From Underdog to Contender: Shawn Reed Is Earning Respect in Top Fuel

Top Fuel owner-driver Shawn Reed isn’t exactly NHRA’s Rodney Dangerfield, he’s definitely beginning to earn some respect.

It cost him a lot to reach that point, but the Missouri transplant from Washington State is the newest proven threat in the sport’s headliner class.

The prominent Kalitta Motorsports brain trust, for one, hasn’t been afraid to acknowledge it.

“Brian Husen [crew chief for 2013 Top Fuel champion Shawn Langdon] has said some things in the past where it’s just kind of a respect thing.” At one race, Reed asked Husen, “Did you guys tune for that, for a [3.]77 [-second elapsed time]?” And he said, “No, we tuned it for a .75. We knew you were going to run .75, and we were just hoping Langdon was going to get us a little bit on the lights. Man, that car’s [Reed’s is] running good.”

Alan Johnson is Husen’s counterpart on two-time champion Doug Kalitta’s dragster, and the mastermind of 13 total series titles in the class. Reed said, “Alan Johnson has never said a word to me in his life until this year, until he said hi a couple times toward the end of the year. The mutual respect that we’re getting out of the teams and everything has been pretty dang cool.”

He knows part of that is because of his stunning comeback from a catastrophic Seattle crash in July that left him with broken ribs and an amputated left index finger. He scored his first-ever drag-racing victory with an IHRA outing near Columbus, Ohio, that was a trial run for the NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship opener at Reading, where he also triumphed, claiming his first NHRA trophy, all within a week last September, and the entire ordeal within 57 days.

“Everything we went through last year… I mean, what a disaster in Seattle, and to come back and win a race… It’s been pretty cool that way. But I’d still like to have my finger back and my ribs [undamaged] and shit, for sure,” Reed said.

He is resolute not to be remembered just as the racer who crashed, lost a finger, and returned triumphantly to his race car. He wants to be recognized for his improving skill, for his grit against the other odds the sport throws at smaller-budgeted teams, and for being a winner.

Reed is at the stage in his career where he is ready to capitalize on his distinct, but subtle, advantage. He could pour cubic dollars into an effort to become a powerhouse. However, he has chosen to avoid abusing his parts, live within his financial and proficiency means, work in sync with veteran crew chief Rob Wendland, and upset everybody’s expectations.

“I think pretty much everybody knows that we got a dang good car, and I’m still trying to find ways to get a little bit better on the lights,” Reed said. “I mean, I don’t do anything dumb. I’m just not great. But there are things that we’re trying in the car right now to help the car react a little bit better. I need to get a little bit better on the lights, which would help out a lot. I don’t leave first on a lot of people, which is bugging the hell out of me. But also I’m wise enough to know the harder you try, the worse you get. So I don’t really try to practice. I just try to get reps, and hopefully that kind of stuff will improve itself.”

And that’s the hitch. Reed doesn’t have the cubic dollars. Moreover, his spending power will shrink at the beginning of 2027.

He and Wendland are limited in the amount of seat time and track time they can log.

“This game we’re in, I mean, I’m a small potato in about a 10-acre field,” Reed said. “Man, these bigwigs and this money and the data and the experience of the drivers… we’re none of that. We’ve been around three years [full-time], and this is our third year coming up, and we look at every Sunday morning at 11 o’clock as, ‘This is a new test run for us,’ because while everybody else that’s been running for years has that 11 a.m. [information], look at where we finished and what we’ve done.

“You win the first Countdown race in Reading and you go from 10 to five [in the standings], and then you go to the Charlotte four-wide, and Brittany [Force] wins by one-thousandth of a second, or I would’ve gone to Round 2. And who knows what could have happened then? And then the third race of the Countdown, you go to St. Louis, where it was rain-shortened and blah, blah, blah. And Langdon goes out there and messes around and qualifies 13 to my No. 4. But again, they got lots of data, and then he beats me by two and a half feet. So you take a thousandth of a second and then two and a half feet running a powerhouse like Langdon, and that sealed my [place]. If I would’ve got past those two rounds, I would’ve been top four, top three,” he said.

Instead, he started another year testing in conservative mode, ready to grind out another season with respectable numbers at the Gainesville, reunion of Mission Foods Drag Racing Series drivers, but not having the luxury of doing everything he wanted to do. His 2025 Top Fuel victory at the PRO Superstar Shootout exhibition race at Bradenton, just before the season-opening Gatornationals at Gainesville, seemed like a lifetime-ago memory.

“We don’t go [to the preseason test session] to do things that the guys that have all the money in the world do. They don’t care if they blow their stuff up. I don’t have that budget. We run good for not having a budget, but we could run a lot faster than we did. We just don’t try to tear up the parts. We did a couple of 3.75s. We tested a couple clutch discs. We tested a different cam. We did a lot of stuff like that. We hit the throttle nine times. And from talking to Rob, I think he felt pretty successful about what we learned.”

The latest twists in his Top Fuel program center on his collaboration with Ida Zetterström and a major move away from the dragstrip.

“I’m selling 49 percent of my company to an employee at the end of ’26,” Reed said of his Tacoma, Wash.-based trucking and excavating business. “And I’ve got to position myself to where I can afford to do that. I can’t just take all the money out of the company and then expect some big sale to go through. The problem I’m running into is I make about two and a half million dollars a year, and I spend three. So you know what? The math doesn’t work.

“And next year, if I’m selling 49 percent of the company, I can’t run a full-time dragster on my 51 percent,” he said, especially “at the current rate of me getting sponsors, which is very little. Maybe like a few hundred thousand dollars a year in help is all I get, other than Reed Trucking and Excavating, my company. So the thought was, if I’m going to sell that company, I vow not to use any of that money for drag racing. That’s my money that goes back in my retirement account. I live off interest and stuff with that kind of money, and I’m not going to go racing for three years and spend 49 percent of my money.”

Reed said, “The whole thing with bringing Ida on was she needed a place to go. She’s very marketable, and if she can do five races, six races, seven races, or whatever, and get her in a good car, get some rounds, go some rounds, do some good things, and I can afford to go racing all by myself this year. I still got all my money from my company, but I’m trying to step out of the seat, let her get some traction, so she could either find a full-time sponsor or she could find a guy or a company that would just give her 10 races or 12 races. Then I’ll just do the other ones on my 51 percent of my money.”

What happens this season will help determine Reed’s plan for 2027.

“If she can’t find money, then I’m probably going to have to either go run the IHRA or go to a limited schedule and lay off a lot of people and go to a part-time crew,” Reed said.

So, frankly, he’s not certain how everything will play out: “I don’t know yet, but I know January 1st of ’27, I only own 51 percent of Reed Trucking and Excavating. Then 51 percent of two and a half million is about 1.2 million. And 1.2 million doesn’t get you through an NHRA season.”

Therefore, he said, he needs to refine his exit strategy.

“In a nutshell, this is my third full-time year. It’s really all I ever wanted,” Reed said. “But now I’ve got to look to the exit strategy. And the exit strategy is to get someone in here to run my car and to maybe take over running my car, to make this a business, not where I make a lot of money, but where I break even or make just a little bit. I mean, I need to get somebody like Ida over here to get some traction on getting some money for Shawn Reed Racing.

“I would love Shawn Reed Racing to be around for many, many, many years. I just need the money to come in,” he said, “because I’m not going to put my personal money in. I’m 60 years old, and I want to retire, and I don’t want to have to work. So, if I could bring in two and a half million dollars and I could spend two and a half million dollars, I can keep that afloat over there and make it work and get drivers and be a team. That’s what I want.”