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,\u00a0Drag Illustrated<\/em>\u00a0spoke 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s 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\u2019s Raul Torres<\/a> and Maryland International Raceway\u2019s Royce Miller<\/a>. Stay tuned for an interview with Rockingham Dragway\u2019s Dan VanHorn.<\/em><\/p>\n The NHRA Countdown to the Championship will begin September 18-20 at the inaugural Great Lakes Nationals at Martin, Michigan\u2019s U.S. 131 Motorsports Park led by\u00a0Jason Peterson<\/strong>\u00a0and his wife, Stephanie, for the last 23 years. It\u2019s a multi-generational facility, as the Petersons\u2019 son, 2025 DI 30 Under 30 honoree Samuel Peterson<\/a>, leads the track prep program, and Stephanie\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n How long has hosting an NHRA national event been on your wish list?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n We have been courted by NHRA for years, and for whatever reason, it wasn\u2019t the right move for us at that time. Now, the time became right.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s been many years now that we\u2019ve been doing our own event in August to substitute that national event. But that was one of our criteria: we wanted a national event.\u00a0<\/p>\n What are the opportunities that come with hosting one? What are the challenges?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019d say a challenge that we\u2019re running into right now \u2013 and it\u2019s not just because of the national event, it\u2019s just the overall switch \u2013 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\u2019ve got to learn everybody. I think, \u201cWho do I call for this? Who do I call for that?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019re dealing with the local bracket program, but we\u2019re 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\u2019s been the biggest challenge so far.\u00a0<\/p>\n The biggest benefit so far is that we\u2019re able to get better sponsorship dollars for signage, both with our local sponsors and then bigger corporate organizations, just because we\u2019re hosting a national event on national TV.<\/p>\n What have you done already to prepare and what\u2019s left to do?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019ve got a major paving project that we\u2019re doing to support the nitro teams. We\u2019re looking to pave somewhere between seven and nine acres of property. That\u2019s a major overcoming. We\u2019ve got to get engineering drawings up. You\u2019ve got to get permits from the drainage things, and then you\u2019ve just got to line things up to get it done. And then we\u2019ve 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\u2019s our biggest project, as far as what we need to do to host the national event.<\/p>\n What do you hope this event accomplishes for your track, your fans, racers, community?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n We are now on the elite side. We are an NHRA national event track. We\u2019ve always known or always felt within that we were able to host one of these types of events, and now we\u2019re 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\u2019re very excited to see that and to prove to those racers that we have a facility that they can race on.<\/p>\n This story was originally published on September 15, 2026. The post U.S. 131 Motorsports Park\u2019s Jason Peterson Talks Prep For Inaugural NHRA Great Lakes Nationals<\/a> first appeared on Drag Illustrated<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the NHRA celebrates its 75th anniversary this season, fans can expect to see plenty of familiar and even nostalgic elements \u2013 the return of legends, the celebration of the people and moments that made NHRA history, and even official uniforms that harken back to the \u201cglory days\u201d of the sport.\u00a0 But the NHRA Mission […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dragillustrated.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Martin_Martin_AE3I4960.jpg\")
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