Bobby Bode went in a matter of a year from practicing in the family garage simply how to get in and out of his Jr. Dragster cockpit to earning the Route 66 Raceway championship and back-to-back National Hot Rod Association Division 3 titles.

Although he’s an avid student of the National Football League whose favorite pastime at Funny Car owner-driver dad Bob Bode’s events is tossing the ball around with his friends, the youngster waved off the suggestion to join a youth football team. He said it would interfere with his racing. He wasn’t even 10 years old at the time.

Bobby Bode is part of the Next Generation of drag racers, hooked on a sport that promotes family, drums safe-driving habits into kids long before they can qualify for a driver’s license, and provides a structure for verifiable achievement.

Like Major League Baseball and unlike the NFL and the National Basketball Association, NHRA and IHRA drag racing have a feeder system for training young aspirants and offering them seat time.

This brain child of Vinny Napp, the late co-owner of Old Bridge Township Raceway Park at Englishtown, N.J., has grown into a program that has attracted thousands of students aged eight through 17 at close to 200 racetracks since its inception in 1992. The NHRA program alone has awarded Wally trophies and nearly $200,000 in savings bonds each year.

Last month at Pomona, Calif.’s Auto Club Raceway, the Jr. Dragster program scored its biggest coup with Shawn Langdon’s Top Fuel championship. The Mira Loma, Calif., native, who learned the nuances of the sport from sportsman standout father Chad Langdon at that same facility, became the first Jr. Dragster graduate to earn a professional series crown.

Langdon already had a 1997 Jr. Dragster national title in the 14-year-old category and back-to-back championships in the Super Comp class (2007-08). However, this accomplishment in the Al-Anabi Racing Dragster showcased the system and proved that daydreams and elbow grease make a formidable combination.

After securing the Top Fuel championship, Langdon – who waited 87 races to earn his first Top Fuel event victory – said that when he first was captivated by the sights, sound, and smells of the sport, “all I had was a dream. I didn’t have anything much more than a dream, a dream to drive a Top Fuel car.”

He said what he would tell those kids today is “I was just like you 15 years ago.

“It means a lot to me when Jr. Drag Racing kids come up to me,” he said, “because they’re all like I was.

“When I first was ding Jr. Dragsters, I just kind of did it with my dad. It was something we enjoyed to do. It was a hobby of ours,” Langdon said. “My dream when I was really young was to be a professional baseball player. But in ’97, when I won the Jr. Dragster national championship, I changed my mind. I got more interested in the racing. Once I started running Super Comp and I got out of high school, it got to the point where I thought, ‘You know, this is something I enjoy and something I’d like to do for the rest of my life.’ ”

Even then, he said, “I’d always get nervous taking winners circle pictures. I never wanted to be in the spotlight. I just loved to do what I was doing.” After earning the Top Fuel championship. Langdon said, “I get up in front of the microphone, and I don’t always know what to say. My jaw, it’s on the floor. I’m in awe of the opportunity that I have just to be out here.”

Curiously, despite those three Jr. Dragster and sportsman accomplishments, Langdon still has trouble shaking the feeling that he still is that wide-eyed little boy. Although he has moved about 2,000 miles from home, to Indianapolis, the auto-racing capital of the world, in his mind sometimes, he’s the kid standing at the rope line, hoping he can get an autograph or some junked part from the car of Joe Amato or Kenny Bernstein or Larry Morgan or Bob Glidden or Don “The Snake” Prudhomme.

“I’ve been on the other side of the ropes, and I try to be the way I wanted those drivers to be to me,” Langdon said. “I’d get all these autographs and pin them on the wall. I had a ‘favorites’ section. Now that I’m on the other side of the ropes, I want little kids to put me in that section. I try to be that guy who signs all their autographs and makes their weekends enjoyable. That’s one thing I’ve always enjoyed: seeing that little kid smile.”

Langdon doesn’t pin pictures from racing magazines on his wall anymore. But he still has that Jr. Dragster feeling, calling his emergence as star of the sport “something that to me is just weird.”  

He said, “I still just kind of look at myself as that little kid that’s racing Jr. Dragsters, and I don’t really, I guess, think of myself as a superstar of the sport. I’m just very thankful to be out there, and I just enjoy what I do. I’m no better than anyone else who walks into the racetrack. I’m just some lucky kid who got the opportunity of a lifetime.”

He’s grounded in reality, though. He knows to whom much is given, much is expected. 

“There are responsibilities that come with it,” Langdon said of reaching the sport’s ultimate honor, “so I think it’s going to be very important to keep pushing the NHRA, Mello Yello Series, and keep the sport alive. And the next generation is coming up, and I’m a part of that next generation. I’m just going to try to do the best job that I can and try to be an ambassador of the sport and try to push our sport and show all the fans across the country and across the world just how great the sport is.”

He has some quality company to help him spread the word. Seven-time Pro Stock winner Erica Enders and her six-time winner husband, Richie Stevens, are Jr. Dragster grads. So are Langdon’s Top Fuel colleagues Morgan Lucas, JR Todd, and Spencer Massey; Pro Stockers Vincent Nobile, Rickie Jones, Buddy Perkinson, Grace Howell, and Danny Gruninger; Funny Car newcomer Blake Alexander; and Pro Stock Motorcycle rider Katie Sullivan.

Former Jr. Dragster racers who have made a mark in the sportsman ranks include 2011 Stock national champion Joe Santangelo, 2010 Super Stock national champion Ryan McClanahan, 15-time national event winner Brad Plourd, and 10-time national event winner Justin Lamb.

All have gravitated to their areas of expertise after mastering Jr. Dragster’s half-scale versions of Top Fuel dragsters that use a five-horsepower, single-cylinder engine to post elapsed times as quick as 7.90 seconds in the eighth-mile at as fast as 85 mph.

Waiting in the wings for their chance to move up through the system and maybe one day follow Langdon with a pro championship are thousands of kids across America. Among them are Anson Brown, nine-year-old son of 2012 Top Fuel champion Antron Brown who already has six victories and a national runner-up finish on his resume.

Anson Brown is the first fourth-generation member of his family to compete in drag racing, a tradition his great-grandfather Albert Brown started and passed to Albert and Andre Brown (Antron’s dad and uncle). Anson’s older sister Arianna, 12, also gave Jr. Dragsters a whirl, and youngest sibling, Adler, who’ll turn six next March, wants to slide into a Jr. Dragster, too.

He just got his Jr. Dragster in April and has raced only since the end of May. Anson Brown told Allen Gregory of the Bristol (Tenn.) Herald Courier that his famous father “just tells me to do my best and have fun.”

That’s the same message 2009 NHRA Funny Car champion Robert Hight has had for daughter Autumn, 9, who made her debut at Southern California’s Irwindale Dragstrip.

“Sometimes you start to forget why you really love this sport, but then you have a day like I had at Irwindale Dragstrip with my daughter, Autumn, and it all comes back to you,” Robert Hight said.

“There are high expectations, but mainly, I just wanted her to have fun. That’s the big deal. You want her to learn and get better and have fun, and she did that,” he said. “It was kind of nerve-wracking. I didn’t think she was going to get hurt, nothing like that, but it’s like if you were in an auditorium watching your kid play a musical instrument or act on stage, you just want them to do well.”

Funny Car fixture and 2011 Top Fuel champion Del Worsham’s twin 11-year-old daughters Kate and Maddy, who also drive Jr. Dragsters, helped Autumn Hight get oriented.

“It’s kind of cool to have all of us out here now, teaching a new generation about the NHRA and this sport and seeing that they love it just like we do,” Robert Hight said. “Being with my friends at a racetrack and watching our daughters do what we love, kind of trying to follow in our footsteps . . . was pretty cool.”

Hight interacts with the fans at more than 20 races a year and has been active in drag racing a long time, long enough to see the generosity and goodness of the fans. But spending time on the Jr. Dragster scene underscored that for him.

“The thing that was really cool was the people we met and how helpful they were to us,” he said. “I can see that we’re going to meet a lot of great people doing this, which really doesn’t surprise me, because drag racing people are the best, no matter whether they enjoy Top Fuel dragsters or Jr. Dragsters or something in between.

“It’s a great program, Jr. Dragsters. If I had had the chance to do something like that when I was a kid, you wouldn’t have had to ask me twice,” Hight said.

What startled him, he said, was the reply he got from Autumn when he asked her, “Did it seem like you were really going fast?”

She nonchalantly responded, “No.”

That’s a real “uh-oh” for a dad. Hight said, “That tells me she’s already ready to get a faster car.”

But for right now, the objective is fun.

Billie Jo Brown, Antron’s wife and Anson’s mother, said; “Anson is racing as a nine-year-old little boy and trying to have a good time. That’s the most important of this for all these kids.”

Bob Bode said of his own ride, “The car is nothing but a pain in the butt. It’s what everything here twirls around. But all the people who circle around the car is why we all come out. We come out for the kind of fantasy world and being around lots and lots of fun people. That’s the draw. If you have kids to do all this stuff with, it’s much more fun.”