Drew Davis: Razorracks BBQ Pitmaster and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

In a town of about 350 people in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks, there are more cattle than neighbors and not a single stoplight.

It is where Drew Davis built a barbecue team good enough to earn one of the hardest-won seats in the sport.

He cooks under a ten-by-ten canopy with no electricity, a couple of folding tables and a few coolers, and he has spent more than a decade out-cooking men with gleaming trailers and years on him.

In April 2027, in Las Vegas, he will cook for $1,000,000 at the first BBQ World Cup.

Davis came to barbecue the way many of the best ones do, sideways and almost by accident.

He played baseball in college, so the competitive streak was always there.

The cooking came from his mother.

When he first moved out on his own, he called her constantly, tired of paying restaurant prices and wanting to know how she made this dish or that one. By the time he reached graduate school, he was cooking for real.

Then a friend named Nick Garza, who knew the competition circuit, needed an extra set of hands at a contest and asked Drew to tag along.

Something clicked that day.

The cooking and the competing fused into one thing he suddenly had to do.

He drove home, called an old high-school tailgating buddy, and told him they had to try this. They signed up, got a couple of category calls at their very first contest, and the hook was set.

How Razorracks BBQ Got Its Name

The team that walked into that first contest was not Razorracks.

For exactly one weekend, it was Hoggy Style.

Two twenty-one-year-old men thought the name was hilarious, right up until they heard it called over the loudspeaker and had to walk to the stage for their award in front of families and kids.

That was the end of Hoggy Style.

Back at the drawing board, another friend helped them find something they could say out loud. Arkansas is a one-college-sport state, and the Razorbacks are the whole show, so Razor Racks was born as a play on the name.

It stuck.

The tailgating buddy eventually drifted away as life pulled him elsewhere, and Chelsey, Drew's wife, stepped into his place on the team.

They started young, likely the youngest team on the circuit, and Drew set himself an early goal: a Grand Champion win by the age of 26.

He got it on his 26th birthday.

Roughly 250 contests later, he still likes being the young one who shows up under a canopy and beats the veterans.

There is an everyman pride in the way he tells it.

He is a full-time physical therapist who leaves work on a Friday, drives somewhere within a six-hour radius of home, and cooks against teams with far more money and time than he has.

Barbecue also gave a rural Arkansan a network he would never have had otherwise.

If he has a plumbing problem, he has a plumber to call. An electrical problem, an electrician. An IT problem, an IT guy.

All of them friends made over turn-in tables.

How Drew Davis Cooks Competition BBQ With No Trailer and No Power

Razorracks cooks balanced across all four proteins, though rivals peg them as a rib team.

Drew has learned the hard way that the moment you feel safe in one category, another slips.

Keeping all four sharp at once is the real work, because dropping a single protein takes you out of the running for a Grand Champion call on any given weekend.

He does it with almost nothing.

No electricity, a couple of tables, a tote, and coolers.

Wind is his enemy.

He runs walls on his canopy and will strap the whole rig to his truck to anchor it against a gust.

He thinks that hard-won discipline is a quiet edge heading into Las Vegas, where everyone will be under a canopy in dry desert air, and plenty of trailer teams have never had to cook without their walls up and their gear laid out just so.

The resume runs deeper than the setup suggests.

How Drew Davis Qualified for the BBQ World Cup at Smoke on the Shores

Davis has finished third at the Jack Daniel's Invitational more than once, including a 2024 run where Razorracks earned a first-place rib and a first-place pork, both perfect scores, and still landed third overall.

He has taken third at the American Royal Open and at a KCBS Invitational too, near-misses that sting all the more because third place at a major often pays nothing.

His biggest win before the World Cup was a Grand Champion title at a KCBS Invitational, his first at that level.

Then came the one that mattered most.

At Smoke on the Shores in Lebanon, Tennessee, a 125-team KCBS contest, Razorracks went Grand Champion and punched the ticket to Vegas.

The team that finished second that day had three or four solid calls.

Drew, by his own count, had one, and still won on the final math.

He walked over to the runners-up afterward and told them to pack their bags, because the qualifier awarded two seats and they had earned one too.

None of it works without the people.

The Razorracks BBQ Team: Drew and Chelsey Davis and Their Mentors

Chelsey, an oncology nurse, is the palate on the team. After nearly 250 contests the proteins blur for Drew, and she is the one who decides what actually goes in the box.

The two of them cook 95 percent of their own meals at home and plan road trips around restaurants they want to try, so the sport is really an extension of the thing that first bonded them.

Their six-year-old daughter, Brynn, is now dipping into Kids Que, though she mostly treats a barbecue contest as a full day on a playground with new friends.

Drew keeps a short list of people he leans on.

Nick Garza, the graduate-school friend who brought him to that first contest and changed the course of his life, is one, even though the two have drifted in recent years.

Eric Lee of Fire Dancer BBQ is the other.

He looked like the most intimidating cook in the world when Drew started, then became a father figure who keeps him from riding too low in the lows or too high in the highs.

On the road, Jordan Kirkpatrick of Janky Leg BBQ, Bill Heyen of Triple H BBQ, and Jason Halterman of King Country Outlaws are the voices that keep him awake through six- and eight-hour drives home.

The dream ahead is already taking shape.

Razorracks sells a spice line, All Day Seasonings, an all-purpose rub, a sweet rub, and a garlic rub that account for most of what Drew puts on his own contest meat and now turn up on other teams' tables around the circuit.

What Drew Davis Would Do With $1,000,000 at the BBQ World Cup

If the million comes, he has thought about it more than he lets himself admit.

A food truck is one idea, a way to chase the food he loves without worrying about the bills.

The other is closer to home.

In a place with more cows than people, he has been dipping into the cattle business, and he would love to build it into a herd of around 120 head.

His pick for the greatest of all time is Darren Warth of Smokey D's, the standard he measures himself against.

Ask him what makes great barbecue and the answer is one word: experience.

Nobody cooks their best on the first try, he says, and you cannot teach the thing you learn from every rack you burn.

Ask him what happens if he hears Razorracks Barbecue called as the first BBQ World Cup winner, and the answer goes quiet.

There will be tears, he admits, even though he holds his emotions in well.

Then he will find Chelsey for a hug, find Brynn, and stand there a minute before he can move.

A zero-stoplight town, a canopy with no power, and a family that cooks together are about to share a stage in Las Vegas with the best pitmasters in the world.

For Drew Davis, that is the whole point.

He earned the seat the hard way, and he would not have it any other way.

Sources

Interview: The Road to a Million, BBQ World Cup qualifier series, host Shannon Pruitt (Riverside).

Smoke on the Shores BBQ Championship, Lebanon, TN (smokeontheshores.com).

Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational results thread (bbq-brethren.com).

Razorracks BBQ / All Day Seasonings, Atlanta BBQ Store (atlantabbqstore.com).

Darren Warth, American Royal BBQ Hall of Fame (who13.com).