NHRA Top Fuel driver Terry McMillen counts his blessings he never took up ski jumping as a hobby. 

McMillen, for the last five seasons, has become drag racing's version of Vinko Bogataj. For those unaware of Bogataj, and his contribution to the sports world, he’s the unlucky Slovenian ski jumper who provided the object lesson for Jim McKay's iconic phrase “and the agony of defeat” during the old ABC’s Wide World of Sports opening. 

McMillen had no idea who Bogataj was two weeks ago when he missed a spot in the NHRA's Countdown to the Championship by a single point, but he does now. 

"I crack up laughing thinking of myself as a ski-jumper because I'd likely turn out like that poor old guy wiping out," McMillen said with a laugh. 

McMillen does it so well; smiling through the tears of heartbreak. 

This go-round of failure was probably worse for McMillen than his 2011 experience, where he was in the Countdown to the Championship field with a win over Hot Rod Fuller in the first round, then was penalized 25 points for putting oil on the track and fell back out. 

"You try to package everything with the setbacks; we kinda needed that, uplift of getting into the Countdown to counter the disappointment of crashing the car earlier in the year," McMillen said. "To miss it by one point. there’s a lot of things that bother me about the whole situation."

McMillen, who raced to a runner-up finish earlier this season, was hit for 60 points in oildown penalties this year. 

"It’s just disheartening when you look at all that," McMillen said. "But I guess at the end of the day; we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. We went out there; we took everything we had at it, and it wasn’t enough."

McMillen admits he tempered his emotions at the beginning of the season when his team clearly resembled a team with the potential of being a playoff-caliber operation. 

"We felt like we had a package, a combination and we just wanted to keep everything in check," McMillen admitted. "The young crew guys were starting to come into their own as the season continued. A lot of the mistakes that we had earlier in the year were pretty much behind us."

McMillen started the season with a new Don Schumacher Racing chassis and had won in the first round in three consecutive events; a feat he had never achieved in NHRA competition. As quickly as an engine explosion blew the top part of the engine off of his dragster and into a slick, puncturing it and forcing a hard impact into the wall, so did a season with so much promise, hit a wall of its own. 

"You get a new car and then it’s like a fingerprint," McMillen said. "It doesn’t want anything to do with the old combination that you were running. So it took us a long time to find our way. We didn’t have the ability to test or anything like that to maybe try to shortcut that change of events. We just had to go out there, run the car down the track and try to make it happen."

It took McMillen seven races to earn his next round win, and then another four to win a second. 

"Well, there’s always next season, isn’t there?" McMillen offered with a smile. 

McMillen said he will take the next six races to prepare for 2017, and a strong off-season which he promises will not include ski-jumping.  

"No, because I’d probably screw that one up," McMillen said. "I've already been the poster boy for the agony of defeat too many times." 

Somewhere Vinko Bogataj is probably sitting and cheering for Terry McMillen, if he ever learns who the Top Fuel driver is.