Last Updated on November 10, 2016 by CCAR Staff
Editor’s note: Southern California’s Ron Capps will provide his thoughts and insights throughout the Auto Club Finals, the NHRA season finale. He is within striking distance of winning his first Funny Car championship.
It seems like a lot more than two weeks have gone by since we raced at Las Vegas, and I can’t wait to get back in our Napa Auto Parts Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car today and be with my team to start the last race of the season.
So much has happened since we left Auto Club Raceway at Pomona in February when our Napa team started the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing season with a win. No better way to start a year than by getting a Wally trophy; actually, it’s always great to get a Wally.
That was the first time this year I was asked if this would be the year that I win an NHRA world championship. And I can’t count how many more times I’ve been asked, especially after we won each of our five Wallys.
I get it. That’s to be expected after you’ve finished second to the champion four times. No one’s done that before. And it seems like that’s been the topic of every conversation I’ve had since the Countdown to the Championship started in September.
We get to Pomona leading my Don Schumacher Racing teammates Matt Hagan by 86 points and Tommy Johnson Jr. by 113. The most any of us can earn this weekend is 130.
So I guess I’m in pretty good shape, but like our team owner Don Schumacher says, ‘First you have to qualify and then take it one win at a time on Sunday.’
Sounds simple, but it isn’t. We didn’t qualify for this year’s first race at Las Vegas in April. We haven’t forgotten that.
One of the cool things about NHRA is you have to earn your spot every weekend. There are no provisionals like in NASCAR, so you’re not guaranteed a chance to race on Sunday. We have to earn it.
Our team with my crew chief Rahn Tobler and his assistant Eric Lane with our Napa Know How crew got hot in the summer when we won three of the four titles in June and really haven’t let up since. We won the regular 18-race season with a 202-point lead and all we got for that was a 20-point bonus when they reset the points for the six-race Countdown that cut our lead to 30.
Tobler and I believed if we kept getting those “little points” in qualifying and averaged a semifinals finish in the Countdown we’d have a good shot at the championship. Well, we’ve earned more qualifying points than any of the other teams and we’ve been in three semis and two final rounds.
It was a longshot for us to clinch the championship at Las Vegas like our teammate Antron Brown did in Top Fuel for the second straight year.
I definitely feel a little bit looser going into Pomona than we were going into Vegas. But it’s by far not over, and a lot of people since Las Vegas have been yelling out, ‘Hey, this is your championship,’ but it’s not over. We still need to get there and do our business and clinch it.
I’ve seen some pretty miraculous things happen at Pomona over the years, and we definitely don’t want to be one of those statistics.
I’m going up to the line each time trying to do the same thing I’ve done for 19 years, and that’s just be money for our team so they can count on me.
