Back in 2016, Pro Stock teammates Jason Line, Greg Anderson and Bo Butner were nearly unbeatable.

That is the season NHRA required all Pro Stock teams to equip their cars with electronically-controlled throttle body fuel injection systems to make engines more relevant from a technology standpoint. In order to reduce and control costs for the race teams, an NHRA-controlled 10,500 Rev Limiter also was added to the fuel injection systems.

The Ken Black Summit Racing team figured out the EFI rules better than any other Pro Stock racers as Line won the 2016 world championship and Butner was the world champ last year.

Winning had been common place in 2016-17 for the team, but 2018 had been a much different story. Through 13 of the 24 NHRA national events Black’s team had zero wins.

That changed Sunday at the Dodge Mile-High Nationals in Morrison, Colo., near Denver.

Anderson, in his Chevy Camaro, clocked a 6.943-second elapsed time at 196.53 mph to edge Line’s 6.947-second lap at 196.17 mph in the final round to give Black’s powerhouse team the victory at Bandimere Speedway.

“I would like to think that would be the best start to a great season coming forward,” Anderson said. “We’ve had a heck of battle this year and we’ve had great running cars, but we’ve made mistakes on Sunday. We have not been able to close the deal on Sunday. We’ve garnered a lot of green hats, No. 1 qualifier hats, and that’s a great feeling, but we have not been able to find our way to the yellow hat and the yellow hat (given to the race winner) is everything.”

This was Anderson’s 91st career NHRA Pro Stock national event win. Only Warren Johnson has more career Pro Stock wins with 97.

Anderson’s victory parade consisted of wins over Joey Grose, Vincent Nobile, Jeg Coughlin and Line. This was Anderson's third career victory at the Mile-High Nationals in 2008 defeating Allen Johnson and 2004 when he beat Larry Morgan.

“The class is so tough right now, but we know we just haven’t put forth our best effort on Sunday,” Anderson said. “We haven’t lost giving it our best shot and (Sunday) we gave it our best shot and really all weekend we gave it our best shot.”

Anderson won four races a year ago, with his last win coming at the Las Vegas fall race before this weekend.

“This (Denver) is the last place I thought I would come and break the streak because we struggled here, I’m not going to lie, we have struggled at this race track for a lot of years,” Anderson said. “It takes a completely different way of running your race car and we just haven’t figured out the combination the last several years. I was surprised we came right off the trailer fast and continued it all through the weekend, unlike every other race this year we didn’t lose performance gap we had in qualifying on Sunday and that’s what it took. Somehow how the two drivers got the job done (Sunday), Jason and I, we didn’t screw up and we carried the great cars we had to finish line.”