The Kalitta Motorsports teams have all experienced some form of success during the 2025 NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series. Shawn Langdon is leading the Top Fuel points, Doug Kalitta has three number-one qualifying efforts to his name, and J.R. Todd’s team is starting to gel together. Each team is ready to elevate their season at the Gerber Collision & Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals.

So far this season, Langdon has notched a pair of wins in Top Fuel. The biggest win was at the American Rebel Light NHRA Four-Wide Nationals, as that made Langdon the winner of the 1,000^th NHRA Top Fuel race.

“We have to keep doing what we’re doing. We do that by going through the car to double check everything – every part. We need to do everything we can do to make sure we don’t make mistakes. We have a great team and a great car, but the key is mistake-free racing. The car’s been good and making great runs; the consistency is there. Chicago’s always been a track where I’ve struggled a little bit so it would be nice to actually get a win there,” Langdon says.

Doug Kalitta’s Top Fuel dragster has been consistently quick and fast all season. That level of performance is what has pushed Kalitta to earn his three number one qualifying spots, a Right Trailers Top Fuel All-Star Callout win, and two Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty Challenge victories this season.

Kalitta’s goal now is to translate the qualifying efforts into race-day wins.

“We’re working towards just going rounds on Sunday; that’s obviously what we need to do to start accumulating points,” Kalitta said. “We’ve been unfortunately going out a little early here last couple races, but I’m real confident in the effort we have going on and the ability to start going rounds, getting to final rounds and being in position to win,” Kalitta explains.

The offseason saw a tuner change on Todd’s Funny Car team. Dickie Venables took over the Crew Chief role. As the season has worn on, the team has started to come together and they’re ready to make the next step at Route 66 Raceway.

“We’ll get a better sense of where we are now that we’re back to two-wide racing so we get two shots at each lane during qualifying instead of one in each lane – it takes away some of the guesswork of only having one shot at each lane at the four-wide races. We had some issues in qualifying in Charlotte but rebounded pretty well on Sunday. We made a couple of pretty good runs so I’m confident we can hit the ground running Friday in Chicago.”

The Gerber Collision & Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals takes place May 15-18 at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois. We will have a complete event recap right here on Dragzine.