Gerda Joon was overwhelmed with some sort of mixture of joy and relief and pride.

The lone woman crew chief in the NHRA’s nitro ranks helped her partner make the provisional field for the Dodge Power Brokers U.S. Nationals. And, referring to the team’s motto, she said Top Fuel racer Lex Joon “never quits. I’m so proud of this man!”

Together the Dutch couple had secured the No. 13 position in the Friday order, but dropped to 15th by the end of Saturday’s first session at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park. By day’s end Saturday, Lex Joon was on the bump spot, in 16th place.

He had clocked his career-best elapsed time at 3.858 seconds on the Brownsburg, Ind., 1,000-foot course. But Gerda Joon gushed Saturday evening about how hard she and Lex and their crew members have worked – and they have, rising early every day to work their respective jobs, then reconvene in the race-car shop in every extra hours they have to labor into the wee hours of the next morning. They sacrificed: Several years ago, Gerda Joon finally allowed herself to replace the tennis shoes that she wore for eight years. (She had worn a hole clear through the sole so that her foot touched the pavement as she walked through the pits.)

And Saturday, his goal of “just trying to be prepared as good as possible” is paying off, affirming his declaration that “we are getting there, slowly but steady.” In the first round at Topeka last month, he gave Leah Pruett a tough side-by-side race and lost, but he said this weekend, “Finally I got back into racing again and almost beat Leah. At least from a driver's point of view, I showed myself I still can do it.” And so far, he keeps piling up evidence that he is poised to make the U.S Nationals field for the first time in five attempts.

“This U.S. Nationals, I feel we really have a chance to make it into the field,” Joon said. “I would be disappointed not to make it into the field, but at the same time, then I'm looking at the field and I think, ‘Well, there will be people not qualified that you should expect to be qualified because I will be in there.' Again, that's my energy.

“People come to us, and they say, ‘It's awesome to see you. You’re making those baby steps, and you're getting there.’ Well, that's what we do. But as long as the way is up, we will get there, because there will be a moment, boom! You're in,” he said.

Yes, it was just the second of three qualifying days, and it’s not like he was top qualifier. But to the Joons, the performance so far this weekend is reassurance that their program is headed in the right direction. And it’s a program the couple, who sold all of their possessions in The Netherlands a decade and a half ago to come and race in the United States, is pursuing virtually on their own.

“Mike Salinas is trying to help in this,” Lex Joon said, “but to be honest I'm not the type of guy to put his hand out. No, I want to earn it.

“If you have to fight like we have to do, then every win or every achievement is awesome,” he added. For the well-funded teams and those who have grown accustomed to winning, Joon said, winning “is something that's just part of the deal. So the reward, the boost to get it done is not there [in the same sense]. It is what it is. They are just in that situation, and we are in our situation. But I always say you only can enjoy the win if you also know what a loss is. And if you don't have it, work towards it.

“That's one of the reasons we moved from Europe to here - because I want everything there is to win. I won an FIA championship. I set records. I won races. I was basically the best driver between 2005 and 2009, looking at all the points I gathered. So now I need a new challenge, because that's the reward you're looking at. To become another time an FIA champion? Sure, it's cool. So always raising the bar. That's the goal. Sure, you want to win a race. Those things happen or not. And when it happens, you need to be ready for it. So what I need to do here is I need to have enough parts and pieces in the trailer. If we go rounds, we can do it.”

He said his situation on that front is “getting better because we don't break anything anymore. Now we are building on inventory. So, yeah, I got more parts in here than I had ever before. Although we still don't have the money, we are able to do it. But because we don't break stuff we can ... instead of replacing we can build.”

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​When the budget is not even a shoestring but more like a thread, a racer has to conserve, such as forgoing testing. And being able to focus simply on driving is a luxury.

“The problem from a driver's point of view,” Joon said, is that “I wear a lot of hats. I'm an owner. I need to find the money. I need to teach the crew how to do it, and that's not easy. There are a lot of mistakes made. So you try to be ahead of the game, find the mistakes to make so you can take care of it. The tuning aspect, I work together with Gerda to find a way to get it done, but not to break it. And then finally you're in the race car, and if you're in the race car and you're not 100 percent sure everything is OK, then you cannot shine as a driver because there is too much on your mind. You need to have a clear vision. And you need to be 100 percent sure your car is OK.”

He admitted that he does let concerns bother him, constantly wondering if the car is put together properly and if the tune-up is on-point.

“Because we hardly have any data. We cannot test, because it costs a lot of money. Like in Topeka, we put it on the racetrack. And we never run under those circumstances. So what do you do? You try to go back to everything you know and put a tune-up in there and see what it does. So then come race day, you got a little bit like ... you got energy. So now as a driver you say, ‘OK, switch everything off. Now you're the driver. Let's get it done.’ We just don't have enough data for [all the] circumstances.” He was pleased that if he had to lose to Pruett, for example, he lost by just 0.09 of a second. “So, you know, that's good,” he said.

“You try to win, no matter what. But the effort we put in and the outcome was for me good enough for that moment because you’re building,” he said, referring to the Topeka results. “You only can do your best and try to get the most out of it, given the circumstances. If I would have $200,000 a race to spend, it would be different. But it's not only about getting the car on the track, getting it qualified, then put it in a race and win the rounds. It's about getting there first.”

Quipped Gerda Joon, “We're the black sheep of the family.” Lex Joon said, “We are still the foreigners somehow. That's fine. You know, I will deal with it. It gives me a lot of energy to beat your ---. If you want to ignore me, fine. Then the only way to fix this is to put myself front and center and do something that they cannot ignore me.”

Three days ago, somebody wanted to buy a Never Quit decal, Gerda Joon said. The person asking was facing a tough personal family situation, one Joon said “will break your heart.” Immediately they honored the request, and Lex Joon said, “It’s those things that keep us going. And if the rest of the group wants to ignore us, that's fine. In the sense of, you better not ignore me because I'm after you. It gives you more energy. You have to find your energy somewhere.”

Where Lex and Gerda Joon find it is in the reality that they are living their American Dream.

He said, “Do you know how many people that own race cars or drivers would give an arm or a leg to be at the U.S. Nationals? We are. So we already won this battle, and we will win the next one and get it going. And we will be qualified.”