Yahoo Autos NHRA Funny Car Points Leader Hight: One Bad Weekend from 'Fifth or Sixth in Points'
John Force says teammate Robert Hight could run away with title.
Hight’s chief rival, Matt Hagan, said he “ready to rip people’s heads off. We’re going into battle and it’s a war."
This weekend’s Betway Carolina Nationals is the second of six Countdown to the Championship races.
John Force is working furiously every day to do what it takes to earn 17th NHRA Funny Car championship.
However, he said after watching Robert Hight, his teammate and company president at John Force Racing, dominate last weekend in the first of six Countdown races, “Robert may just run away with it.”
But Hight, who has ruled the standings for most of the season and never has been lower than second place, isn’t about to assume anything.
“You know, we're dealing with fuel cars here, and they drop cylinders. There's clutch packs that are not 100% consistent," High said ahead of this weekend's Betway Carolina NHRA Nationals—the second race in the six-race Countdown to the Championship playoff. "You can go out there first round and smoke the tires with the same setup you ran [in the last qualifying session] and you just had an over-aggressive clutch pack in it and your day can be done. Now you could all of a sudden be fifth or sixth in points.”
Or, has Hight has said before, “Anything can happen when you put nitromethane in these cars.”
Just the same, Hight and his Automobile Club of Southern California Chevy Camaro team will be working this weekend at the Betway NHRA Carolina Nationals at MAX Dragway to repeat the commanding performance they had in the Countdown to the Championship opener. Points leader and No. 1 qualifier Hight won the Reading, Pa., event which he said before the playoffs is the one he regarded as “the most nerve-wracking” of the year.
“It’s one down five to go. We have to focus and try to get the same job done again. If you can do that early on, you’re going to put some pressure on these guys,” the seven-time winner said. “Seven wins is not going to get the championship. We’re going to have to get more than what we have and keep this rolling to win this championship. This is just getting started.”
He recognizes that his competition is stout. The three rivals immediately behind him—Matt Hagan, Ron Capps, and Force, in order—represent 21 championships.
“They're proven,” Hight said, “And once you've done something one time, there's an element of confidence that goes with that and you feel that you can do it again and again and again. The top five guys, they know how to get it done.”
And No. 5-ranked Bob Tasca III still is pursuing his first title, but Hight counts him as a championship-caliber competitor: “Bob Tasca, with a great car, he's going to go a long way. I don't feel he'll falter at all. He's a great driver, and he also has (crew chief) Mike Neff over there who has won races and been a championship tuner (Gary Scelzi, 2005). So he's got that in his back pocket. It's really going to be a matter of who races the smartest, and a lot of it is going to come down to qualifying. You can gain a lot of points in qualifying with those three, two, one points, and that's going to be a goal for all of us. We've got to be near the top, but when you're trying to get three points every run, you're pushing the envelope. You're right on the edge. And that's what makes it exciting for the fans and us. And we're going to bottle all those points in qualifying that we can get.
“We have to be aggressive, because we are going to need all the points we can get. It was a pretty humbling experience going to the website and seeing our almost 300-point lead turn into 20 after the points reset,” Hight said. “Anything can happen with a small lead. I’ve lost a championship by 19 points, and it sucks to say that if we only had one more run we could have gotten it done. (He also won over Jack Beckman by a mere eight points in 2019 for the most recent of his three crowns.) We know we need to focus 100 percent on our car. But we don’t really have to tell this team that.”
He said, “It's really about the next six races and getting hot or being very consistent. What I did in 2009, going [from the] 10th spot, we won half the races in the Countdown, and we just got our act together at the right time, because we struggled throughout that regular season.
“It's real now,” Hight said, knowing his margin over Hagan is 81 points, just 84 over Capps, and 97 over Force. “We don't have a big advantage. We don't have a big points lead,” Hight said.
He does have a pattern of consistency throughout this season. During the first three races, Hight factored into the final round eight times. He and Matt Hagan met in the money round three times in the first eight races. Ron Capps made his presence known early on, as well. Hagan was 3-3 in final rounds in the first seven events. But by the Norwalk race, the 10th on the schedule, Tasca was starting to make noise. He was runner-up at Norwalk and Denver, then he came on strong with victories at Sonoma, Topeka, and Brainerd. Then it was all Capps at Indianapolis and all Hight at Reading.
Hight still inspires Countdown hopefuls with his leap from 10th place to the title in 2009. But he also has experienced a slide during the playoffs. In 2012, after he led the standings for 12 races, he entered the Countdown ranked second and finished seventh, and in 2014, he led everyone for 13 races and stumbled in the playoffs to finish fifth. So he knows success can be an impostor and that struggles can turn into success.
Hight has won a record six-times at zMAX Dragway, four times in the fall at the Carolina Nationals (2009, 2013, 2017 and 2019) and twice at the Four-Wide Nationals in the spring (2012, 2014). He has yet to qualify No. 1 at the Carolina Nationals but has started race day from the No. 1 spot at the Four-Wide race three times (2010, 2012, 2019). This weekend, he’ll be looking to add to his 13 Countdown trophies, already a record in Funny Car.
And Hight know Hagan is determined to return to the hot streak that started his season.
“We’ve had a lot of good wins, but we’ve also runnered-up a bunch. We have to give it all, because it’ll take all,” the Tony Stewart Racing driver with Shelor Motor Mile livery this weekend said. “We saw that at Indy, losing by .006 [of a second] to Hight. The win light didn’t come on, so as a group, we all have to do more. I’m ready to come in and rip people’s heads off. We’re going into battle and it’s a war. This is the closest thing you get to gladiators nowadays. This is what we’ve waited all year long to do. We have to give it all and sacrifice mindset and mentality to go out there and win this thing.”
Capps said, “I think everybody can take a deep breath now that we’ve got one race under our belts with the Countdown. Obviously, a lot of emotions go into racing all season long and having the points reset, and then it all comes down to battling it out for six races.” Following a second-round exit at Reading, he and the crew discovered why he lost despite having “an unbelievable NAPA AutoCare car in Maple Grove [Raceway, Reading], qualified No. 2, and then ran low E.T. of the weekend in the first round.” He said, “We’ll see if we can’t climb ourselves back into the top spot in the points.”
So Hight is the hunted. And he knows he has to keep up his blistering pace.
Top Fuel points leader Justin Ashley said, “It's go time. There's no more margin for error. You have to go out there and perform, because if you don't perform, you're going to be going home. And all your hopes and dreams go home with you.”
Hight doesn’t want to take that baggage home to Southern California.
