Reigning Pro Stock Motorcycle champion Gaige Herrera opened the 2025 NHRA season in winning style with his third-straight victory at the Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway in Gainesville, FL, on Sunday.
Herrera took the top qualifying spot for the 24th time in his career with a 6.670-second/202.97 mph pass on Friday evening, which became the event’s final qualifying session after Saturday’s on-track activities were washed out by rain showers.
After morning rain and a track power outage forced a four-hour delay to the start of competition, the action finally resumed on Sunday afternoon. Herrera opened the books on his title defense with a 6.766-second/200.11 mph round-one victory over former class champion Geno Scali, who fouled on the starting line.
In round two, Herrera knocked out Kelly Clontz (6.833 seconds/196.64 mph) with a 6.765-second/199.23 mph run. Herrera defeated Chase Van Sant (foul) in the semi-finals with a 6.764-second/198.88 mph blast to advance to his 25th career final round appearance and a matchup against last season’s runner-up, Matt Smith.
Herrera got the early advantage off the starting line in the finals and ran 6.722 seconds at 200.23 mph, his quickest run of the day, to edge out Smith (6.723 seconds/203.19 mph) at the finish line in an exciting side-by-side drag race. Herrera’s 0.295-second margin of victory was all he needed to secure a 22nd career victory and remain undefeated in Gainesville with a 12-0 elimination round record.
After a 2024 season filled with records and superlative performances that produced his second Pro Stock Motorcycle title, Herrera was ecstatic to begin the year by knocking out the competitor who is likely to be the toughest challenger in his quest to securing a third championship.
“This win was an all-time high for me because it came down to reaction time between me and Matt. That’s the kind of racing I love. The last two seasons I’ve often had the fastest bike, but we didn’t today. I went into the final round with the attitude that I had to kill the tree to get everything I could out of the bike. We were running in the seventy-sixes all day long, but Andrew changed the tire for the final and did his magic with the computer. He looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Hopefully we have more than him.’ It was a picture-perfect run. I had to make zero corrections, I hit all my shift points, and I knew Matt would have to be more than perfect to beat me,” Herrera said. “It’s exciting as a rider to know I need to be on my A-game all the time, that what I can do on the bike makes the difference in the result. That’s what drives me, pushes me and makes me love this sport. I’ve had remarkable seasons the past two years, but I feel like this year is going to be even better.”
In round one, Richard Gadson defeated Brandon Litten (6.990 seconds/190.16 mph) with a 6.821-second/198.38 mph pass. But despite going quicker in round two with 6.814-second/198.82 mph run, Gadson came up short in a narrow loss to Chase Van Sant (6.790 seconds/198.29 mph).
“It’s tough racing out here. You can do your best job and then somebody just throws a haymaker, like Chase picking up six hundredths in the round against me,” Gadson said.
Reflecting on his progress over the past year, when he was new to the class and the team, Gadson said the difference in his mental state is stark.
“I feel like I’m starting the season 180 degrees from where I was last year, when everything was new and there were a lot of moving pieces to my life. I feel more settled now with a strong foundation under me. I came here well prepared mentally and physically, but mother nature just didn’t cooperate,” Gadson said. “We wanted to try some things in qualifying to find more performance, but we didn’t get the runs we needed to do that. We didn’t get where we wanted to be this weekend, but I feel good about going to Charlotte and I think we’ll be where we need to be soon.”
After challenges last year adapting to a new mandatory spec fuel in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class, RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines Suzuki crew chief Andrew Hines welcomed the return of a new VP Racing spec fuel that he feels is better suited to the characteristics of both the Suzuki and V-Twin engines that dominate the class.
“That’s the biggest change in the rules for this season. I’m not sure it will benefit us more than anybody else, but I think it’s better all-around and we’re excited to have them back in the series,” Hines said.
“The introduction of any new fuel means we need to adapt our tune-up and figure out what our engines like. It threw us for a bit of a loop today, with some trial-and-error through the early rounds, but we had enough performance to get through even though we were off a little bit. In the final we used our special ‘fast’ tire that’s won us a lot of races over the past two years. We hadn’t run it since Las Vegas last year, but it’s worth about two-hundredths and it helped make the difference today,” Hines said. “Our level of performance is not quite where it needs to be for parity in the class. We’re still behind a little bit, but luckily, we still came out with the win.”
After the first of 15 rounds in the 2025 Pro Stock Motorcycle season, Herrera and Gadson sit first and fifth in the Pro Stock Motorcycle standings with 123 and 55 points, respectively.
The RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines team returns to action April 25-27 at the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals at zMax Dragway in Concord, NC.
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