After a tough back-and-forth battle with teammate Gaige Herrera, Richard Gadson emerged as the 2025 NHRA Mission Foods Pro Stock Motorcycle world champion.
After joining the Vance & Hines team at the start of 2024, Gadson enjoyed a breakthrough season with four wins in six final rounds. He took over the points lead with a win at the Four Wide event in Charlotte in September and never relinquished it. He left the recent Dodge NHRA Nevada Nationals with a 21-point edge against teammate and two-time champ Gaige Herrera and secured the win after the In-N-Out Burger NHRA Finals was cancelled due to weather.
“This is a big, big, big, emotional roller coaster; the journey last year, really a lot of blows, a really, really, really hard season to get through, to start this year, and still trying to find that groove,” said Gadson. “Once we found it, I would say after Bristol, I was kind of starting to feel like I belonged. Starting to feeling like, you know, I can run at the top of this class.
There’s a lot of tough competitors out here, My teammate, Gaige, I want to take a minute to give him his due. You know, I’ve got a lot of respect for him.”
Gadson is the 13th different rider to win an NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle title since the category was recognized as a pro division in 1987 joining class icons such as Dave Schultz, John Myers, Matt Smith, and Angelle Sampey. Gadson also joins Herrera, Eddie Krawiec, Andrew Hines, Matt Hines and team founder Terry Vance as the latest rider to earn the No. 1 plate for the storied Vance & Hines team.
After considerable success in grudge racing and other organizations, Gadson was named as the replacement for Eddie Krawiec prior to the 2024 season and performed well, earning runner-up finishes in Richmond, Reading, and Charlotte to go with four semifinal finishes. He finished the year in the No. 3 spot behind Herrera and Matt Smith.
Gadson earned a long-awaited first victory earlier this season in Bristol and tacked on additional wins in Sonoma, Reading, and Charlotte, the latter two coming during the crucial Countdown to the Championship playoffs. Gadson’s most impressive performance may have come in Dallas where he qualified No. 1 and claimed a narrow final round win against Brayden Davis.
Much like Pro Stock champ Dallas Glenn, Gadson also pulled off a rare feat when he went the entire 2024 season without a round one loss.
“I went through every emotion you could think of this weekend [in Pomona,” said Gadson. “It was way too much time to think this week. Unfortunately, we are a sport that Mother Nature dictates. There’s nothing we can do about it. NHRA was in a tight spot. The racers, the competitors, are in a tight spot. None of us left home with this in our plans. But what do you do? Everybody was here with the intent to race, and my mindset, even while it was raining, was, you know what? Whether we race or not, you’re going to take it anyway. Take it anyway. It’s yours, either way it goes. If you got to go to war for it, you got to go to war for it. If, if Mother Nature dictates that for you, you work your ass off to be in the position to win it anyway. So you know you can’t, you can’t smack the smile off my face right now.”
Gadson grew up in a family of motorcycle racing enthusiasts and his uncle, Ricky, briefly raced in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class. Given an opportunity to forge his own path to success, Gadson won multiple championships in multiple organizations before getting an opportunity to race with the RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines team aboard their Suzuki Hayabusa.
“You’ve got to understand one thing; I come from a motorcycle racing family. It wasn’t just my uncle,” said Gadson. “My grandparents rode motorcycles. My dad and my sisters and brothers all ride motorcycles. There was no plan B in this life. It’s all about motorcycles.”
