Wes Buck, World Series of Pro Mod. Photo: Luke Nieuwhof
The Origin Story
On February 9, 2017, Drag Illustrated announced it was going to hold a Pro Mod race that paid $100,000 to the winner and nothing at all to anybody else. Sixteen drivers. No qualifying. Invitation only. First-round pairings drawn at random a full month before anybody unloaded a race car.
The reaction was not universally warm.
Pro Mod had never raced for that kind of money. Doorslammer racing had never raced for that kind of money. And the man announcing it did not own a racetrack, did not run a sanctioning body, and had spent the previous eleven years publishing a magazine.
“The World Series of Pro Mod is a concept I’ve been kicking around for several years,” Wes Buck said at the time. “Putting on races has been a part of the Drag Illustrated plan since the very beginning. We feel the time is right to disrupt the industry, to try something fresh and new.”
Three weeks later he sat down and explained himself at greater length, and the answers he gave in March of 2017 read now like a blueprint for everything the race became.
Why Pro Mod? Because Buck called it “the universal language of drag racing,” the class every racer in every other category admits they would run if money were no object. Because the people in it were, in his words, colorful, charismatic, lovable characters. Because when you put Pro Mod on center stage instead of in a support slot, you get a show.
Why invitation only? Because he was not building a race. He was building what he called a drag racing entertainment property, and that meant controlling the cast.
Why draw the pairings a month early? So the sport had thirty days to argue about them. “It’s my opinion that the first round at the WSOPM will be as significant and interesting as the final round,” Buck said, and he was right in a way nobody could have scripted. That first year, Mike Janis and Stevie “Fast” Jackson drew each other in round one and the matchup was talked about for a month straight. Janis drove twenty-two hours without stopping to get there. He won.
And then there was the part that genuinely upset people.
There were no scoreboards. The clocks stayed dark all week. Time slips were cut in half. Buck wanted mystery, and what he got was a paranoia the class had never experienced. During testing, a crew member went headfirst into a trash barrel to dig out the shredded remains of his driver’s time slip, terrified somebody might piece it together. Nobody knew what anybody had run. Every driver was forced to assume the guy in the other lane was quicker, and every team tuned like it.
Buck had compared it to poker before the race. He was not wrong.
Bandimere Speedway got the race for two reasons. The Bandimere family believed in the idea of Pro Mod as the headline act rather than the undercard. And the mountain outside Denver, sitting near six thousand feet with a corrected altitude that could push toward ten, was a place almost nobody in the field had ever run a Pro Mod. It took everybody’s data and threw it away. That was the point.
Bandimere Speedway, 2017. The first World Series of Pro Mod.
The week itself was strange. For four days it was high fives and hugs and a pre-race party, and Buck remembers wondering whether he had built the thing up so large in his own head that it could not possibly mean as much to everyone else.
Then heavy rain came through on Saturday morning, the skies cleared, and he stood at the top of the staging lanes in front of a couple dozen people and asked a question.
“Are you guys ready to do this?”
They said yes. And then, in his words, everything changed.
What followed was the most consequential afternoon in the modern history of the class. Five cars ran in the fives in the opening round alone. All but two first-round races were decided by margins you could not see from the grandstand. And the man who walked away with the check was Mike Bowman, a California racer who got into the field on a fan vote, who had made the first five-second door car pass in the history of that racetrack days earlier without anybody knowing, and who had not raced at Bandimere since 1995.
They put a championship belt around his waist. John Bandimere Jr. and Wes Buck handed him $100,000.
The race changed things immediately, and not all of it was comfortable. Three months later Buck wrote a column arguing that Pro Mod needed a single unified rulebook, because in building the field he had run into racers who could not compete without significant modifications, and he had counted more than a dozen different definitions of what a legal Pro Mod even was. He compared the class to professional boxing, fragmented across too many federations until the belts stopped meaning anything. That argument started at the World Series of Pro Mod, and the sport is still having it.
Ten years on, the shape has changed. The 16-car invitational became a 32-car field so deep that qualifying for it is a career achievement. The ladder is gone entirely, replaced by a chip draw that can put the two quickest cars in the building together in round one. The purse has been as high as $150,000. Seven men have won it, and the last three came from the 32nd, 30th and 8th qualifying positions.
What has not changed is the thing Buck was actually after in 2017. Sudden death. No safety net. Every pair a main event.
On March 5-7, 2027, the race runs at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas, for the first time. Somebody will stand at the top of a set of staging lanes and get asked, in one form or another, the same question.
The 2027 Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod runs March 5-7, 2027 at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas.
See every champion in race history on the Champions page. Racers and promoters interested in 2027 should start at Race the WSOPM.
