BURBANK — It’s going to happen. Maybe it will be this weekend during the NHRA Winternationals at the In-N-Out Burger Pomona Drag Strip.
At some point, Tony Stewart, who has won big at just about every form of motorsports racing, and his wife, Leah Pruett, are going to square off in their respective 11,000-horsepower Top Fuel dragsters in a race with a lot at stake.
They did face each other during the first round of qualifying last month in Phoenix, with Pruett winning.
“That doesn’t really count,” Pruett said Thursday during a press conference at a Burbank restaurant. “We want to face off in a Sunday elimination race, ideally in the final round in Pomona on Sunday.”
The two days of qualifying begin Friday with elimination rounds in all classes scheduled for Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pomona is Pruett’s home track. She grew up in Redlands, where her father Ron owned an auto repair shop, Pruett Precision Alignment. Ron introduced little Leah to drag racing when she was 8 years old. Her mini dragster had a five-horsepower Briggs and Statton motor with a top speed of 18 miles per hour.
“Whenever I lost, my father would have me push my little dragster all the way back to the pits,” Pruett said. “People don’t realize, the Pomona track is slightly downhill. That meant I was pushing my car uphill, which made it even harder.”
As for racing side by side against her husband, Pruett said: “I always try to be positive. Whoever wins, it is going to be a good thing.”
If it doesn’t happen in Pomona, there is still the rest of the season. The Winternationals, which formerly served as the season opener, is the third event of 20 on the 2026 NHRA schedule.
There hasn’t been a duo like Pruett-Stewart in Top Fuel racing since the days of Shirley Muldowney and Connie Kalitta a half-century ago. The legendary Muldowney was not technically married to Kalitta, but they certainly were a couple.
Muldowney, a Hall of Famer and a groundbreaker for women in drag racing, usually beat Kalitta when they squared off. That was the case when they raced against each other at the 1980 Winternationals.
Two years later, they met to at the U.S. Nationals in what became an historic race, with Muldowney nipping Kalitta after covering the quarter mile in 5.57 seconds. (Due to safety concerns, the NHRA distance is now 1,000 feet instead of 1,320.) That victory gave Muldowney her third national championship. (The NHRA now prefers the term world championship.)
Now it is Pruett who has a shot at duplicating Muldowney’s feats – beating her significant other and winning a world championship. After two events, Pruett is third in the Top Fuel standings. Stewart is fifth.
Pruett took the past two years off from racing after getting pregnant. She and Tony became the parents of a son, Dominic, or simply Dom, last November. Pruett remained very involved with her two-car team, Tony Stewart Racing (TSR), attending almost every event.
Pruett is an advocate for the people in drag racing who work behind the scenes. “A driver gets all the attention, but he is only one person on a team,” she likes to say.
Leah, a Cal State San Bernardino graduate, spent about six months during her time off from racing to take MIT courses to learn more about data science, a key behind-the-scenes element of drag racing. Her crew chief, Neal Strausbaugh, was the one who suggested she do that.
Leah’s return to racing meant Tony took her seat in the TSR Top Fuel dragster. Matt Hagan, a four-time national champion, is TSR’s Funny Car driver.
With Leah returning, her husband lost his seat. So he joined another team, Elite Motorsports, which has a multi-faceted alliance with TRS.
