Ferguson had raced off and on locally for a few years when he decided to attend the PDRA’ s inaugural event held at Rockingham Dragway, where he hoped to qualify for the ultra-tough Top Sportsman category. After not only qualifying, but going to the semis at the season opener and then the finals at the next event at South Georgia Motorsports Park, Ferguson was determined to chase the championship, despite his shoestring budget. At just 26 years old Ferguson earned the 2014 PDRA Top Sportsman title. The following year he remained in the thick of the hunt, finishing second to the late Ronnie Davis. This season, Ferguson picked right up where he left off, continuing to be the dominant threat in the category. He confidently picked up his second world championship in three years.

The success Ferguson has seen in his young career is almost unheard of in Top Sportsman. He’ s led the points for an astounding 20 out of the 25 events held by the PDRA in the past three seasons, as well as participating in 27 of 36 potential rounds of racing in the 2016 season with a 20-7 win-loss record.

“ My first championship was tough,” Ferguson admitted.“ I had some help here and there, which I am very thankful for because there was times it made the difference between making the next race or not making the next race, but I was mostly self-funded. I went to Rockingham because Rockingham was my home track [ at the time ] and I used to love that track. I just wanted to try and qualify for the PDRA race. I qualified and ended up making it to the semis. The next race was at South Georgia, not too far away, so I said if I come out of here top five in points, I’ m going to go to the next race. I ended up going to the finals that race and took the points lead. From that point on I decided to keep scraping and finding ways to make it from race to race. I race pretty cheap; I try to be smart about how I spend money and only buy things that are necessary, so sometimes

I won enough money to cover a lot of it. Winning the 2014 championship was probably the biggest accomplishment in my life. In that season, to go from being an unknown guy who came with his buddies to have fun, just wanting to make the field, to have kept going the rest of the season and end up winning the championship while mixing it up with guys like Ronnie Davis, Bruce Thrift, Billy Albert, Aaron Glaser is still surreal.”

Even though Ferguson finished a very strong second in 2015, he considers it a learning year that honed his mental game.“ I had my car working good last year and I was driving really well. Then in the middle of the year, I had a couple of red lights and it started getting in my head. I was going out early rounds and not winning any money, so I was worrying about that. I just got myself in a bad frame of mind, sabotaged myself mentally I think. I just started doing bad the rest of the year. It’ s a very mental sport. Staying focused up there is the hardest part. You got to cut a good light. You have to stage perfectly, because it could affect your reaction time and your consistency, and you have to watch your opponent the whole way down the race track and make a decision if you’ re going to lift or hit the override or just run it on through. Before you even race, you have to try and predict what you’ re going to run. There are a lot of elements to bracket racing. For a driver, I think it’ s a lot harder than heads-up racing.

“ I never count my eggs before they’ re hatched but I was able to stay confident most of [ this ] year. When you lose your confidence, I think it really hurts your driving and that’ s what happened to me last year. I beat myself. So I learned from that. And then this year, I just tried to keep a good frame of mind. I knew we had as good of a chance as anybody.”

One of the biggest battles Ferguson faced this season was also a mental and emotional one. At this year’ s PDRA Spring Nationals, Ferguson’ s friend and mentor and all-around racing legend, Ronnie Davis, succumbed to injuries from an on-track accident. Ferguson felt the ripples from the shock more than most.

“ It sucks. I really miss him. We had a lot of stuff we were talking about that we never got to do. We’ d been talking about me possibly moving down to Georgia in fall of 2016, to work for him in both his golf cart business and racing. We had talked about the possibility of me putting in some years with him, learning the golf cart business, and buying him out one day when he was ready for that. I think we would have gotten along good racing and working together. It was

pretty devastating. When you lose a close friend so unexpectedly like that, it’ s pretty hard.”

Ferguson and all who knew Davis were certain that he wanted no one to stop racing. Ferguson continued the same fateful event where Davis crashed and ended up winning it in his friend’ s honor.“ We all love this sport, and if he was willing to put his life on the line to do it, so was I. I was determined to go finish the deal out, hopefully win in his honor, and we ended up being able to

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