By Richie Murray
Speedway, Indiana (March 26, 2026)………Thomas Meseraull is locked in for a full season of USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship racing in 2026 aboard the Tim Engler owned number 7x.
Meseraull (San Jose, California) is among the most experienced veterans in the lineup today with 205 career series starts, 10 wins, 40 top-fives, 87 top-tens and three fast qualifying times dating back to his 1999 USAC National Midget debut.
One year ago, Meseraull was a part-time competitor with the series, making nine starts with a best run of second at Kansas’ Belleville Short Track. Despite experience in a wide variety of racing machinery from midgets to champ cars to sprints cars with and without wings, it’s getting behind the wheel of a midget that gets T-Mez fired up.
“Midget racing is probably the most intense racing you can go do,” Meseraull stated. “With the size of the cars, we race on these tracks that are big enough for full size cars, sprint car, stock cars, whatever. Midgets are half the car. So, you have twice the amount of room on the racetrack. It’s elbows up and it’s as good as it gets and as exciting as it gets. That keeps it fun for me.”
For the past two-plus seasons, Meseraull has teamed up with Engler, the Princeton, Indiana based team owner and engine builder who entered the world of midget racing with a new platform, the EA Stealth Ford, which has been under the hood of the team’s cars since day one.
“Originally, Chase Briscoe brought a motor, or an idea of building a midget motor, to Tim, and that kind of fell through,” Meseraull detailed. “But the motor and the idea sat there for another year or two. Then, Tim just decided he wanted to take it on. There are just not a lot of midget motors available, so this was a way to bring a new motor into the sport.”
At the time, Engler’s midget engine was one-of-a-kind. Nowadays, you’ll see other teams with the powerplant installed beneath the frame rails of their own cars. But it all started with Meseraull being the first one to put it to the test and also find success.
“The motor is amazing,” Meseraull exclaimed. “Tim has actually sold a handful of them, so now we’re going to the racetrack and we have other teams that have them, and we’re all kind of building to make this thing as competitive as it can be. Tim built a midget team for me with Donnie (Gentry) and Chuck (Adams). We’ve built two cars, then three and now it’s four. We have four cars and six motors.”
Meseraull first competed with the engine during his final year with RMS Racing in 2023, winning a BC39 preliminary night feature at The Dirt Track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway that September. T-Mez went on to explain that the engine is a version of an old pushrod Gaerte, but updated in the new age and features a NASCAR cylinder head. By November 2023, Engler’s new team debuted and Meseraull was tabbed as the wheelman and has been a combo ever since.
“Tim’s got a lot of money invested in this motor,” Meseraull revealed. “And the best way to get results for him was to keep doing it. So, he decided to build a team for me to go continue to race. I’m very excited this year to go USAC racing and we feel like we have our best piece. It’s taken years to build it after just learning where we were lacking and where we can get better. It’s come a long way in the last year. I’m really proud of Tim and everything he’s done. We built a midget motor to compete with Toyota, and that’s a big feat. We’re close. We’re so close.”
Thomas will start off his USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship season in 2026 beginning with back-to-back nights at Indiana’s Kokomo Speedway for the Kokomo Grand Prix on April 24-25.