Terry McMillen, wanting to leave nothing to chance after making the Countdown to the Championship in his 11th year of trying, said Sunday morning that he had debated whether to run his car at this event.

“I’m in [the six-race playoff]. I know I’m in. The decision was whether we were going to run the car here. Why take a chance on an oildown?” McMillen said. “So when I came here, the decision was I’m not good at parking my car. I’m here to race. But when you start looking at it from a business side of it, for the first time I said to myself, ‘Maybe I can’t afford to run my car here, because if I have a couple of oildowns, everybody else can go around me.’ And I can’t take that chance. It was a tough decision, but I’m here to race. That’s what I do.”

The Amalie Oil Xtermigator Dragster owner-driver said, “We’ve had good luck. The car’s staying together well. It’s just come out here and do what we do, and it has paid off.”

He won the fan vote and the Traxxas Shootout lottery for the eighth and final spot in the bonus-race order. In the opening round, he defeated top seed Antron Brown to avenge his final-round loss to Brown at Seattle. He raced Tony Schumacher closely in the semifinal before Schumacher pulled away.

“By half-track we were really close. After that, he started to pull away and we sort of flatlined,” McMillen said. “It’s just learning. We’ve just got to keep making laps like that. If we do that, it’s going to happen.”

“It was pretty awesome to come out here and do it. The craziest thing was how many fans voted.” He said his allotment of ping-pong balls in the lottery hopper “was just incredible. That’s a lot of fan votes. What’s been moving to me, since Sonoma, is the fans. They’re just unbelievable. You pass the stands and they’re screaming louder than the fuel cars running. And that’s been overwhelming. Here was just crazy yesterday, and Seattle was the same. Standing out here [at the rope line by his pit], I usually go through a box and a half of hero cards. I’m on my fourth box today. I wouldn’t be here without the fans.”

Scott Palmer, McMillen’s longtime buddy from their IHRA days, also raised his performance level and realized his dream of making the Countdown elite.

“Our goal, Scott and I, at the beginning of the year, was for both of us just to be in the top 10. We would both do whatever we got to do to help each other get there,” McMillen said. “We’re both fortunate we’re there. Now he’s got a lot of help from Steve [Torrence] and his guys. We don’t have that. But it’s about surrounding yourselves with the right people. That’s what we’ve been able to do. And Rob [crew chief Wendland] has just taken the ball and run with it and worked within the restraints of the budget that we have. We’ve got quality parts, and we’re going out there and running numbers.

“We can run a [3.] 60, probably. I don’t know that we know how to do that totally yet. It’s around the corner. We’re real close to it,” he said. “As a team, you’ve got to be on the same page all the time. You can’t just half-ass do something and expect it to work. It’s got to be 100-percent right or it’s not going anywhere. And that’s the biggest thing [Wendland] has instilled in everybody: how to be organized and how to make sure that you do your job and that the details you give me are 100-percent right. If it varies a tenth, the car’s going to vary, too.”