Susanne Callin needed a shade over four seconds and 280.4mph to settle the argument. Under a rain-delayed September sky at Santa Pod Raceway, the 43-year-old Swede beat Switzerland’s Jndia Erbacher in the Top Fuel final at the FIA European Finals to defend her championship — the second title of a career that only properly began when she came back from a 14-year break in 2019.
Outside the drag racing paddock, it barely registered. It should have. Callin’s win means women have taken seven of the last nine European Top Fuel championships, in the fastest discipline motorsport has — a category quicker than anything in Formula 1, where men and women line up against each other without caveat or quota.
Four seconds, 346mph and more g-force than a rocket launch
The numbers in Top Fuel do not read like sport. They read like ordnance. A dragster covers 1,000 feet — 305 metres — from a standing start in roughly four seconds, passing 100mph in under a second and pulling more g-force on launch than an astronaut strapped to a rocket. The fastest pass in National Hot Rod Association history came in September 2026, when Shawn Langdon ran 346.96mph at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park. The fastest a Formula 1 car has been timed in a grand prix is about 231mph.
Brittany Force, the two-time NHRA champion and daughter of 16-time titlist John Force, held that record before Langdon: she was the first driver into the 340s, with 341.59mph in April 2025, and pushed it to 343.16mph that July. That a woman held the outright speed record in the world’s fastest motorsport, and that it took a man two seasons to win it back, is the cleanest summary of this story available.
Callin’s own description of the experience is the one that sticks. “Nothing comes close,” she said at Santa Pod. “The car never stops accelerating. If you’re not feeling like you’re being shot out of a cannon, you know it’s not going to be a good run.”
It is not risk-free. Fatal crashes in 2004 and 2008 prompted the shortening of the distance from a quarter-mile; drivers sit in protected cockpits in fire-resistant suits and deploy parachutes at the finish. Callin has had two major shunts, walking away with concussion and a bruised collar bone.
The numbers that make Top Fuel an outlier
Across motorsport as a whole, the campaign group More Than Equal puts women at roughly 10% of participants and just 4% of elite drivers. Top Fuel does not look like that:
- Women made up around 20% of the Top Fuel field across the 2026 US and European seasons
- Seven of the past nine European Top Fuel titles have gone to women — Anita Mäkelä, Ida Zetterström, Erbacher and Callin twice
- The 2026 European season opened in May with an all-female Top Fuel final at Santa Pod, Callin beating Erbacher 3.98s to 4.81s
- Leah Pruett sat fourth in the 20-round NHRA Top Fuel standings in the closing weeks of the 2026 season, inside a title fight led by Langdon and Doug Kalitta
- In Pro Stock, Erica Enders has won six NHRA championships outright against mixed fields
This is the distinction that matters. In most elite motorsport, female success is measured in participation and development programmes. In Top Fuel it is measured in trophies won off men.
From Muldowney to Mäkelä: a lineage, not an accident
The pattern has deep roots. Shirley Muldowney became the first woman licensed to drive a Top Fuel dragster and the first to win an NHRA championship in 1977, adding titles in 1980 and 1982. Mäkelä, the Finn, is a four-time European champion who won three of those titles after a six-year break for her children and the family farm. Erbacher is the daughter of Urs Erbacher, himself a three-time European champion. Zetterström won the 2023 European crown and has since moved to the NHRA, sharing a Shawn Reed Racing dragster through 2026.
That detail — the comeback — recurs so often it looks structural rather than coincidental. Callin returned at 35 after raising a family and won two titles; Mäkelä did the same. A sport contested in four-second bursts is one of the few a driver can leave and genuinely re-enter at the top.
What it means going forward
More Than Equal’s research points to the reasons: an accessible grassroots structure with junior programmes, family-run teams, visible role models in unbroken supply, and financial barriers far below Formula 1’s. The European championship runs to just four events — two in the UK, one in Germany, one in Sweden — against the NHRA’s 20, where the 2026 champion collects $500,000 (£378,000).
It is spreading, too. In India, Uvashri Kannadasan Balajeyanthi — “Octy Girl” — won the Valley Run series across three categories between 2022 and 2024, and is impatient with the reaction. “Why do they have to get shocked?” she said. “Anyone can drive, right?”
Formula 1 has spent a decade and considerable money trying to engineer a route for women to the top. Drag racing engineered nothing; it simply never closed the door and kept the entry cost survivable. Callin goes again in 2027, with Erbacher — who summed up their rivalry perfectly: “We hate each other at the starting line, but we love each other at the finish line” — alongside her. The rest of motorsport might usefully ask why the fastest category on earth is also its most equal.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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