Who is the Greatest Drag Racer of all Time? NHRA’s 50 Greatest

NHRA’s 50 Greatest Drivers list wasn’t slapped together as clickbait – it came out of a genuine blue-ribbon panel debate for the sanctioning body’s 50th anniversary, weighing everything from national event wins to the sport’s technological history. Don Garlits sits at number one, with John Force, Don Prudhomme, Bob Glidden, and Shirley Muldowney rounding out a top five that basically built modern drag racing. Decades later, NHRA even expanded it into a Top 75 list for its 75th anniversary. So who’s your pick for the top spot?

Ok, who is your #1 NHRA Drag Racer of all time?

Do you agree with the rankings? Leave your comments below…..

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NHRA’s 50 GREATEST DRIVERS
50. Elmer Trett
49. Richard Tharp
48. Malcolm Durham
47. Billy Meyer
46. Ken Veney
45. Scotty Richardson
44. Dave Schultz
43. Frank Hawley
42. David Rampy
41. John Mulligan
40. Frank Manzo
39. Danny Ongais
38. James Warren
37. Edmond Richardson
36. Blaine Johnson
35. Terry Vance
34. Willie Borsch
33. Brad Anderson
32. Darrell Gwynn
31. Dick LaHaie
30. Chris Karamesines
29. Art Chrisman
28. George Montgomery
27. Jim Dunn
26. Gene Snow
25. Tommy Ivo
24. Gary Beck
23. Jack Chrisman
22. Pete Robinson
21. Connie Kalitta
20. Raymond Beadle
19. Ed McCulloch
18. Don Nicholson
17. Jim Liberman
16. Tom McEwen
15. Ronnie Sox
14. Eddie Hill
13. Pat Austin
12. Lee Shepherd
11. Mickey Thompson
10. Dale Armstrong
9. Joe Amato
8. Bill Jenkins
7. Warren Johnson
6. Kenny Bernstein
5. Shirley Muldowney
4. Bob Glidden

3. Don Prudhomme

2. John Force

1. Don Garlits

Leave your answer in the comments

Thanks, Pat Caporuscio

Ask ten different drag racing fans who the greatest driver of all time is and you’ll start ten different arguments – that’s basically the entire premise behind NHRA’s 50 Greatest Drivers list. It wasn’t some casual internet poll, either. A panel of historians, journalists, former racers, and officials spent real time weighing decades of quarter-mile history before locking in their rankings, and the results still get debated at every cookout and swap meet where gearheads gather. The name sitting at the very top has a nickname that’s basically drag racing royalty at this point. So does the list actually hold up a couple decades later, or is it time to argue about it all over again?

How NHRA Actually Built This List

The Top 50 Racers list wasn’t thrown together overnight. NHRA put it together in 2001 as the centerpiece of the sanctioning body’s 50th anniversary celebration, pulling in a blue-ribbon panel that went well beyond just counting national event wins. Technological contributions, sponsorship impact, fan popularity, and pure influence on the sport all factored into where a name landed. That’s exactly why you see Top Fuel legends sitting alongside Pro Stock stars and Funny Car icons instead of the list turning into a single-category popularity contest. It’s a genuinely tough exercise, ranking eras and disciplines that don’t always compare cleanly against each other, and the panel clearly took that seriously. Two and a half decades later, NHRA revisited the whole project for its 75th anniversary, expanding the original 50 into a Top 75 list that folds in a new generation of talent without erasing any of the original names.

Big Daddy Takes the Top Spot

Don Garlits – ‘Big Daddy’ to anyone who’s spent time around a drag strip – tops the list, and it’s hard to argue with a career that basically invented the modern rear-engine dragster and reshaped safety standards for the entire sport.

The Rest of an Untouchable Top Five

John Force sits right behind him, a Funny Car dominance machine whose win totals speak for themselves. Don ‘The Snake’ Prudhomme, Bob Glidden, and Shirley Muldowney round out the top five, and each one changed their respective discipline in a way that’s still felt today – Prudhomme in Top Fuel and Funny Car, Glidden as a Pro Stock institution, and Muldowney as the driver who broke down doors nobody else could even reach. These aren’t just fast names on a list; they’re the reason a lot of the sport’s modern rules and records exist in the first place.

The Sport These Fifty Drivers Actually Built

NHRA itself traces back to 1951, founded by Wally Parks in part to bring organized rules and safety standards to a sport that had largely grown up informally on dry lakebeds and abandoned airstrips across Southern California. The 50 Greatest Drivers list, tied to the sanctioning body’s own 50th anniversary, was as much a celebration of how far drag racing had come from those improvised roots as it was a ranking of individual talent.

Why Comparing a Top Fuel Legend to a Pro Stock Icon Is Nearly Impossible

Ranking drivers across categories as different as Top Fuel, Funny Car, and Pro Stock means comparing eras and technologies that barely resemble each other — a nitro-burning dragster running in the three-second range shares almost nothing mechanically with a naturally aspirated Pro Stock car built around production-based engine rules. NHRA’s panel had to weigh dominance within a category against a driver’s broader impact on the sport as a whole, which is exactly the kind of judgment call that keeps these rankings argued over decades after they were first published.

Shirley Muldowney’s Fight Wasn’t Just on the Track

Shirley Muldowney became the first woman granted an NHRA Top Fuel license, back in 1965, at a time when few tracks or fellow racers took a female driver in that category seriously. She went on to win three NHRA Top Fuel championships during the 1970s and early 1980s, a level of category dominance that put her alongside male drivers who’d been racing for far longer, and her presence on this list has as much to do with breaking down who was allowed to compete as it does with raw win totals.

A List That Keeps Getting Revisited

NHRA’s decision to expand the original 50 Greatest Drivers into a Top 75 list decades later reflects how much the sport’s talent pool kept growing even after the initial rankings were locked in, and it set a precedent for periodically revisiting rather than treating the original list as a permanent, unchangeable record. Whatever changes between editions, the underlying goal stays the same: giving a notoriously hard-to-compare sport a shared reference point that fans can actually keep arguing about for years afterward, list after list, name after name.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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