NHRA MELLO YELLO DRAG RACING SERIES TELECONFERENCE: ANDREW HINES, MATT HAGAN, TONY SCHUMACHER

The following are excerpts from a teleconference featuring three of the 2014 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series champions: Andrew Hines (Pro Stock Motorcycle), Matt Hagan (Funny Car), and Tony Schumacher (Top Fuel).

THE MODERATOR: We’ll start with Andrew Hines, rider of the Screamin’ Eagle Vance & Hines Harley-Davidson. Hines raced to his fourth career world championship on the strength of strong finishes at each of the 16 Pro Stock Motorcycle events. He didn’t record a first round loss this season and only three quarterfinal round losses. He won six events and was runner up at two. Can I start off with how gratifying is this championship as opposed to your others in your history of the sport?

ANDREW HINES: This one is completely different, just in the aspect of how far I’ve come working with the team and helping us get back to this point. There’s been a lot of work that’s happened at our Vance & Hines race shop here in the last couple years, and luckily I’ve been heavily involved in what’s been going on here, and it brings a different level of pride to it. I’ve really, with the tutoring from my brothers and crew chiefs, I’ve learned more about every aspect of the motorcycle and what it needs to go down the racetrack. I’ve become better accustomed to giving better feedback and things, and I think that’s paying big dividends right now. We’ve got a lot of great guys in our shop, and without them and everything that goes into each and every weekend, we couldn’t have got back to this spot. 10 years ago I was a young kid and the championship it was hard to get to, but it means an awful lot more now after I’ve been chasing another one for eight years.

Q: You mentioned that eight years that you were chasing it. We’ve talked to racers in the past and some of them said one reason they were so excited when they win is because they never know if that’s going to be their last or when that next one is coming. How hard was it, I call it a dry spell for you, without hoisting that big Wally at the end of the year?

ANDREW HINES: It was tough. I’ve been close a couple times. I almost had a four-peat there in ’07, and then 2010 I had another one slip through my fingers at the last event. Those are tough pills to swallow. Losing a championship in the last weekend, that was rough. I’d had great motorcycles both those years all the way up that point and ultimately it fell down to me and I just made a few mistakes. Those are the things I’ve learned from. I’ve learned to push through those points and forget some of those things, and I approached the last couple years racing and riding entirely different. It’s just part of the growing experience. You learn what not to do, what you need to do, how you need to look at different situations, and the thing that really helps me, though, is I have a great crew that we never get down on each other. We never there’s no negative comments, nothing about riding or racing, we just take it one weekend at a time and however the cards fall, we just play like that. They always do a great job of keeping the morale positive in our pit area, and that is huge. I can’t ask for them to do anything more for me. They’re already giving me a great motorcycle every time I go up to the starting line. For them to be that positive for me every weekend and every round, and they know that if we didn’t win this weekend we’re going to go out there the next and do our darndest to get to that winner’s circle. You hear it from all the champions, you hear it from all the people that win races, but believe me, we truly believe how great our crews are every time we go up there to the starting line.

Q. You kind of mentioned championships are tough out there at the pro level. You struggled the years in between getting the titles, but even while your teammate won, also, but not this year. Talk about that consistency and the wins that you’ve been able to put together in one season.

ANDREW HINES: Yeah, it rivals one of my best years of my career. 2012 was obviously a career year for our entire team, but this year for me was one of my best. Six race wins is tying my career best in a single season, and had a consistent motorcycle all year long. It wasn’t consistently fast in qualifying. I didn’t have the multiple No. 1 qualifiers like Eddie (Krawiec, teammate) had. He had nine, I believe, and I had the one there in Vegas, which was right timing, I guess. But I had a good motorcycle on race day. I could go rounds, it was consistent, and I was able to ride it and have confidence in how I was going to leave the starting line. That’s the biggest thing, you can go out there and focus on going on yellow, trying to get the best reaction time I possibly could. I won a couple rounds on holeshots and extended the day a little further here and there so we could tune on it a little more, and we got to those final rounds and we won six out of eight. That’s a pretty decent track record. I didn’t know the stats like they were saying earlier, how I didn’t have single first round loss and I only had three second round losses. That’s something I dreamed about in years past, and to actually pull that off this year and have a motorcycle that consistent and that deadly to go out there and get Wally’s on Sunday was phenomenal.

Q. Do you have any plans to be able to go back to back next year?

ANDREW HINES: Oh, absolutely. That’s the goal every time. I want to go out there and have the No. 1 plate every year. It’s hard to win them, it’s even harder to defend them. You’ve got that bull’s eye on your back, get rolling into next year, big No. 1 on the side of the bike. You get some respect for it, but you get a lot of people taking potshots at you, and they want to take you down.

Q. Have the rigs even entered the state line? Have they gotten back from California?

ANDREW HINES: No, I actually I stayed out in California the last couple days. I was at the LA Auto Show yesterday. We had the Harley-Davidson on display there along with Erica Enders-Stevens Pro Stock car and Matt Hagan’s Funny Car. The rig just left Southern California yesterday, so we’re not expecting to see that thing until Sunday.

Q: Talk a little bit about the LA Auto Show and about that experience.

ANDREW HINES: That’s a good time. I’d never actually been to the LA Auto Show before, so to actually be invited this year as the NHRA champion was very special. Met a lot of great press folks out there. It was just open for the press day, just a few couple days here. Got to see some interesting cars and mingle with people that hadn’t really experienced a whole lot of NHRA drag racing before, so it was nice to open their eyes to what we had done this year and show off the Harley. I put a Tweet out yesterday, it was breaking the rules. We had a Harley-Davidson at a car show. It was pretty cool. Only motorcycle on the premises that I saw.

Q. With last year being so dismal and you guys working so hard on the new engine package and trying to find that combination, how much sweeter does it make this championship and the season that you’ve had, your whole team has had?

ANDREW HINES: Yeah, it makes it really sweet. Last year was a rebuilding year, but it was so brutal to go through. I think I won nine rounds all of last year. I did win one race, so four of those rounds came in one race, so that just shows you how tough it was for us just to get going and find some horsepower to run up front. But we pulled through. This past off season my guys stayed focused, and my brother Matt (Hines, crew chief), he led the charge on our R & D program, figuring out which direction we needed to go. To pull off what we did just last winter and have the horsepower gains we had to roll into Gainesville this year and have some confidence we could be contending for the front again was huge. I mean, it was rough going most of last year, but we ended the Countdown fairly well, and that gave us some big morale boost going into the off season, got everybody pumped back up again, and it was just quite the ride. We were able to get back to our old form, we like to say. That was a big deal for us. All our guys, we love going out there and winning, and it was rough last year. Rough is the key word to 2013. Maybe just because of the ’13 year. It wasn’t a good number.

Q. I’m guessing that you never did see the black suburban with Jersey plates on it and the five guys in suits that Eddie was talking about over the weekend, huh?

ANDREW HINES: No, never did see them, but he did keep hinting around at it. He’s such a great teammate, and we obviously poke fun at each other all the time and he says stuff like that, and I’ll say, well, I’ll just make a wrong key stroke on the keyboard when I’ve got the tune up going on the bike. But no, he just wanted to make it interesting this last race, and we both had fast V Rods, and luckily I was able to maintain my points lead throughout qualifying, and at that point it was a formality. The big thing for me going into Sunday was I just wanted to win the first round, I didn’t want to have the drama play out where I lost first round and Eddie is marching through elimination rounds, and who knows, he might go out there and set the record in the final and steal it.

Q: Talk a little bit about the one two finish that you had with Eddie and how much that means to Vance & Hines.

ANDREW HINES: One two finish for Vance & Hines was huge. We did that back in 2012, and that was our ultimate goal coming into the season. We take a lot of pride in how we run our V Rods up and down the racetrack, and Harley-Davidson loves having both vehicles up front. It’s a huge task just to try and get one up front, let alone having two running good enough to get back where you’re both contending for a championship. Luckily Eddie and I, we make each other better. We push each other to have the faster bike in the pit area. When we’re doing that it’s tough on the competition because each one of us wants to go out there and have the faster bike in the pit area, and we keep pushing through it. We saw struggles with my bike throughout the year, and Eddie stayed mainly pretty consistent. He was pretty deadly in qualifying. And then we did a chassis change in the middle of the season, brought in a new bike for me, and that was the ultimate turning point. I went 13 and 0 with the new bike after we debuted it, and that was the writing on the wall for how I was entering the Countdown as the No. 1 seed and then stayed consistent all the way throughout.

Q: How nerve racking was that to break out a brand new bike mid-season, and how important was that in the overall championship?

ANDREW HINES: Well, that was very, very nerve racking. We had three days to build the bike between our Chicago and Norwalk events, and it was unproven. When we got back from Chicago, it was just raw tubing sitting there. We had to totally assemble it, rewire it, or wire it the first time, I guess, and hadn’t even been down the racetrack. We made sure all the brakes were good, everything was good on it, and sent it down the first lap in Norwalk and put a six second run up on the board on a brand new bike. That was the gratifying feeling.

It was nerve racking getting to that point, stressful, but ultimately played out well. I went out and won the Norwalk event that weekend, and that was a huge turning point, gave me a lot of confidence in what my team had done. It showed the true character of all the guys on my team. I had a new guy with me all year long that had never worked on a Pro Stock Motorcycle before, Mike. He’s a friend from New Jersey, and he showed that he can be consistent. He gave me a bike that was perfect every lap I went up there, never had one malfunction, and everything was flawless. I knew we had assembled a great group for our Harley-Davidson team, and that showed right then and there how good our guys were.

Q. Kind of looking ahead if you can for next year, we saw Hector Arana, Jr., run strong at the tail end of the season, we saw Angie Smith run strong this season, Steve Johnson. What’s in store for fans for the 2015 Pro Stock Motorcycle category?

ANDREW HINES: Well, these last couple races it was an eye opener. We didn’t have big speed out of our V-Rods, and we were putting up the E.T.’s, we were getting off the line good, but we weren’t running the big speeds. That’s where Hector Jr. was outrunning us. That pisses me off more than anything. That’s horsepower. That’s something I’m going to be focusing on here. We’re going to switch over to Sunoco race fuels for next year as the official fuel of NHRA, so I’ve got a 55 gallon drum sitting out in my dyno room right now, and next week I will be burning gas all week long trying to figure out what it wants for a tune up, and I already got parts on order from our suppliers to make ourselves one step better for 2015.

MODERATOR: Matt Hagan and his Mopar Express Lane / Rocky Boots Dodge Charger secured his second Funny Car World Championship with four wins and two runner-up finishes this season. He also powered to two No. 1 qualifying positions. Hagan clinched the championship with his victory over Tommy Johnson, Jr., in the semifinals in Pomona and then went on to defeat John Force in the finals for his fourth win of the year. This is the second Funny Car world championship for crew chief Dickie Venables, as well. Matt, how important or historic was this championship for you compared to your first one?

MATT HAGAN: Well, I think they’re all special in their own way. You know, like Tony (Schumacher) said in his speech, each one of them tells a story. Someone said earlier when we were having a press conference, they said, you know, well, your second one is harder to get. They’re all hard. Every one of them are hard to get. There’s not an easy one out there. But they’re all very, very special in their own way, and I’m just tickled to death. It finally kind of started to set in. We partied like rock stars for the last three days and finally got back home last night about 1:30 in the morning, and it’s just all kind of settling in that we won the world championship. It’s my second one of my career, and in such a short amount of time, six years out here driving for Don Schumacher Racing and to be able to have two championship trophies from NHRA and Mello Yello sitting in your living room.

Q: Talk about Sunday in Pomona. It was so exciting, at least for the fans on the outside to watch the championship go back and forth, round to round. What was it for you being inside the cockpit on Sunday?

MATT HAGAN: Well, you know what, all the way up until that day, I was like, man, just cool, calm, collected, let everything happen. But you’re just a nervous wreck. There’s no way around it. As a competitor, as someone that has put everything into this, this is what you work all year for. This is what you get up early in the morning, you go work out, you get back on a practice tree, you’re talking to a sports psychologist, just everything to have the mental edge to do everything it takes to go out here and win, like I said in our press conference in Vegas. It’s just a phenomenal feeling when it all comes together, and all the hard work you put into it all year long, you’ve got to I guess today is why it’s soaking in because I can sit back and reflect on some of the round wins and the race wins and just all the stuff that it took us to get there to be able to win this thing.

Q. Matt, on the teleconference before rolling into Pomona, if I recall you were rather confident, and you shared that with all of us, I’m sure. Talk a little bit about that confidence and obviously the result.

MATT HAGAN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, confidence is key out here, and confidence in your crew chief is key. I think that there’s plenty of moments in drag racing where you can get down and out and really let that kind of eat at you and your confidence. You know, I’ve just learned at an early stage of my career that I have to keep it positive. I have to keep my guys positive. I think that in drag racing it’s like being a manic depressive. It’s the highs of highs and the lows of lows and there’s not a lot of in between, and there’s a lot more lows than there are highs. Being confident in your stuff, what you’ve worked so hard for, knowing that you can do the job that needs to be done out there, knowing that your team can do the job that needs to be done out there, that we worked so hard for it, and it comes together, but really like I said, having that mentality, like I know how to do this, I’m a great leader, I’ve got a great crew chief, and it just all comes into play. No matter what, you know you have the best race car out there on Sunday.

Q. How great does it feel to have a championship now after having a struggling year in between?

MATT HAGAN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we struggled we led the points all year long up until John took them over in the Countdown. Similar situation, the roles were just reversed with John this year versus his. Dickie got sick in the middle of the year not the middle but towards the Countdown here, and our team started to fall through, as it probably should. Dickie is our leader on our team and he makes the decisions and calls. But at the end result, I’m not trying to take anything away from what John did last year. He is a, like they say, force to be reckoned with, but it’s just one of those things where I know our team is good. I know our just we are whole as a team. We ate together, we drink beer together, we hang out together, we have each other’s backs, and it’s not just a job to these boys. They have skin in the game. We’re family. I have a beautiful, wonderful, magnificent family at home, and I’ve got a family at the racetrack. It’s really, really cool for me to be able to leave my kids and children at home and be able to come out to the racetrack and feel like I have another family out here, as well.

Q: Talk a little bit about that team. Do you see that in other teams within Don Schumacher racing or within other groups in the pits, a team that you feel was as close as yours was this year?

MATT HAGAN: Well, you know, there’s a lot of great teams out here, a lot of great drivers. You know, each race is different. Honestly, all of our teams are really, really strong. We all have the same R & D, we all have the same stuff that we’re trying to run. I mean, right now we’re getting ready for testing in West Palm in December. We’re trying to implement some new stuff into the race car. But yeah, they’re just all coming. Honestly the rival between me and John is where it’s been the last four years, and basically my entire career me and John have been battling it out, and that’s what the fans wanted to see. They wanted to come out here and watch me and John race, and we did in the final. It was just nice to see the results off of that, you know.

Q: Following your win in Chicago, that seems to be really where your team picked up. You didn’t have any first round losses after that Chicago event, you started to move slowly up the points, retook it following Reading. Did you guys hit upon something at that Chicago event, or did everything all just kind of come together at once?

MATT HAGAN: Well, you know, at the beginning of the year we felt we were smarter than what we are and we decided we were going to try some new stuff, especially in the bell housing, and it just took three, four, five races and Dickie finally said, look, I just can’t make this work and it’s not going to work, it’s unpredictable, so we decided to go back to our old combination. Well, doing that, we still have different clutch disks, different rotating parts, different valve chain stuff, so it took another five, six, seven races to kind of get our feet back into the groove of where our old race car used to be that we led the points all the way up until halfway through the Countdown of last year. After we started kind of getting things going, that’s when our momentum picked up and the clutch disks started responding to what the crew chiefs were wanting and asking the wear and all that stuff to do out there with the car. It just all started clicking, and we started getting that confidence that we were talking about earlier back into Dickie Venables, my assistant crew chief and all my guys, including myself. As a driver you start having first round losses, you’re not thinking about leaving the starting line, you’re thinking about what do I got to do to get this thing to the other end of the racetrack. So everything trickles down from confidence and having the combination that our stuff is running strong again.

Q: You guys talked about you’re going to start testing up here pretty soon. What do you see your category next year, Funny Car, what do you kind of foresee from that category the coming season?

MATT HAGAN: It’s going to be tough. I know a lot of my teammates and stuff, they were running combinations that they’re looking forward towards ’15, and our team personally is going to go test in December, as well. I know Capps had some combinations in there and so did Tommy, and so did Jack. Jack had some injector stuff, and everybody was trying new things. These boys weren’t thinking about ’14, they were thinking about ’15. They’re already planning ahead for ’15, and we’ve got to get on the same page. We have to get going and make sure that we’re testing the stuff that we need to come back out here and be strong and run hard and make sure that we don’t let our sponsors down and ourselves down for next year. I’ve been there where you win a championship and then you have a tough year, and I really don’t see that happening next year. We’ve got a great team and a great car, and I feel like we’ll have another very successful season coming up.

MODERATOR: Tony, Talk a little bit about the significance of this eighth championship and what that means to you.

TONY SCHUMACHER: Well, it’s fantastic. Part of it because it’s hard to win one anymore. In any way, shape or form it’s the most difficult racing that I’ve ever seen. But to come off a four year sabbatical basically after winning six in a row, that’s hard. It’s hard to take. We stuck our ground. Now, we didn’t go off and disappear. We finished second, I think, twice in those four years. We still had a good car. We had a great car. It’s just more difficult to win these days. This year was amazing. It started out we were done in the first Pomona, Pomona 1 at 11:07, I think. We were beat and taking our car apart. At the beginning of the year after some good testing, you think, that hurts, and then you go on to Vegas and win it, and it was spread out. The wins were spread out, and it gave us a little light at the end of the tunnel often throughout the year. And then to go out in the Countdown and just have such an amazing day, go off and win within 24 hours, win two races. It’s never been done before, and like I said at the banquet, it’s never been done because it’s never been presented as an option. It was just a great opportunity, and we capitalized on it. In Reading, I cannot tell you, it was the most spectacular race ever because it’s when you start to see your crew realize there’s a chance, and that’s a special moment. Great, and then you get to Pomona, and you have to qualify. It’s kind of anti-climactic. I’m so glad we went into the final round because those were difficult races. Starting off in the ninth qualifier spot, running against the second winningest driver in the history of the sport, close race. Close second round, close third round, then getting beat by ultimately the second quickest run in the history of the sport. That’s what it took to beat us. So great team, proud of them, going to really enjoy the off season. I’m going to enjoy the way it went down, the way it happened and with a canopy on that car, more weight in that car to keep me alive than any other driver has, and we did it anyway.

Q: You talked about the Countdown, and it’s kind of interesting sitting here looking at the stats, you were either worst or first in the Countdown. Racing to four final round appearances, you won three of them, lost one, so those two first round losses in St. Louis and Las Vegas, did those races give you any concern or did your team just kind of rally around you at that point?

TONY SCHUMACHER: Well, St. Louis was uncomfortable. We were out so early and didn’t make it down the track. Vegas not so much. We made a great run but beat most everybody else I think except Langdon possibly, but when someone goes out and runs a quick session against you which so many people do against our car, you just kind of shrug it off. It’s racing, man. We were on the winning side of a lot of those, too. That was unfortunate, but we had to sit there and watch and watch as everything transformed, and it did. It changed leaders several times in that race not leaders but second in points. You know, it could have been a lot worse. We opened the door, and if Langdon or one of the guys up in front, Torrence, wins, they’re right on our tail. We got lucky a few times, but we definitely earned it, and I definitely think that Pomona, again, had we gone out first round, it would have been three wins and three first round losses, and you know, wouldn’t have been the way you’d want to call yourself a champ. If you win a championship you want to do it in good form, and we did it in outstanding form.

Q. Tony, the tenure of Mike Green (crew chief), is that what’s really paid into this, the consistency of that car combined with your driving skills? Is that what’s got you to this point?

TONY SCHUMACHER: We’re just comfortable with each other. I mean, really, he’s fantastic. You know, when Allen Johnson was leaving, he said, don’t worry about Mike Green, he’s great. He’s great at what he does. And I believed him. I didn’t know Mike that much, that well, except that he’s worked with Allen for a while, and Allen knew the decisions he made and how he raced. To hear Allen Johnson say that, it definitely makes you more comfortable. I don’t know if in Allen’s mind we were going to go off and win championships. I don’t know that he thought anyone else would at that time because they were running so darned good, and the whole team left, but when Mike came over and I saw the decisions he made and how he raced, I was extremely pleased. I think they know that we’ve gotten through some big moments, and I think a crew chief can look at a driver and say, okay, this guy knows how to handle the pressure and can turn the wick up a little more than he may otherwise. There’s a combination of we really hit it off well. We went off, the first meeting we had against Allen Johnson with Dixon driving, we won that, and it was just an excitement that Mike hadn’t probably had in a while. There was potential to go out and win, and me having this team that had just done so well for five years straight, having lost a crew chief, seeing how good he really was, was so comforting to me. It was just a great combination of, wow, we can actually keep going and go out and try to win the championship or at least be in the battle at the end, at least not be sitting back watching everyone else run away, like so many people said was going to happen. We were written off. We weren’t going to win a race, no less a championship.

Q. The last championship you won after winning the championship, you said that Mike had come to you and said, we’ve got to change basically everything we’re doing if we’re going to have a shot at this, and it paid off. Was there ever that time during this Countdown that Mike said, hey, we’ve got to step on it a little harder?

TONY SCHUMACHER: No. I did. There are always those moments where you go, dude, why don’t we go back to a five disk clutch. We’ve got to win some races. He said, I’m so close. If we do that, we will not have time to catch it back up. He fought hard to maintain that, him and Neal both, and they said, we have got to make that right. We’ve got to keep making changes, but we are right on this, we have this. This is something that’s going to win in the long term more than just this year. Everyone eventually is going to have to switch to this deal, and we’re going to be years ahead. Man, we worked a long time. We may not be years ahead of my two other cars because they’re going to walk over and take it once it’s figured out, but the other cars aren’t going to have it, and ultimately as the power level raises and keeps going up, you’re going to have to have these disks, and we have our handles on it. Now, that being said, everybody runs out of disks. We always run out of clutch parts, so to make sure that there’s a new batch coming out and everything, we’ve stayed ahead of that game, and I think it’s an outstanding advantage we’re going to have starting out next year and going forward.

Q. Tony, eight championships is a tall measure. You got this one with a charge into that Countdown when it really counted. Talk a little bit about that surge.

TONY SCHUMACHER: I think we were coming off strong. Even the Western Swing we were starting to get it. We really were starting to find it. Brainerd I got beat on a great race, and I got beat by (Doug) Kalitta again. There’s just nothing easy about racing. But we knew we were getting it at the right time. Mike said it best. He goes, we are right on it, and we are coming on strong at the right time. Proved us right, got beat by a phenomenal run in a close race, but the championships are won, honestly, by those rounds going your way, and we had used up a lot of those rounds going the wrong way throughout the season, and during the Countdown. And I said it best, I think, at the banquet, everybody knows that championships are part luck. You have the greatest car in the world and you get the guy who runs low ET against you next to you, it’s over. And it’s timing and placement and a whole lot of little things, and we had the right luck and the right car to start it off. When you start the Countdown off with a couple of wins, you break people’s backs. You make it hard. They start thinking different, they start tuning different. Their backs are against the wall and they have to do things maybe that they’re not comfortable with or even ready to do. Great example is Morgan Lucas in the final. What does he have to lose? He runs a couple of races, why not turn the wick, and that’s what they did. Why not? But when you’re fighting for this Countdown, you’ve kind of got to do that sometimes when you’re not ready for it. And maybe Morgan pulled that off a few times in a row, but if he had to do it three times in a row, that wasn’t going to work. That’s a very difficult thing to do, and I think it just was the right timing for us.

Q. You’re always good at articulating and defining the strengths of you and your team. Can you talk a little bit about that? Is there anything different this year, specific, that made you and your team stronger?

TONY SCHUMACHER: We bonded well. A couple of guys left, a couple new guys came. This may be the greatest team I’ve ever worked with honestly. Mike Green and Allen Johnson, that was a flawless team. We still had rotation of team. We had a good, strong team. But right now it is a group of dedicated people. And again, I’ll revert back to my canopy. The canopy should be heavier. I have more leg protection in my car than anyone else is willing to put in because it weighs too much, yet my car is only five pounds overweight. It’s because we worked extra hard. It is a group of people that spent more hours at the shop than I’ve ever seen, worked harder to earn a championship, harder. Allen Johnson and that group was a brilliant group of people with a tune up that everyone else was fighting for number two from the get go. This was different. There was only one car back there. Now there’s 10 cars that can win on any given day. You have to dig a little deeper to win. These guys did it. They performed I don’t know what to say about them. They’re just an amazing gift of a team, and I think that it really showed at the end of the year how grateful they were to win the championship, not so much entitled to it, they were grateful. It was pretty amazing.

Q: Looking forward to next year a little bit, you have the five wins, Antron (Brown) had six, Spencer (Massey), Shawn (Langdon), Khalid (alBalooshi), Richie Crampton, J.R. Todd who finished second in points, Top Fuel is going to be another dogfight, another fun season next year, right?

TONY SCHUMACHER: It’s going to be harder than this year. And repeating a championship is harder than winning one. Winning one, you can go out there and win one. Try to back it up the next year with this level of people. It is going to be brutal. I mean, if we pull this off, it will be as gratifying as the one thing to be said is unless you win the first one, you can’t win two in a row. Our guys love it. They said, we can’t win the second one in a row without that first win, and they did what they had to that time. I’m going to enjoy this off season because I know how hard it’s going to be next year. It is going to be the most brutal Top Fuel season we’ve ever seen.

MODERATOR: We look forward to seeing it kick back off when we hit in Pomona coming up early next season. Tony, thank you very much for your time.

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