Eddie Krawiec took the points lead at the NHRA Carolina Nationals at the zMAX Dragway in Concord, N.C. on Sunday by taking a step back.

The Vance and Hines Harley-Davidson rider had entered the countdown in a solid second place in the points. Despite this, the 40-year-old New Jersey native had been dissatisfied with some of the results earlier on in the year after many adjustments had been made to the bike’s old chassis.

“We debuted [the brand new bikes] back in Englishtown, the Harley Davidson street rod body and chassis platform and we kinda struggled a lot,” explained Krawiec, sporting a yellow hat after defeating teammate Andrew Hines in the final in Charlotte. “We expected to run better and do better but it proved to give us a little bit of a fit, the motorcycle was not happy on the starting line.

“When you’re giving up three, four, five hundredths to some of these motorcycles out here at the 60 foot and the 330 mark you really can’t run them down even if you’re a hundredth better in the back, it’s not going to happen, you’re still four, five hundredths behind them.

“Everybody really put the effort in back at the shop to make what we had better and we had Plan B but we continued to work on Plan A and that was to work on our bikes and our chassis and our setups and keep going.”

Unfortunately for Krawiec and his team, Plan A was not yielding promising results, and so the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis they reverted back to Plan B and took home the Wally.

“There are certain renditions of chassis of motorcycles out here that have all been proven and you kind of make a hybrid when you’re going through your development phase,” added Krawiec. “Again I thought we were going down the right road but then there was a huge stop sign at the end and we hit our heads into it.

“We’re going to continue to work away at it. I’ll tell you the truth right now, we have another rendition of another new chassis that hopefully we’re going to go out and go test and it’s just an evolution of everything to try and make your team better.”

Despite having the old chassis that he could trust underneath him, it was not a walk in the park for Krawiec to take home the Wally in Charlotte. But after defeating Charlie Sullivan in Round 1, he saw an opportunity open up in front of him in Round 2.

“I think the biggest round win for me was probably the second round of this race because I watched in front of me the points leader [LE Tonglet] go out and I knew if I wanted to get into that points lead, I had to now win,” explained Krawiec. “I had Matt Smith as a huge competitor, he’s a great racer and he has a fast motorcycle, and I knew if I could get around that round it would help gain momentum for me. Unfortunately my momentum stops when there’s Jerry [Savoie] in the other lane.”

Savoie red-lighted against Krawiec in the semi-final, and so Krawiec advanced to the final where he squared off against Hines.

“It’s a win-win every time we get to race each other and obviously for our team guys, but we’re still out here and we’re still racing for points and we’re still racing for the championship,” said Krawiec. “Andrew’s the one that tunes my motorcycle, he’s the one who puts the tune-up in there and makes all the proper changes to fuel injection or ignition timing or to whatever he thinks it’s going to make optimal and I have 100 percent trust in him to go and do that.

“Even though I’m in the other lane he wants to make my bike as fast as he can because that’s a direct reflection on him too.”

Krawiec took home the win with a 6.850 ET in the final at 196.87 mph, after a 0.023 reaction time.

“It’s probably one of my most proud races as a driver to go out there and be .012, .012, .020 and .023 was my worse light in the final and, to be able to say that, it’s something that I hang my hat on,” Krawiec added.

Krawiec now holds a 48-points lead over Tonglet leaving Charlotte, a lot of which he has his team and old chassis to thank for.

“When you have a notebook of 15 years of development and you go to something completely outside of your circle you go to use that notebook,” Krawiec explained. “And so my crew chief Matt Hines, you’re staring at a graph and that’s what he does all day, he looks at it and he needs to figure out what it takes to get it from point A to point B as fast as possible. And when you take that notebook and information away, it’s hard to do especially when you’re going into the final few races of the year, so we are excited to have the package that we have now and we feel very comfortable going into these final five races.

“I think statistics has always shown most of the time the person that came out of here as the leader has gone on to win the championship, and hopefully that stays true.”