It will be one of the most unique business arrangements — not to mention marriages — that NHRA drag racing has ever seen.

Now, try to keep up because it’s confusing.

So, the team owner of one of the most popular drag racing teams, NASCAR Hall of Famer and NHRA Top Fuel driver Tony Stewart, will continue racing in 2026, but he won’t be racing for his own team.

Instead, Tony Stewart is turning his dragster back over to his wife, Leah Pruett, who sat out the last two seasons to begin a family with Stewart, resulting in the birth of their son, Dominic. Stewart’s now-former Top Fueler actually was Pruett’s in the first place, so you might say he kept her seat warm for the last two seasons before she was ready to return to active competition.

“I had to kick my husband out to go race so I could get back in my race car,” Pruett laughed during a Tuesday afternoon session that was part of Epartrade’s sixth annual four-day Race Industry Week.

Then, Tony Stewart will race this coming season for Richard Freeman’s Elite Motorsports, which has become one of the most successful Pro Stock teams in NHRA history. But ‘Smoke’ will be the team’s guinea pig as 2026 will mark Elite’s first season of campaigning a Top Fuel car.

Four-time Funny Car champ Matt Hagan will remain with Tony Stewart Racing (TSR) as Pruett’s teammate for the coming season.

A unique business alliance could become a game-changer in NHRA

The reason for so many parts and pieces being moved around like on a chess board is due to the unique business arrangement that TSR and Elite will have both on and off the racetrack. The main reason is to enhance both organizations’ marketing programs to offer more opportunities to potential sponsors who want to be part of the two organizations.

But first things first: how will Leah react if Tony beats her, or vice versa, when she beats him?

“We know at the end of the day that we’re a married couple,” Pruett said. “This is what we do, and this is what we love. And the fact that we get to do it with and against each other is something super unique.”

Leah Pruett then added with a laugh that left Tony Stewart with a somewhat sheepish look on his face, “A real great driving force of me getting back in the car is kicking his a-s.”

The first matchup between Stewart and Pruett could potentially come in the season-opening Gatornationals, March 5-8, near Gainesville, Florida.

Who’s going to do the ‘whoopin’ — Tony or Leah?

Freeman is looking forward to seeing Stewart’s first run vs. Pruett – but Stewart may not like who Freeman will be cheering for.

“I think you’re going to see an a-s-whoopin’,” Freeman said. “That’s what I told Tony last night, that he’s going to have to be okay with sleeping on the couch.“

Pruett appreciates Freeman’s support, even though Stewart will be Freeman’s driver and not Pruett.

“The a-s-whoopin’s coming, it’s gonna be fun,” Pruett laughed, throwing down with some trash talk against her hubby. “He (Stewart) can dream (of beating her). It’s funny.”

The marriage of TSR and Elite, not of Stewart and Pruett, is unique in that they will be working together more from a business standpoint, while their teams will remain separate when it comes to performance. It’s really the first time in NHRA annals that two major teams have joined forces to have a joint marketing alliance.

That alliance covers not only things such as promotions, on-track hospitality for sponsors and guests, but also to work together to enhance sponsorship opportunities.

“People don’t just write checks to put their name on a race car,” Freeman said. “That’s one thing that me, Leah, Tony, our entire group, that’s what we do every day from the time we get up until we really go to bed. It is a collaboration of things. The racing, that’s just a piece of the pie. And it’s actually the smallest piece.

“Things are shifting. And it’s going to take all of us in order to keep doing what we love to do.”

Stewart agreed, crediting his wife as being the conduit that brought both TSR and Elite together. It just made so much good sense from a business perspective, Stewart said.

“The racing is competitive by itself,” Stewart said. “The competitive part in all honesty is for these teams to get the funding to compete at a high level and to do a program properly, not cutting corners, not skimping, doing what it takes to get the job done correctly.

“So when Richard came to us with that aspect of taking our programs together and taking two Nitro teams, merging it with all of Richard’s Pro Stock teams, his Mountain Motor team, all of his assets, we collectively as a group can go to any corporation and have a level whether they’re a hundred thousand dollar partner or a multi-million dollar partner. We have all these assets that we have to offer those guys.”

On paper, the collaboration between TSR and Elite makes sense. And if it proves to be as successful as both sides believe it will be, it could be revolutionary for other drag racing organizations. In fact, it could be the key that allows some teams to stay in business in a sport that can be very expensive, where a blown motor is easily a six-figure challenge to replace.

“To come up with the three of us and put all this together and come up with an idea to do things different than how it’s done in the past, I think is really going to be groundbreaking for all of us,” Stewart said.

Who gets to sleep on the sofa after losing to the other?

But there’s still the unknown between Stewart and Pruett — both ultra-competitive — about who winds up sleeping on the sofa when – not if, because it’s inevitable to happen several times during the course of the season – one winds up whoopin’ the other’s a-s, as they put it.

“I got fired at the end of the year by my own wife, from my own race team,” Stewart deadpanned. “But with Richard and Leah’s involvement and working really hard, I have a car to drive next year now.

He went on to say, “The hard part is I have to race against her at some point. But I think that’s going to be fun for us as a family, and we get to do it together, we get to do it with our son Dominic, who literally did not miss a race the entire season. So for us, it’s a really neat deal for our family, and it’s a great way to take our program to the next level with Richard and Elite Motorsports and create this TSR-Elite alliance and really work hard to build our programs even stronger than what they both already (are).”

In a sense, Tony Stewart has a brand new life. He’s taken to drag racing like a duck to water, and constantly says he couldn’t have had a better partner and coach and leader than Pruett when it comes to not only the performance aspect of a Top Fuel dragster (she barely missed winning the Top Fuel championship in 2023 before taking a two-year hiatus to have the couple’s son), but also the business side of operating an organization like TSR.

Plus, with Stewart’s disenchantment with NASCAR in recent years, which was a big part of why Stewart-Haas Racing dissolved after the 2024 season, NASCAR’s loss is definitely NHRA’s gain with Stewart.

“I remember when we started dating, somebody asked (Pruett) what she thought the difference was between what NASCAR does and what NHRA does, and I thought her answer was brilliant,” Stewart said. “She said what NASCAR does in three and a half hours, we do in three and a half seconds.

“And literally take the drama and the excitement and the intensity of a three and a half hour NASCAR race and condense that down to three and a half seconds. That’s what we do.”

Tony Stewart won the Top Fuel regular season (the first 14 races) championship this season, before tapering off in the six-race Countdown to the Championship left him with a fifth-place finish for the overall 20-race season.

“There isn’t anything on the planet that accelerates as hard as these nitro cars do,” he said. “It’s absolutely incredible. I mean, we’re driving Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars that have almost 12,000 horsepower (each). That’s almost half of the Daytona 500 starting field combined.”

Stewart is eager to get back to challenging the 1,000-foot drag strip as soon as possible.

“(Leah) said guys can’t rattle me and they really don’t,” Stewart said. “Nobody’s been able to rattle me on the starting line.”

And it’s likely no one ever will.