed: the employees, the safety crews, the television people, and the racers. Freeman says Cuttell’s answer made it clear he had no intention of making any of them whole. Drag Illustrated is presenting that as Freeman’s account and reached out to Cuttell for his response prior to publication.
Freeman is not measured about what he thinks it all means, and he doesn’t want to be.
“Anyone who is holding their breath for payment, thinks next year is happening, or ever thought for a second this guy was the savior we needed, has no clue,” Freeman says.
For the better part of two years, the IHRA under Cuttell has been the loudest story in drag racing, a wealth-backed operation moving purses and paychecks around while a long line of executives and staffers came through the door and right back out of it. Kenny Nowling. Rich Schaefer. Christian Byrd. Josh Peake. Scott Woodruff. Alan Reinhart. Leah Martin. The revolving door has been the real reporting on the IHRA for a while now, and the pattern told its own story long before this week.
Now the man with more equipment on more racetracks than almost anyone in the business has said, on the record, that he looked at it up close, made an honest run at it, and walked the moment it stopped being an honest deal.
What happens to the people still owed money is a question nobody around the IHRA seems able to answer. What happens to next season is a question Freeman has already answered for himself. And whether anyone else steps into the wreckage is a story that isn’t finished.
Drag Illustrated will keep reporting it.
This story was originally published on July 24, 2026. 
The post Richard Freeman Details His Bid to Buy the IHRA, and How It Fell Apart in Eight Days first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
