Jason Line Ran the Exact Same Time as His Rival in 2026 – A Red Light Still Cost Him the Hemi Challenge

Two 1968 Hemi package cars ran down the same quarter-mile to the exact same thousandth of a second in the 2026 Sox and Martin Hemi Challenge final. One driver still walked away empty-handed — here’s how a .013-second red light decided a 25-year-old Indy tradition.

Jason Line and Steve Comella crossed the stripe in the 2026 Sox & Martin HEMI Challenge final with identical 8.430-second elapsed times — a dead heat down to the thousandth of a second. In 25 years of NHRA’s longest continuously running specialty race, nobody at Indianapolis Raceway Park had seen a final that tight. But drag racing doesn’t settle ties with a coin flip. It settles them at the starting line, and Line left it .013 of a second too soon. The red light on his side handed Steve Comella his fifth Sox & Martin trophy before either 1968 HEMI package car ever reached the finish stripe.

A Dead Heat That Still Wasn’t a Tie

CompetitionPlusTV’s coverage of the 2026 Sox & Martin HEMI Challenge follows the event from qualifying through eliminations to the final-round showdown at the NHRA U.S. Nationals. Comella earned the No. 1 qualifying spot with an 8.415-second run at 159.23 mph, with Line qualifying second at 8.445 seconds and 159.53 mph — meaning Line actually clocked the quicker trap speed of the two cars heading into eliminations. Line then beat six-time Sox & Martin champion Charlie Westcott Jr. in the quarterfinals, winning a razor-thin 8.315-to-8.362 race despite Westcott nailing a .007 reaction time at the tree, one of the sharpest starts of the entire weekend.

That set up a final between the two quickest cars left in the field. Under the lights, both drivers posted the exact same 8.430-second elapsed time — a result that would have been a photo finish for the ages if the race had actually gone the full quarter-mile. It never got the chance to. Line’s .013-second red light ended the race at the starting line, and Comella collected the win without his car having to out-run anything. In heads-up drag racing, a red light — leaving before the green light actually comes on — is an automatic disqualification regardless of how the rest of the run unfolds, which is exactly why a dead-even finish still produced a clear, if anticlimactic, winner.

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The 1968 Package Cars Chrysler Built Just to Do This

The cars battling it out aren’t replicas or modern tribute builds. The Sox & Martin HEMI Challenge runs exclusively in NHRA’s SS/AH (Super Stock/A Hemi) class with 1968 Plymouth Barracudas and Dodge Darts built through Chrysler’s factory “package car” program — a joint effort between Chrysler and Hurst to drop the 426 Race HEMI into the compact A-body Barracuda and Dart shells as turnkey, drag-strip-ready machines. Chrysler built 72 BO29 Barracudas and 83 LO23 Darts between February and May of 1968, stripped of sound deadening and most creature comforts, with acid-dipped body panels, fiberglass hoods and a 426 HEMI tuned for the strip — rated around 550 horsepower in race trim versus the 425 hp of the street version of the same engine. They were never intended for daily driving or street legality in most cases; Chrysler built them specifically to compete, and more than five decades later, the surviving cars are still doing exactly that at the same track where many of them first lined up.

The event itself has been part of the U.S. Nationals since 2001, when Bucky Hess won the inaugural race, making 2026 its 25th anniversary. It’s not the only piece of drag racing history getting a second look this year — one surviving 1972 Plymouth Duster spent 30 years proving a cheap Mopar could outlast the odds, the same stubborn streak that keeps these decades-old HEMI package cars running side-by-side at Indy every September. The McCandless family, which has sponsored the Challenge in recent years, announced a three-year extension that keeps the race on the U.S. Nationals schedule through at least 2029.

Why the Sox & Martin Name Still Carries Weight

The event is named for Ronnie Sox and Buddy Martin, the Mopar drag racing team that dominated Super Stock and early Pro Stock competition in the late 1960s and 1970s behind the wheel of HEMI-powered Barracudas and Darts. Naming the modern SS/AH showdown after them isn’t just nostalgia — it’s a direct line back to the same cars, the same class, and the same engine that made Sox and Martin famous in the first place. Fan comments on the race broadcast echoed that connection, with several viewers calling the SS/AH class “the greatest class racing there ever was” and noting the Barracudas and Darts are still, nearly 60 years later, among the most sought-after cars in the pits at Indy. One commenter who said they drove one of these cars in competition decades ago called the attention to detail on today’s surviving package cars “incredible,” and said the field is worth seeing up close in the pits if fans ever get the chance.

What makes the class compelling to watch has little to do with outright speed by modern standards — an 8.4-second, 159-mph quarter-mile run is quick, but today’s Top Fuel and Funny Car classes clear 1,000 feet in under four seconds. The appeal of SS/AH is that every car in the field is built to the same strict, decades-old factory specification, so the racing comes down almost entirely to reaction time, consistency and nerve at the starting line rather than who spent the most money on the newest parts. That’s exactly what decided the 2026 final: two cars that ran identically down the track, separated only by who left the line first.

Five Trophies in Six Years

For Comella, the 2026 win extends a run that’s hard to overstate: four consecutive Sox & Martin titles from 2021 through 2024, the No. 1 qualifying spot every year since 2021, and now a fifth championship after a one-year gap. “That’s number five,” Comella said after the race — a short line for a driver who has now made a habit of winning NHRA’s oldest continuously run specialty event. For Line — a former NHRA Pro Stock world champion who had the second-quickest car in the field all weekend and a win over a six-time champion already banked — the final came down to the one variable a well-tuned 426 HEMI can’t fix on its own: reaction time. Several fans in the comments said as much themselves, with one writing that Line “should still be proud” of how close the final actually was, and another calling it a loss that will “sting” given how evenly matched the two cars were down the full length of the track.

The race also unfolded on one of the biggest stages in American motorsports. The NHRA U.S. Nationals, held annually over Labor Day weekend at Indianapolis Raceway Park, is nicknamed “The Big Go” and has run since 1961, making it the sport’s oldest and most prestigious national event. The Sox & Martin HEMI Challenge runs as a specialty support race during that same weekend, giving a 58-year-old factory race-car class a featured slot alongside the Top Fuel and Funny Car fields that headline the event. For a class built entirely around 1968 hardware, getting a dedicated final under the Indy lights — broadcast and promoted alongside NHRA’s premier categories — is no small thing.

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