For 20 years, Ron Capps had been unable to earn the title of NHRA Funny Car champion.

Now that he finally has, he’s not prepared to give it up.

“It’s funny how it was such a relief to finally win the championship,” said Capps, “and then I’ve enjoyed it so much… the stuff that came along with it: being up for ESPY awards, being voted into the San Diego Hall of Champions… I thought winning was the greatest thing ever, and I was still sort of gleaming from winning the championship, and doing all the press through the off-season, and really enjoying being called ‘Champ’ and seeing the stuff, the new cardboard cut outs for NAPA and the handouts, and the trailer picture came and it’s me holding the trophy, 2016 World Champion. All that was awesome.

“But then going to every race since then has been almost like winning the championship over in a small way. Because I haven’t seen a lot of these people at these racetracks since last year before we won it, so it’s like, ‘Hey, Champ,’ and they come up and grab your arm and they tell you, ‘Hey, I told you you were going to win it last year.’ So that all being said, I’ve enjoyed that so much that I’m motivated to do it again just because of that, not necessarily because I want to be champion. I mean it’s just been fun to represent our sport as an NHRA Champion. And yeah anything less would be, it would be severely disappointing.”

Capps is sitting in the right spot to try and win the championship again, having entered the Countdown as the NHRA Funny Car point’s leader. And while it could be assumed that his championship defense didn’t get off to a great start after qualifying 11th on Friday, Capps was smiling as he considers that, if anything, his competition could be getting lulled into a false sense of security. He enters Sunday's eliminations as the No. 10 said. 

“[Friday] it torched a head gasket,” Capps explained. “Doesn’t do it very often but we know why it did it. And it was on a good run. It probably was going to be Q1 last night.

“Today you can’t go to Q1 probably with these conditions, but we can steal those three points every session, and we can move up.

“The good thing is, and this is where all the crazy point counting’s going on, I guarantee you every driver, every crew chief, every crew member, every owner’s been looking at two weeks of where they are in the standings. Yesterday all the counting of the little points started. That’s all everybody. If they tell you they’re not counting points, they’re lying. Everybody in this countdown. When you stand back and look at it yesterday, it wasn’t that bad. Courtney and J.R. both ran good, and they’re sixth and eighth in points, or something like that. They’re back a ways from us. Yeah they ran good, they gained some on us, but it wasn’t like they’re number two or three where they’re only a round behind us. So it could have been worse.

“Sometimes you’ll see me get out on a Sunday when I hear a team has lane choice over us, we didn’t run good the run before, and they may have said something in their interview like they got us, they got the NAPA car when they’re down.

“I won’t say a thing. It’s like talk. They think they know, they got us. We know what we’ve got going on.”

In fact, notes Capps, his poor qualifying result on Friday may just be setting up for a memorable win on Sunday.

“Give me a weekend where you’ve got to struggle a little bit, and things are thrown at you as a crew chief and a driver and you’ve got to drive in certain areas in the lanes.

“Give me one of those weekends and you win, and I’ll take that any day over everything going great. Because to me those are the weekends you look around in the winner’s circle, you look at your guys and you’re wore out, you’re beat up, you’re dirty, got clutch dust all over me, the crew chief looks like he hasn’t slept in three days, and you’re in the winner’s circle. Those to me are the best days ever, the best weekends.”