Dodge and Tony Stewart Racing celebrate the return of NHRA National event racing to Michigan for the first time in 66 years with the reveal of new Dodge Charger Super Bee and Purple Haze color-themed race car liveries leading up to the inaugural Dodge NHRA Great Lake Nationals presented by Mopar on Sept. 18-20 (Leah Pruett's Dodge Top Fuel dragster shown at left and Matt Hagan's Dodge Funny Car at right).
Tony Stewart Racing didn’t need a focus group to know two purple nitro cars parked outside Stellantis headquarters would get attention. What’s worth noticing is when the reveal happened: three days before NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship opens in Michigan, at the exact building where Dodge signs off on its marketing budget. That timing isn’t an accident. It’s the point.
On Tuesday, Sept. 15, team owner Tony Stewart stood alongside Funny Car driver Matt Hagan and Top Fuel driver Leah Pruett at the Chrysler Technology Center in Auburn Hills, pulling the covers off two Dodge nitro cars finished in a deep, color-shifting purple called Purple Haze, with bold Super Bee branding running down the flanks. Both cars debut the look Friday when qualifying opens for the inaugural Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals presented by Mopar, Sept. 18-20 at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan — the first NHRA national event held in the state in 66 years.
A Countdown Opener With Real Stakes
The timing matters because this isn’t just any race weekend. Great Lakes is the opening round of the Countdown to the Championship, the six-race playoff format that resets the points gap and turns the sprint to the regular-season finale into a qualifying exam for six much higher-stakes ones. Hagan arrives having already locked up the 2026 regular-season title, his fourth world championship on the resume and 58 career national-event wins, every one of them behind the wheel of a Dodge Charger Funny Car. Pruett, a 13-time Top Fuel winner, is chasing her second win of the season after taking one at the New England Nationals in June. Whatever bonus points the regular season earned them, none of it means anything if they don’t back it up over the next six races, and Michigan is race one.
There’s a nice bit of irony buried in the branding. “Six Pack” used to mean three two-barrel carburetors bolted to a 440 or 340 V8, the loud, analog end of Mopar’s muscle car era. In 2026, Sixpack is the name Dodge gives to the twin-turbocharged, 3.0-liter inline-six that replaced the Hemi V8 under the Charger’s hood. The Super Bee Launch Edition riding on that engine is rated at an SAE-certified 600 horsepower, which Dodge CEO Matt McAlear called “the most power-dense muscle car” the brand has ever built, and the quickest, fastest Sixpack Charger sold to date. It’s a genuinely quick production car wearing a genuinely old nameplate, built around an engine architecture that would have been unthinkable under a Super Bee badge a decade ago, which is exactly why Dodge wants it parked next to a 12,000-horsepower Top Fuel dragster for the photo.
None of this is subtle, and it isn’t supposed to be. Wrapping a playoff-caliber Funny Car and dragster in a production color option is standard practice in a series where manufacturer sponsorship dollars fund most of the paddock, but Dodge picked its spot carefully here: its own backyard, at its own headquarters, timed to a race NHRA hasn’t run in the state in 66 years. The brand is also running its Dodge Tour de Michigan cruise Thursday, sending Dodge owners and other enthusiasts from Auburn Hills through Hell and Lansing before ending at U.S. 131, a low-cost way to put current and future Charger buyers directly in the stands for a race Dodge is presenting outright.
Special liveries built around a marketing beat aren’t unique to drag racing, Formula 1 teams run the same playbook when a title partner or a market push calls for it, but NHRA’s format makes the tie-in unusually direct. There’s no other series where the exact car chasing a championship is also the exact car advertising the dealership option list.
What to Watch This Weekend
On track, the paint job stops mattering the moment the tree goes green. Qualifying begins Friday at 1 p.m. ET, with eliminations Sunday starting at 10:30 a.m. ET and the broadcast airing at 2 p.m. ET on FS1. Hagan will be looking to add a Wally in the state where Chrysler builds the engines his own team races, and Pruett will be trying to open the Countdown with points in hand before the playoffs move to Rockingham the following weekend. The livery earns headlines this week. What Hagan and Pruett do with the tree on Sunday is what actually decides anything.
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