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. Stay tuned for interviews from Maryland International Raceway’s Royce Miller, U.S. 131 Motorsports Park’s Jason Peterson, and Rockingham Dragway’s Dan VanHorn.
Raul Torres is the first of these four owners on the schedule, as his South Georgia Motorsports Park will host the NHRA Southern Nationals May 1-3. Located in Adel, Georgia, SGMP isn’t new to NHRA sanctioning and was actually slated to hold the now-scrapped Peach State NHRA Showcase of Speed event last fall. Torres and wife Jennifer purchased the facility from Ozzy and Maria Moya in 2023. SGMP is known primarily as the home of Donald Long’s iconic radial races, Lights Out in February and No Mercy in October. A Division 2 double divisional at SGMP was also scheduled for early April.
How long has hosting an NHRA national event been on your wish list?
Raul Torres: From the very get-go. I set my goals and my expectations very high in anything I’ve ever done. Just getting three quarters of the way into some of our goals would be extremely successful. But this one was like the epitome of all my goals.
I think we host one of, if not the, most successful and popular small-tire radial series in the country with the Radial Outlaws and No Mercy and Lights Out. We have a huge race in the no-time world with Michael Hill’s Year End Finale. So I wanted two big races, which is a no-prep race, which I’m still working on, and an NHRA national event. With the NHRA national event being the biggest race in the country, that was my ultimate goal. To think we’re shy of three years of ownership and achieving that goal within those three years, I would’ve never believed that were the case back in March of 2023 when we were in conversations with Ozzy and Maria about buying the property and the business.
What are the opportunities that come with hosting one? What are the challenges?
RT: The challenges are the infrastructure of the property. It’s 22 years old. Their goal may or may not have been a national event when it was built. There are things that I would do differently as far as the ingress and egress of the property. The tower and the lack of buildings are our other biggest challenges. It’s a bare-bones facility right now, so we’ve had to make numerous improvements in order to host a national event.
The opportunities are endless. Once you get a national event, that opens the doors to these national accounts and bigger companies because we would get a lot of exposure, and in turn, they would get a lot of exposure. Just being on national television for four hours in May, that in itself is a huge value to the property and the name. That is a big opportunity.
The government, both local and state, have started to work with us, and it’s been a challenge at times to reach out to some of these elected officials and get them to work with us. We were bringing good revenue to the local economy, but now the whole state is benefiting from it. Now North Florida’s benefiting from it because people are flying into Tallahassee and they’re flying into Jacksonville. Now we can reach out to our neighboring state and they’d be willing to work with us because we’re bringing local economic benefits to them as well.
What have you done already to prepare and what’s left to do?
RT: There’s been five major improvement projects. Our biggest task at hand was raising the wall 6,600 feet. We had to raise it 10 to 12 inches of height for the Top Fuel and Funny Cars. That in itself was a couple months’ worth of work and it’s very expensive. With material costs going through the roof everywhere you turn, whether it’s aluminum or concrete or metal, everything’s not what it was 10-15 years ago. It’s building the mold, pouring concrete day after day after day, and it’s an outdoor project, so you have the weather and the cold to work with.
Aside from that, we had to move the scoreboards away from the race surface. Our scoreboards on both sides were up against the wall. Well, they needed moved at least 25 feet, and it’s just not picking up a sign and moving it over. We’ve got the entire timing system that’s connected to those scoreboards. With Compulink and these computer systems, they’re just microscopic wires. They’re little telephone wires basically, and there’s dozens of them for every last connection. We’re on eggshells for four weeks while these scoreboards were disconnected, moved over 25 feet, and reconnected. Fortunately, that was one of the first tasks we took on, and we’re back up and running, and we’ve had real flawless events knowing that our timing system is 100 percent.
Our first turnoff was an opening in the wall for racers that run eighth mile. Considering these nitro guys go 300-plus mph, NHRA requires that it’s a complete wall all the way down to the finish line, which is 4,400 feet of concrete wall. We had to put a metal gate where it’s available for first responders to come out into an accident scene, but it’s closed while we’re racing and there isn’t an angle where a car could impact it head-on.
We had to bring in over 2,000 new bleachers, which we’re completing here in the next month or so.
That’s our final phase, and then we had to redo our top end containment. We’re adding walls to the side of our sand traps and then putting tires in a top end containment on the top end after the walls at our sand traps.
What do you hope this event accomplishes for your track, your fans, racers, community?
RT: Aside from the economic impact that makes a huge difference to our local economy in Adel, Cecil, and Valdosta, we’ve sold just in Lowndes County alone over 750 rooms. The fact that we’re able to give back to our community by bringing these guests in from all over the world, but then also bring this type of excitement to our local fan base and bring this type of race to their backyard, you can’t put a dollar amount on it.
It’s extremely gratifying to hear the conversations or hear our fans calling me on a daily basis asking for tickets and their excitement about their race coming. Just the joy that we’re able to bring to these families that have never been able to go to either Gainesville or Atlanta when it held the Southern Nationals, that in itself is the biggest benefit I take from all this – bringing so much joy to our local fan base and racers here at South Georgia.
This story was originally published on May 1, 2026. 
The post SGMP’s Raul Torres Talks Preparation Ahead of NHRA Southern Nationals first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
