For Buddy Hull, it’s a trade-off.
The NHRA Funny Car racer stepped from the Jim Dunn Racing seat at the close of last season into team ownership and admitted that “it is a lot to take on. There’s going to be a little bit more freedom but a lot more responsibility.”
That balance, that trade-off, is not really anything new.
“That’s just what I’m used to anyway,” Hull said.
He thrives on responsibility. Before he became husband to Madi and father to toddler son Maverick, Hull was a professional bodybuilder and a national vice-president at a major fitness-center company, and then the founder of his ever-expanding roofing firm that has expanded from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to Atlanta, Minneapolis, and California.
“I’m definitely an entrepreneur by spirit,” he said.
Such a dizzying workload might sound daunting to anyone with a routine and a staid lifestyle, but not for this man, who gets out of bed between 3:30 and 5:00 am every morning and tackles his email usually by 4:00 am, on an average of three hours of sleep a night.
“I just go hard. I’m all day,” Hull, 45, said. “I’ve been that way for so long. I’ve heard these stories about when people have heart issues over it. But since I’ve been this way for so long, I just have to believe my body has adapted. I’ve been in this way since I was in my early 20s, and I’ve been an early riser since I was in grade school. In high school, I always wanted to be at school at 6:30 in the morning.”
And in the case of his role as team owner of his newly rebranded racing operation, he said, “In some scenarios, it’s almost as if things are going the right way, I’ll actually create more time than I had for myself than driving for someone else because I can make my own schedule. I can dictate how my day goes. I can decide when I show up. There may be times where I don’t show up to the track until Friday morning, and I couldn’t do that before.”
Going forward, Hull has tapped veteran tuners Mike Guger and Johnny West to lead his crew.
“Mike and Johnny are a good 1-2 punch,” he said. “Mike really specialized in making power. Johnny West has always been known to be a clutch guru and a really good overall mechanical guy. So, I put those two together in hopes that their strengths would balance each other out, and it could be a good 1-2 combo. They’ve never worked together before. They’ve worked at the same places at different times, but they’ve never worked together before. So that’s also pretty cool to see two really extremely seasoned veterans working together,” Hull explains.
“Both are very levelheaded. Both are very, what I would consider, guys that respect each other. They have a massive amount of respect for each other. They both are very old-school. They came up the same way or very similar ways in drag racing. And so I think they’ll work really well together,” he said. “I’ve already seen them work together. They’ve been working in my shop together. I’ve witnessed it, and it’s all positive.”
Hull, never one to let even the tiniest trace of a negative thought enter his mind or exit his mouth, said he made the move because “I think 2026 offers up for me the right place, right time. For me to be able to grow my racing team with my business at the same time, some opportunities that were offered through racing just made all the sense in the world. So also to my family lineage. We are changing the name of our racing team that we had in the past from Buddy Hull Racing to Hull Racing. Encompasses my whole family. Maybe someday my son wants to drive a race car, maybe he doesn’t, but either way, I would rather see him drive under the banner of Hull Racing than Buddy Hull Racing or Maverick Hull Racing. So we’ve made the change early, and he won’t even know the difference. So it’s all set up for him.”
The arrival of his son on August 26, 2024, which happened to be on Hull’s 44th birthday, has cemented his commitment to a family-centric life. “It was a key factor,” he said. “We do everything together. That’s kind of my thing. It’s kind of the pact that I made with myself is that no matter what we’re doing, we’ll do it together. It doesn’t matter what it is. So, it’s truly a family thing. It’s not just him. It’s family all encompassing.”
It’s clear that Hull enjoys calling the shots, navigating his own destiny, which, curiously, embraces the lessons he has learned from early drag-racing guide Tim Wilkerson and other team owner bosses Terry Haddock and the legendary “Big Jim” Dunn, but also an inherent, incurable yearning to be independent from them and anyone else.
“It’s not that I’m a bad employee,” Hull said. “I believe that every great leader is also a great follower, because what makes a great leader is someone who, at one point in life, was a great follower. So even though I own my own business, I still have bosses. We have customers. We work for people, and those people become my boss. And the truth is, our NHRA schedule, that’s the boss. That is the boss. That schedule dictates where we have to be and when we have to be there. So again, a great leader makes a great follower and vice versa. So yeah, I’m OK with that.”
Having strong, successful mentors is no substitute for making one’s own mark in the world, which sometimes means learning the hard way and trying to enjoy the process that often is cruel. Hull had 28 consecutive losses in Top Fuel and Funny Car before he earned his career-first round win at the U.S. Nationals in 2024, exactly seven days after Maverick was born. Hull defeated savvy Bob Tasca III in the opening round. He ended that season with an overall mark of 1-32. But he pressed on and in 2025 earned three more round wins, defeating capable Daniel Wilkerson and nearly unstoppable Austin Prock in back-to-back races as he was en route to his second straight championship. So maybe as a team owner, Hull will be able to record his elusive first victory.
“I’ve been lucky over the years to have some really good mentors,” he said. “I have owned my own racing equipment for almost 20 years now. So I’ve had a lot of successes, a lot of failures. I love being a student. I’ve watched other teams and how they move and how they operate. And I’m extremely confident that in terms of the operational side of what we’re doing, we’re as prepared or more prepared than anybody out there. Of course, there’s the racing side of things, which is all about the parts and the people and then the drivers. So that’s going to be the side that we have the biggest challenges with, because we’re brand new. But we have a good brain trust. We have really good race cars and really good parts. So I think that we’ll be successful on both sides.”
He’s especially grateful to be back on the track following a serious hand injury last summer that kept him sidelined for six events. He definitely is not afraid of his race car, just as he is game to climb onto a steep roof in his “real-world” career.
Despite his professional start in the Top Fuel class, Hull decidedly is “a Funny Car guy” at heart.
“My experience of driving race cars, 95 percent of it is with the engine between my legs,” he said. “What people know about me in the professional ranks is Top Fuel. It’s actually more peculiar that I drove Top Fuel to start. That’s just how my career worked. It was where opportunity was at the time, so I took it. I will probably never go back to Top Fuel. I feel like I belong in a Funny Car. My body, my frame, fits better in a Funny Car.”
And his passion is with the Funny Car category, hence his NHRA FAST channel show “Talkin’ Funny Cars With Buddy Hull,” which won a People’s Telly Gold Award last May in its inaugural season.
Hull said, “If I’m in control and if I have my two cents on it, I’ll probably forever and always be in a Funny Car.”
The goal now is to be a regular in the winners’ circle, and the relentless Hull is no one to bet against.
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