On Saturday night, Erica Enders earned her first No. 1 start in the Pro Stock category since 2015.

That’s right.

As hard as it is to believe, it had been 65 races since Enders, a two-time champion in the class, last sat atop the field in a Pro Stock machine.

But on Saturday, Enders finally got the monkey off of her back and once again proved the quickest car on the property. For the first time since her championship-winning season, Enders raced to the green hat for the 19th time in her career at the Lucas Oil NHRA Nationals at Brainerd International Raceway.

“It’s definitely been a long road for us since our back-to-back championships. ‘16 was a huge struggle with the Dodge stuff and ‘17 we just kinda got our feet wet again with the Chevy program and the EFI,” Enders said. “Now we are back. It is more like a well-oiled machine now. Things are going great for our entire program and it was fun to get that green hat with my team. They were all really excited and that means a lot to me.”

Enders earned the top spot in the Elite Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro with a 6.609-second pass at 207.53 mph that stood from Q2 on Friday. Chris McGaha qualified second with a 6.613 at 208.36 mph - also from Friday night - while Alex Laughlin moved up a couple of spots on Saturday into third with a 6.613 at 207.59 mph.

Bo Butner (6.614) and Tanner Gray (6.615) rounded out the top five.

While she didn’t improve on her time, Enders also had the low elapsed time in the first qualifying session on Saturday, made even more impressive by the fact that her team didn’t have computer data from their chart-topping run the day before.

“During the first and second runs (the computer) didn’t work, but thankfully today we had data from both runs. It ended up being a bad SD card. It is just one of those deals, but I did get to joke with the crew chief that he does better without a computer because we actually ran better yesterday,” Enders said with a laugh. “Q3 today was definitely awesome. We thought we could go out there and we could make a better run, but we didn’t have the data from that 60 with a nine, but the weather conditions were there to go a 60 with a five or seven and we thought we could improve. The run was awesome, we got the three baby points for being low for the session and all of those points are going to matter with just two races before the Countdown.

“They know we are here and we will try to go out and execute the best we can tomorrow and hopefully make four strong runs on our way to the winners circle.”

While Enders finally broke through with her first top qualifier award this weekend, she actually broke a more than two-year winless drought earlier this year in Charlotte. If she can win on Sunday, it will prove another step in the right direction for an Elite Motorsports team that has seen quite a resurgence in 2018.

Enders will face Dave River in round one on Sunday.

“When we made that change to a new car in Houston, we have had those six final rounds and the one win, but also the other wins from our teammates. It is definitely showing we are moving in the right direction,” Enders said. “With the Countdown the way it is structured, points-and-a-half in Indy and now Pomona, positioning yourself as well as you can heading into the Countdown and doing your best is key. It is all about peaking at the right time.

“Hopefully our peak will come late like it did in 2015 when we won four races in the Countdown. We have been on the downswing for a little while and hopefully this is the beginning of our fight to the end.”