POMONA, Calif. Rick Ware Racing earned its third victory in less than 24 hours when NHRA Top Fuel driver Clay Millican drove the RWR-prepared Mighty Fire Breaker/Parts Plus dragster to a final round victory in the Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals Sunday at In-N-Out Pomona Dragstrip.

Millican defeated Tony Stewart with an impressive .038 of-a-second reaction time to take his eighth career Top Fuel win in the NHRA Mission Food Drag Racing Series.

Five of those victories have come since joining RWR in late 2022, with Millicans prior win earned in the sports biggest event, last years Cornwell Quality Tools NHRA U.S. Nationals over Labor Day weekend at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park.

My crew chief (Jim Oberhofer) told me he had it loaded up and a couple things were going to happen. He said were going to win, were going to blow up and if we lose, were going to be a footnote in history, said Millican, who went 4.273 seconds at 189.71 mph against Stewart before enduring a wild engine explosion at the finish line. Thank goodness were not a footnote in history. Tony Stewart is going to win one of these soon, but all I know is we won the Winternationals.

But boy, that final round was forever. When you blow it up and and we blew it up good and you got a HANS (head-and-neck restraint) device on, youre stretching that HANS to its limits, trying to look over like, Is he coming or not? I couldnt get there quick enough. I promise I never let off the throttle, even though it wasnt running no more. But I had that thing buried. I was stomping on the loud pedal harder than normal. What a day.

Winning (the Winternationals) is one of the majors. It definitely is. Weve won Indy and now weve won here, and thats pretty dang cool. But to come out and win the way we did today, it was a total team effort.

On Saturday night at the Senoia Short Track in Georgia, RWRs Progressive American Flat Track riders Briar Bauman and Chase Saathoff won their respective classes.

Bauman won the Mission AFT SuperTwins race to score his 27th career victory in the class and his fifth with RWR, as the two-time Grand National Champion came to RWR in 2023.

In a prelude to Baumans win, Saathoff triumphed in AFT Singles presented by KICKER. The victory was Saathoffs first with RWR and the fourth of his career. He joined RWR this year after spending 2022-2024 as an independent AFT Singles rider.

Were in the business of trying to win races, and this was a very good weekend for RWR, said team owner Rick Ware. Credit goes to our people who put in so much time, energy and effort to make all of this happen. Moments like this are really appreciated because winning in any of these series is just really, really hard. Everyone is good, so when you do have success like this, it makes it even sweeter, because you know how hard you worked to achieve it.

Its been a really good weekend, and that makes us want to do it all over again the next weekend and the weekend after that. NHRA is in Vegas in two weeks, AFT is in Ventura in less than a month, and weve got NASCAR at Darlington next weekend. Theres no let up, but its what we love. Its how were wired.