Ron Capps knew this was coming.

That didn’t happen in the first year, 2022, when Capps won his second straight – third overall – NHRA Funny Car championship. That didn’t happen in 2023, when he and the NAPA team had three wins and finished fourth in the championship. But it came during the third year: the struggle for property.

“I just didn’t think it was going to be as taxing as it was this year,” Capps told RACER in Pomona ahead of the season finale. “But I always wondered when I worked for Don Prudhomme and Don Schumacher, if I could own a team, how would I manage that? So, I tried, but I’m lucky. I have a great partner with NAPA, and that was critical because it could have been very different. Much more pressure. So far, I haven’t slept much.

“But overall it’s been fun.”

Capps struck out on his own in 2022 and wasn’t naive about what awaited him. It helped that he immediately had the support of Schumacher, with whom he spent 17 years, and John Force, who called him every week. Rick Hendrick offered advice whenever needed.

There was even a group text featuring Prudhomme, Hendrick and Jeff Gordon before the start of his first year of ownership. It was odd, to Capps, that these legends offered everything he might need in his next adventure.

When the 2022 season ended and Capps won the championship, he admitted to thinking, “It’s not that hard.” » Even though he knew that as soon as something behind the ropes – something new – came along, it was going to create a challenge.

And that’s where Capps now finds himself in what he describes as perhaps a rebuilding year.

It begins at the end of the previous season; Once the hangover from the awards ceremony wears off and the compliments from their fellow competitors fade, Capps and Dean “Guido” Antonelli, his team leader, have a ritual to get through the season. Why did they win the championship? Where did they earn it? But then, inevitably, comes the other side of things that didn’t work.

“After we (won) back-to-back championships,” Capps recalled, “Guido said, ‘If we want to get ahead of everyone, we can keep racing like we’re doing, but all these teams have caught up to us.’ .We need to get a head start. I need to try this thing in the clutch area, and we might get there right off the bat, or not. And then I have a new fuel pump that I want to try.

“So it happens, and you don’t start out so well, and you’re like, ‘OK, I’m behind you 100%.’ And it just keeps going. You can’t look back at last year’s data and say : OK, I changed that, but here’s where I got it. It doesn’t work that way in these cars, and I know that from having been a driver for all these years. So it had to go. before and out.

It was at Sonoma in late July that Antonelli began to feel comfortable with the settings of Capps’ car. Capps went to the final round that day and in two other events since.

But in a sense, it’s a little too late, and that’s why Capps doesn’t necessarily want to see the season end. With the team finally hitting its stride, Capps is frustrated and disappointed that he wouldn’t have been able to take on Austin Prock, the class of the field this year, if his team was at their usual level.

This was especially striking for Capps during the NAPA employee recognition event he attends each season. Capps, along with other NAPA-sponsored drivers like Chase Elliott in NASCAR, are there and it has never been a problem for Capps to “get there with many, many trophies and victories” that executives follow and recall to the pilots.

Capps competed in a total of six final rounds in 19 races. The bad news is he doesn’t have any wins.

“And I could tell you every single one that we could have won and should have won,” Capps said. “There were times when my reaction time wasn’t as good as the person I was racing with in the final. There were times where the car came out and did something funny, which wasn’t the case all day, and we were favored to win in the final. But they were all close.

“It’s hard. The first couples were like, I’m happy to be in the final. I feel better. It’s good. Then we kept going to the final and losing, and it’s like: ” Oh man, that hurts even more.” It hurt even more than not making the finals.

And yet, Capps sits third in the championship standings with a chance to move up to second to finish the year. The first goal at Pomona is to outqualify Jack Beckman, who is driving John Force’s car, second in points. The second goal is not to go without a win in a second for the first time since 2008.

“In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter,” Capps says. “It’s going to be written down somewhere if we don’t (win). The storybook ending would be winning this weekend, and that would make (this) interview even cooler. It’s frustrating too, because it’s a pretty cool streak to get a win at least once a season.