Gary Scelzi, who surrendered his Reigning Funny Car Champion title to John Force as Sunday's Pomona eliminations unfolded, had a theory about why his Don Schumacher-owned Mopar/Oakley Dodge Charger ran hot and cold this season and finally couldn't carry him to a Round 1 victory Sunday morning against Tommy Johnson Jr.

"Like I've been saying all along, the thing either smokes the tires or hauls ass," he said, "and now it's not hauling ass."

It wasn't cooperating in Sunday morning warm-ups. Gary Scelzi, who surrendered his Reigning Funny Car Champion title to John Force as Sunday's Pomona eliminations unfolded, had a theory about why his Don Schumacher-owned Mopar/Oakley Dodge Charger ran hot and cold this season and finally couldn't carry him to a Round 1 victory Sunday morning against Tommy Johnson Jr.

"Like I've been saying all along, the thing either smokes the tires or hauls ass," he said, "and now it's not hauling ass."

It wasn't cooperating in Sunday morning warm-ups.

"We went to start the car this morning, and our ignition is screwed up and it's been screwed up since Vegas, but we keep changing things," Scelzi said. "It goes one run, it does everything right, and then the next run it doesn't. Well, this morning it just wasn't doing anything right, so we changed every single thing on it and when we re-fired it everything looked good again. But we were afraid it was going to have too much power. How do you pull it back when you're not sure how much power it's off? And it just went out there and it got fast and it got faster until it smoked the tires.

"It's like we've been saying, we're going to have to make a major change. We tried to milk this combination all year long and it's not forgiving. It's not working right," he said.

He said crew chief Mike Neff will take a step back and "figure out what we need to do for next year, because right now we really don't know."

He was pragmatic about the course of the season. "You can almost say it's a fitting end to the way the year's gone all the way," Scelzi said. "We looked really good in Denver [where he earned his only 2006 victory]. We looked good in Englishtown for a while [where he was runner-up to Ron Capps]. I looked good. I looked bad. We just never got on the same page all year long.

"I guess I shouldn't bitch," he said, "because I've had a great career, period," the four-time NHRA series champion (with three in Top Fuel and one in Funny Car), said. "This is one of the worst years I've ever had, and I still finished seventh and won a race. When you look at it like that, in the big picture, I'm healthy, my family's healthy, everything is good, and I have a job next year. In the big picture, there's not a lot to bitch about. But it's just frustrating when you've won as much as this team has, and you know that it's capable of a lot more than we showed. Now we just need to go fix it."

Scelzi ended the season seventh in the standings.