National Hot Rod Association

The U.S. Nationals stands above all other drag races in importance and prestige, and the Winternationals, the second-oldest stop on the Full Throttle Drag Racing Series tour, is a clear-cut number two. Behind them – but not far behind – are the NHRA Finals in Pomona, Calif., the event in Englishtown, N.J. (which has undergone numerous name changes since its inception in 1968), and this week's tour stop: The Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla.

"To me, it's always been one of the big ones, right up there with Pomona, Englishtown, and, obviously, Indy," says Toyota-supported Larry Dixon, driver of Alan Johnson's Al-Anabi Racing dragster and the defending event champ in Top Fuel (pictured racing against Antron Brown). "When I was a kid, there were only a handful of national events. The schedule has grown a lot over the years, but the old races, to me anyway, are still the biggest. It just seems like all my heroes have won there at one time or another. I want to win every race I go to, but winning at Gainesville definitely means more than winning at Memphis or Phoenix."

Gainesville Raceway will always be special to Dixon for another, bigger reason: It's where he made his first passes in a Top Fueler, in March 1994, when he drove the car he was then crewing on, Don "the Snake" Prudhomme's dragster, to a 4.76-second time – quicker than Prudhomme himself had run in his long career. Just 12 months later, Dixon, who would go on to be named NHRA's 1995 Rookie of the Year, was a Gatornationals champ.

"I won the first time I ever ran Gainesville, and that's still really cool to me," says Dixon, who also picked up back-to-back titles there in the early 2000s. Today, he's a four-time Gatornationals champ, tied with retired legend Joe Amato as the winningest Top Fuel driver in the event’s history.

"Big Daddy" Don Garlits, Shirley Muldowney, Prudhomme, John Force, Bob Glidden, Warren Johnson, and virtually every great driver in drag racing annals has won the "Gators," as the event is known to racers, at least once. The historic facility also was the backdrop for some of the landmark runs in the sport's history: the first 260-mph pass (Amato, 1984), the first 260-mph Funny Car pass (Kenny Bernstein, also in 1984), the first 270 (Garlits, 1986), and maybe the biggest run of all time, the first 300 (Bernstein, 1992).

In Funny Car, Toyota-supported drivers Cruz Pedregon and Del Worsham both have Gatornationals victories on their résumés. Worsham scored in 2004, the year he eventually finished a career-high second in the final NHRA standings. Pedregon prevailed in 1998, the best non-championship season of his career.

"I still vividly remember the 1998 race," says Pedregon, who qualified No. 1 and set low e.t. that year and went on to qualify No. 1 at the next three events. "The car was running flawlessly all weekend and we beat Force in the final, and that was back when nobody could beat Force – especially in Gainesville, where he really strung together a lot of wins in the '90s. That one race got our whole season going.

"Gainesville is usually the first race of the year that has really warm conditions, the kind you're going to have to deal with at the next 15 races,” he adds, “and as a driver, you really have to adjust. You have to be ready for the car to smoke the tires in the middle of the track and on the top end. It's quite an adjustment after Pomona and Phoenix; it's like racing on another planet. The teams that figure it out early, in the first or second qualifying session, are usually the ones that end up in the final on Sunday."

The history and tradition of the Gatornationals are not lost on Pedregon, who, like Dixon, is both a California native and a student of the sport.

"It's always such a big race. To me, it's just as big as Pomona, and I'm a California guy,” Pedregon says. “All the prestige, the history – it's just different from most races. It's like another Winternationals, but for guys on the East Coast. I won there in Alcohol Dragster back in the day [1989], when we didn't even know what we were doing. Somehow, we found our way to the final and won it, and we were running people I'd never raced before, guys I'd only heard about, just a completely different group than the ones who were at Pomona. With a nitro car, we're basically going up against the same teams every weekend now, but trust me, every one of us still wants to win Gainesville as much as we did 20 years ago."