Photo: NHRA.com
Jim Campbell’s nitro Funny Car isn’t rolling into the NHRA Brainerd Nationals wearing a soda logo or an insurance company’s name across the hood. This week the car carries the names of a gas station, a vehicle wrap shop, and a steel supplier — all of them based a short drive from the Brainerd International Raceway gates. That’s not a marketing afterthought. It’s how a large chunk of nitro racing actually gets paid for.
The car is doing double duty as a rolling history lesson. Studio Wraps handled the vinyl, covering Campbell’s Funny Car in a stars-and-stripes scheme built around America’s 250th birthday — a design that shares the spotlight with NHRA’s own 75th-anniversary season, stacking two overlapping milestones onto one car for the Brainerd weekend. Track Stop Fuel and Food and Roden Steel round out the trio of local backers riding along on the body panels.
For Heather Ingman, who owns Track Stop, the ask came out of nowhere. Campbell approached her about putting the store’s name on his car at her own home track, and she isn’t shy about what that kind of exposure means for a family business without a national ad budget: “every bit of support helps us grow.” Ingman’s comments were shared in an NHRA.com release announcing the partnership. That’s the entire economic logic of grassroots motorsport sponsorship in one sentence — a Funny Car campaign capable of 340-mph passes in front of a national FS1 audience is a bigger stage than any billboard a small business could otherwise afford.
Fans can see the car up close before the green light ever drops. Campbell will bring the America’s 250 Funny Car to Track Stop’s lot outside the BIR gates on Thursday, August 20, from 5 to 7 p.m., with local station 94 ROCKS broadcasting live from the scene. It’s a low-key meet-and-greet by nitro standards, but it’s a smart move for everyone involved: the businesses get foot traffic days before the grandstands fill up, and Campbell gets a hometown crowd primed to cheer for a car with their own town’s name on it.
Special-occasion liveries aren’t unique to drag racing. NASCAR teams run the same math when they wrap a car for a milestone weekend — see Kyle Busch’s tribute paint scheme at Bristol this season — betting a one-off design earns more attention, and more value for the sponsor’s money, than the standard scheme would on an ordinary Saturday night. Campbell’s America’s 250 wrap works the same angle: give a limited-run design a reason to exist, and the brands riding on it get a story to tell along with the ad space.
It’s also a reminder of how much of drag racing’s business side runs on relationships rather than corporate marketing departments. The sport’s other national sanctioning body has spent the past year dealing with the opposite problem — ownership uncertainty at the top forced the International Hot Rod Association to pull back parts of its own schedule while a legal fight over an unrelated business plays out. Set that against a Funny Car picking up a hometown gas station and a wrap shop for a weekend, and it’s a useful illustration of how differently a race program’s finances can look depending on where the money originates.
None of this is exclusive to the smaller end of the sport, either. Sponsorship dollars shape decisions in NASCAR’s Cup garage too — Front Row Motorsports’ choice to keep Noah Gragson behind the wheel through 2027 had at least as much to do with the backing he brings to the shop as it did with his results sheet. Whether it’s a Cup ride or a nitro Funny Car, the same rule tends to hold: the money attached to the seat matters as much as the driver in it.
The partnership lands during one of the bigger weekends left on the 2026 NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series calendar. The Brainerd Nationals, set for Aug. 20-23 at BIR, is the 13th of 20 regular-season events and the penultimate stop before the Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin, meaning the points a driver banks here carry extra weight heading into the postseason. Qualifying runs Friday and Saturday, with final eliminations set for 11 a.m. CT Sunday and broadcast on FS1 that evening.
For fans heading to BIR this year, the takeaway is simple: swing by Track Stop on Thursday evening for a close look at the car before it’s buried in nitro smoke on Sunday. And the next time a small business’s name flashes across the screen during a Funny Car burnout, remember it probably didn’t start in a boardroom. It started with a driver willing to ask.
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