Shawn Langdon understands there’s very little wiggle room. 

Langdon, the past NHRA Top Fuel champion in his freshman season as Funny Car driver, entered this weekend’s Chevrolet Performance U.S. Nationals ranked ninth in the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series points. 

Langdon has qualified for the NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship every full season since he became a professional racer in 2009, as a team driver for Morgan Lucas Racing.  

Langdon has a measure of confidence racing in the final event of the regular season. This comes from understanding what his car is telling him. 

“Obviously this year there was a lot of changes, a lot of things that were new for me, understanding the car, learning the car, learning how to drive it, learning that when the car does this or that, learning why it did that and how to fix it and how to become a better driver,” Langdon said. “It’s been a constant evolving learning curve for me. And then with the crew chief changes that we had and then bringing in Kurt Elliott working with Nicky, they’ve been doing a really good job.”

Bringing the car to its happy place was crucial for Langdon and the Global Team was crucial for the team in getting hot at the right time. 

“We kind of got to a spot on the western swing where we just kind of felt like our setup that we had just wasn’t really working,” Langdon admitted. “I mean it would make okay runs here and there, but we just felt like we couldn’t really keep up with everybody because we just weren’t getting the early numbers that we needed to to keep up with everybody. 

“We made some pretty wholesale changes out in Sonoma, Seattle and the car’s responded very well to it. It actually made some really great runs. We just kind of were in a position where everybody had about 15-16 races on us. We’re kind of starting fresh, kind of taking a gamble and so far I kind of feel like the gamble’s paid off, because the last two races, Seattle and Brainerd, we’ve had a really good car, we just lost some really good races. But we just kind of felt like we weren’t really able to push it because were were more interested in gathering the data and the information because we weren’t really going to learn anything if we smoked the tires and got really aggressive with it.”

The baby steps are working well for Langdon and team.  

“We’ve just kind of been inching up on it and then when we got out here, we really kind of threw a lot at it, what we think that it needed and it’s responded well,” Langdon explained. “We’ve been making some really good low 3.90 runs. Yesterday we shut them all off at 700 feet and the first run we went 3.96 shut down from 700 feet, so kind of translates out to a low 3.90. 
Langdon, just  like teammate J.R. Todd, believes the annual pre-Indy test session provides the perfect springboard for the Countdown, which starts in two weeks outside of Reading, Pa. 

“The test session was very important to us just for the fact of we kind of have a new setup that we’re rolling with and we just need laps on it just so we can gain more information,” Langdon explained. “Not only just the information but just the information of making good runs, but then also the confidence that the crew chiefs get out of that by making continuous good runs and getting all that data. Just building the confidence that you know what the limits of your car are. 

“We didn’t really know what the limits were before. I kind of like what this test session, we’ve been able to kind of push the limits a little bit more to where we know kind of what the threshold of our tuneup is and what the car can run. We’ve definitely opened up the tuning window on it to where the car, you can get away with it if you don’t hit everything just absolutely perfect. Right now it seems like it’s pretty forgiving.”

Langdon stands seventh quickest after three sessions with a 3.959 elapsed time at 325.22.