As Leah Pritchett sat in the cockpit, being towed through the staging lanes at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona, a wave of nostalgia splashed over this California girl from nearby Redlands.
 
As odd as its sounds for somebody who’s just 28 years old, her career began at the fabled facility 20 years ago, when she competed in the NHRA’s Jr. Dragster program. But her thoughts flashed back to those days she and her older sister Lindsey rolled out of bed at four in the morning and piled into the family pick-up with dad Ron, with the Jr. Dragster hanging off the back of the truck.
 
Pritchett soaked in everything on the 2017 season-opening race day. And she talked to herself.

“You’ve got to have confidence if you’re going to run one of these beasts,” she said, referring to her 10,000-horsepower, nitromethane-powered Top Fuel dragster.
 
As she looked for inspiration to the snow-glazed San Gabriel Mountains, she traced in her mind the route she always took to the racetrack that day.
 
“These are my mountains. These are my streets. This is my taco stand,” she told herself.
 
They were all hers that Sunday.
 
The Top Fuel spotlight was all hers that Sunday.
 
It just might be all hers all season long.
 
Before this year even began, she rocked the conventional wisdom that practically anointed three-time champion Antron Brown as this year’s repeat winner. He led the elapsed-time chart the first day of qualifying and people began to wonder if anyone could stop them. But 24 hours later, Pritchett had grabbed the spotlight. It all was in testing, a sketchy proposition in that not every team was trying to make perfect, competitive, Earth-rotating full passes. Then 48 hours later, Pritchett and her Papa Johns’ Dragster team continued to attack the track, producing numbers that no one could ignore, threatening to erase national records, and jolting her competition from their comfort zones.
 
Pritchett never let off the gas at Pomona, either. She became the first female No. 1 qualifier at the Winternationals in 40 years, since Shirley Muldowney led the field in 1977. Her 3.672-second E.T. in qualifying was low for the meet. And in the final against Doug Kalitta, who has been on a tear of his own, she sailed away while he lost traction immediately. That made her the points leader for the first time in her career.
 
Steve Torrence, the Capco Contractors Dragster driver who won the previous Winternationals and went on to challenge for the championship and finished third, knows Pritchett grabbed the early momentum.
 
“It’s big to start strong,” Torrence said. “Winning Pomona last year was a huge confidence-booster. It serves notice to everybody that we’re here and it kind of stokes the fire.”
 
He knows about following her act, too. In January’s Nitro Spring Training at Chandler, Ariz., she clocked a jaw-dropping 3.654-second elapsed time. No. 2 on the weekend’s performance list was Torrence at 3.691 – also thrilling but four-hundredths of a second off her pace. None of that was official. None of it meant anything in terms of points. Both said so. But when it did count, at the season opener, Pritchett had a first-round bye and Torrence was her first victim of the new season in the quarterfinals, by five hundredths.
 
“Between her and Doug (runner-up Doug Kalitta), the rest of us looked like we were in a different race,” Torrence said.  
 
(Ironically, Pritchett’s husband, Gary Pritchett, works for Torrence’s team. He also has a Top Fuel license, and he has competed in the Nostalgia Alcohol Funny Car that belongs to his godmother, the iconic Bunny Burkett.)
 
Other racers even fear her off the track for her relentlessly aggressive marketing approach. Privately, an established driver remarked several years ago that it was a genuine concern that Pritchett could show up with sponsorship dollars and replace him.
 
Her career moves, though, never have been a slam-dunk. She learned and grew with Doug Kuch and Rob Flynn as her crew chiefs at Dote Racing in limited schedules. Her first full season, last year, went off in the ditch last April, even after she earned her first victory – at Phoenix.

That 2016 season – even preseason – was a series of adversities followed by achievements.
 
She arrived at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park – site of this weekend’s Arizona Nationals – eager to launch her first 24-race schedule. But Gary Pritchett suffered burns during the Nitro Spring Training. She persevered, trying to stay focused on what boss Bob Vandergriff, their sponsors, and their team needed from her. She returned to Phoenix the following month and beat Brittany Force in the final round for her first Top Fuel Wally trophy. Within weeks, benefactor Josh Comstock died suddenly, sponsorship vanished, Vandergriff folded the team, and Pritchett had to kick into overdrive to salvage her career.   
 
“I think if I had been in this [DSR] dragster a couple of years ago and not been able to go through that, I would have had a totally different outlook,” she said.
 
But she never has stopped being grateful for how her career turned around – how she worked to make it turn around.
 
“We reflect on it every single day. We went from the outhouse to the penthouse. We literally were in the unemployment line” before the DSR/Papa John’s/deal meshed and she -in her words – “kept rolling.”         
 
However, Pritchett said she isn’t counting her Countdown chickens before they hatch.

Winning at Pomona and testing strong before that, she said, “means a lot, but one thing for sure that I'm focusing on this year is not getting ahead of myself, not getting too hyped up on those things."
 
Still, she can’t mask her excitement: “I want it bad. My team wants it bad. As bad as we want it, it shows in excitement when we get it.”
 
Pritchett said, “People have goals: winning championships and races and all that. And those are my goals – but it’s not to say I did that. I’ve always wanted to do this to feel what it’s like to win races, to feel the journey of what it’s like to thrash in the pit with the guys nonstop four rounds, of what exactly it takes to do that. That’s why I wanted to win.”
 
She said she even has to remind her amped-up sponsor, “Papa John” Schnatter, that performance is the key to everything, especially marketing.
 
“We come up with some really good marketing things for this program. He and I talk all the time,” she said, “and I’m like, ‘That’s some really good stuff – but we have to win. We have to back it up.’ I tell John all the time, ‘It’s really cool. I can’t wait till we do this-this-this-and-this. This isn’t going to mean anything unless we really are truly the baddest ones on the track.’ And here we are, finally, going to prove it.”
 
Of course, she has no shortage of competitors who applaud her accomplishments, acknowledge them, and are doing everything they can to spoil her spin in the spotlight. And she knows that.
 
She won’t have those mountains or her palm-lined streets or her authentic Southern California taco stands. Until the NHRA Finals brings the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series back to Auto Club Raceway in mid-November, she’ll have to race in NASCAR’s epicenter, on the plains of Kansas, in coastal New Hampshire, in the hills of Tennessee, in the Ohio farmlands, a mile high in the Colorado Rockies, in the vineyards of the NAPA Valley, among the towering firs near Seattle, in the shadow of the St. Louis arch, and at a track or two that’s hosted twice as many national events as she has candles on her birthday cake.
 
But she’ll make some of those places her place, too, because she belongs.