: How much of the Battle for the Belts money have you actually paid out?

KN: Some guys have been paid. Travis Harvey, Ronnie Proctor, William Brown III and Rickie Smith to name a few. They shouldn’t have been paid. We should have divided it up equally, and paid a little to every racer that was owed, but I was always thinking the money was going to come. I believed, like Jason (Scruggs), that Sheikh Khalid would pay the money rather than let his reputation take a hit. Looks like we were both wrong!

: How do you feel now that you are totally out drag racing again?

KN: The things that I’m most pissed off about are not the mistakes that I’ve made; I deserved everything that has come my way based on the bad decisions that I made. But I can tell you this, the entire time I was going on the radio (telling everyone that the money was coming), it was under the direction of Sheikh Khalid and Jason Scruggs: Keep spreading the good word, we don’t want any negative publicity. Khalid said he will pay you the money, he’s going to pay you the money. I heard him say it.

I promise you this, they (Mitchell and Jason Scruggs and Roger Henson) spent more this year on the PDRA than it would have taken them to pay that little bit of money and keep the ADRL on track. There were all kinds of discussions between Jason and I about the possibility of them assuming the ADRL because of the $350,000 and I would go to work for them and they would be more involved, and on and on.

: Now that your former partners have taken over the ADRL and changed the name to PDRA, how do you feel about the whole deal?

KN: What I think is irrelevant at this point. They went out and... basically did what the X-DRL tried to do the year before. The only difference was they actually had the money. So they start a competing organization. They take all our tracks. They do all of this based on the fact that my reputation in the racing community is in the toilet because I didn’t pay out a purse. When everybody in the world out there was saying, “We know he got the money, we know he got the money.”

Well, show me where I got the f**king money! Two persons -- aside from Sheikh Khalid al Thani, myself and God -- who know we didn’t get the money. One is Jason Scruggs, and the other is Steve Vick! Listen, I want to be very clear on this. It’s not about what Sheikh Khalid did or didn’t do for doorslammer drag racing; he brought in a lot of money. People can debate either way: that he ruined it because he brought in so much money it priced out the little guy or that he saved it because he brought in enough money to keep it going.

But make no mistake about it, it’s not about the money that he paid, it’s about the money he didn’t pay. It doesn’t matter how much money he invested in drag racing. If he said he would pay $10,630,000 and he only paid $10 million, it’s about the money that he didn’t pay. He didn’t keep his word. Period!

And if people want to forgive him for that, that’s fine, but don’t say that I took the money, that I got the money when I may have to file for bankruptcy, something I never dreamed that I would do. I’m a few years removed from living in an $800,000 house, making $120 grand a year, and having an 840+ credit score. My financial life has been ruined by this.

But again, I am man enough to admit that it was my poor decisions that led to this. I should have never trusted Sheikh Khalid al Thani again!

: What would you like for this very candid interview to accomplish?

KN: At this point I have accepted the fact that my reputation in drag racing, a sport that I love more than anything else other than my God, my country and my family, is all but ruined. Let’s face it, if I did what many are accusing me of doing, which was to have taken the money and run and gotten away with it, then why two years later would I have agreed to do this interview? The answer is simple: I didn’t take a penny and all I want is for the racers to get the money that is owed to them! Nothing more.