INTERVIEW WITH ANTRON BROWN, RON CAPPS, GREG ANDERSON, ANDREW HINES AND EDDIE KRAWIEC

The following are excerpts from a teleconference on Thursday, Nov. 3, previewing the 52nd annual Auto Club NHRA Finals coming to Auto Club Raceway at Pomona, Nov. 10-13. Antron Brown (Top Fuel), Ron Capps (Funny Car), Greg Anderson (Pro Stock), and Andrew Hines and Eddie Krawiec (Pro Stock Motorcycle) were featured on today’s teleconference.

MODERATOR: Thank you for joining us on this teleconference this morning. We will be talking about the 52nd Annual Auto Club NHRA Finals coming to Auto Club Raceway at Pomona next weekend, November 10th through 13th. This is the final race of the season and final race of the six-race Countdown to the Championship playoffs.

We’re currently joined by Antron Brown, driver of the Matco Tools Top Fuel dragster. Antron clinched his third and second consecutive Top Fuel World Championship last weekend at the event in Las Vegas. He raced to seven victories in 11 final rounds this year. Antron, thanks for calling.

ANTRON BROWN: Any time. Any time.

Q. You’re the world champ once again. How does it feel?

ANTRON BROWN: Oh, it feels great. It feels great. It’ll never get old. This is what we all work so hard for. We had a really good season, and the Countdown, again, was good to us because unfortunately we messed up in St. Louis, and it set us back, but we were able to rebound and use that after St. Louis, adjusted after St. Louis, rebounded and came out the next three races with our head down, qualified well.

That’s what really set the tone, and I think that’s what our team with Brian and Mark and all of our Matco Tools boys did well is that we adapted to the situation where we just kept working hard at it, where we said, you know what, to put ourselves in a better situation we need to qualify better, and that’s what we set out to accomplish, and we achieved that. We’ve qualified in the top-five every race since then, and it really set us up for race day to go rounds, and that was the main thing, going rounds, getting lane choice, and coming off, peeling off with a few race wins there, and it really helped us clinch that championship again this year.

Q: You had some early hiccups in the season, but as the season went on, you just got better and better and better. What did you learn about yourself and your team down the stretch?

ANTRON BROWN: Well, what we always knew, I always say that I have one of the best race teams in the business because we’re able to adapt to so many different situations. If the track — if we go to races where the track can be stellar at nighttime but then be the hottest, slimiest, tire spinning track during the day, our team is able to adapt to those situations, and that’s what we’re really good at. And when we have those types of races, that’s where we really shine, and then when a track gets really good, we can throw down and when the track gets really tricky, we can go down the racetrack and run some exceptional laps, and that’s what it takes now in this era to go out there and to compete and to win championships, and that’s what we really focus hard on.

We struggled the first — people say struggled, but it was only the first three races of the year when we came out. We qualified well, but we had a new clutch pack in our car where it made our car very, very aggressive, and we just had to get used to it, to adapt to it to get our window back on how good our car runs, and every team goes through that, and it’s just what you have to go through. And once we got our window back to where we know how to run like we’re capable of, we went back to work and back to business as usual, and that’s just running as hard as we can with what the track gives us, and it gave us some great opportunities, and we were there in the end to bring some race wins home and really set us up for the Countdown.

Q. When you look back at each of the wins you’ve gotten this year, which one — because I know they were all great, but which one is just a little bit better than all the others?

ANTRON BROWN: That’s a good question. That is a very good question. I’ll tell you, you know which one really, really sticks out to me is Charlotte, North Carolina. We have two. I would say Charlotte and I would say Reading really sticks out to me this year because the reason why I’m saying Charlotte is just because it was the first race of the Countdown, and we didn’t qualify that good at that race. I think we qualified, I forget, I think seventh.

But then we fought through the adversity that we went through because we had some issues in qualifying, and we fought through and we became a force to reckon with on race day, and we brought the wins home, and I remember that just fighting through it because the competition we had was just ridiculous, all the cars that we had to race.

And then I would say Reading was a big one for us because that was our bounce-back after St. Louis, after losing first round in St. Louis, where we only had one round of qualifying going on, and we never qualified good because we weren’t qualifying like we’re used to qualifying, and we came out there and we qualified No. 2 with only one lap down the racetrack. So that was kudos to Brian and Mark and all of our boys for throwing that great lap out with only one run to get it done in, and then bouncing back on race day, and we got better and better with every run, and we raced the racetrack, and we pulled that win out. Those are the two that really, really, really stand out to me this year.

Q. You win two championships in a row; how hungry does that make you to keep winning championships throughout your entire career?

ANTRON BROWN: Well, I can tell you this right now: That is the reason why we pull our trailer into the racetrack every race. Even though we won the championship — let me tell you something. Even though we won the championship in Vegas, I was in the truck like, ‘I’ve got to go.’ We’ve got to get ready for the semifinals, and they wanted to celebrate. I said, ‘Celebrating, no, we can wait until the end of the race.’

When we’re out here racing, our team and our mindset, including myself, is that we love — we love the challenge and the thrill of competition, and that’s what drives us, and the competition gets better, it makes us better, and that’s what we thrive off of, and there’s only one thing we know how to do. We’re not going to come out next year and say, we’re the champs from 2016, so it’s ours. No, we know it’s going to be rougher for us next year, and we’re looking forward to that challenge, and we’re about to step that bar up again, that gain, and it’s going to be a blow-by-blow race, and we’re ready to come out next year swinging, and we’re ready — I mean, we’re looking forward to that challenge.

Our main focus is to come out and be able to compete for a championship and have a shot at it, at the last race to win it, and that’s our goal each and every year, and that goal is not changing, and we’re driven even more because once you have a taste of it, it’s like somebody gave you this juicy steak dinner that you ain’t never had before, and they gave you a bite of it, and we’ve had three bites of it. There’s still a lot of bites left on that steak, and now they’re pulling that plate away, and that’s what they do every year at the end of the year. But we want another bite, so we’re going to go after it just as hard as we did the last three that we’ve won. We’re going to go after it just as hard as we can for sure.

Q. Just like last year, you had a stellar performance in the Countdown for the Championship, forgetting St. Louis. What is it about the playoffs that gets that excellent performance out of you and your team?

ANTRON BROWN: It’s that everything is left on the line, and the pressure is at an all-time high. We know the stakes are intense that we’re going after and that you can’t mess up. Like if you go in No. 1, you can mess up one race and you have to rebound fast, and we know that going in that, you know what, we go in there with that even mindset that, all right, this is for all the marbles; six races decides everything, and there’s 24 rounds up for grabs. Let’s go out here and grab as many as we can. It’s survival of the fittest, and we’re going after every nook and cranny, and we take it hard and we take it seriously.

Q. You described it so well here; one of my questions was even though you have the championship in your pocket again, how intensely were you going to race here at Pomona coming up? And what changes may you make in the team or in the car?

ANTRON BROWN: Well, when we come to Pomona, I can tell you one thing, that when we race at certain races, we race strategy. We race the racetrack, and I’d be lying to you, you look at your competitors and you try and look and see what you need to run to win that round. That gives you the best percentage value to win that round. That’s what everybody does in statistics, and we go in there and we go, all right, we need to run this.

Well, Pomona, the cool part is that we’re going to go out there and we’re going to run hard, and the good part is we have nothing to lose, and we can go out there and we can try to rotate the earth, we just hope the earth goes with us so we can actually make some world record setting runs and have some fun with it, and then on race day, we’re going to race to win. We’re going to push a little harder than we normally push, but we’re going to push because you have to now to win a round of racing, whoever you race, because all these cars are running so good. Everybody, every team out there is capable of breaking a world record at any given time if the conditions yield it.

So you have to go out there and run and make those runs if you — I mean, if you’re trying to win that round, you have to go out there and give it your best shot so you can go there and have a shot at winning the race. Well, when you have a shot, you can make it to the finals, but to get there, you have to get through some serious competition.

Q. And that serious competition, you will match it because you run like you described it, you said you run with all your heart, even though you have the championship in your pocket, you’re not sitting back?

ANTRON BROWN: Oh, absolutely not. We went there last year and we lost in the final, and we were sore that we lost. We lost to our teammate in Langdon with the Red Fuel car by I think it was like five- or six-thousands of a second, and we backed our car off because we ran low ET in the semifinals, but we actually threw a rod, we broke a rod, and we went in 70 flat and didn’t even make it to the finish line. We were about to run a 60 out there, like a high 60, and then we went to the finals and we backed our car down thinking like, ‘All right, we don’t want to do that again,’ and it wasn’t a tune-up, we just had a rod that just went south on us, and we slowed up and we went like a 72 with a three to Langdon’s 71 with an eight, and me and him both had ideas for reaction times or it might have had to buy a couple off the tree and made the race close, but we were like, ‘If we didn’t back off, that was our race for the taking.’

And that left a wound on us all last year. We were like, ‘Man, we would have a championship, but we could have won eight races last year, and that would have been something special,’ and in our books it was already special by winning seven and winning the All-Star Race, but when you win a race you don’t get that race back, and when you’re out there trying to push and be a part of NHRA history, that’s one that we let slip away from us for sure.

Q. You mentioned that the pressure is at an all-time high. How important was it for you to get away for a few days and go with Steve Torrence and just hang out and do some hunting to blow off some of that pressure?

ANTRON BROWN: I’ll tell you what, that’s what you call balance. You have to balance when you get into these situations, and sometimes you just need that peace of mind to get away from everything. When I got to go down there with old Stevo, we had such an incredible time together because me and him are really, really close friends, really, really close friends, probably my best friend in drag racing outside of my team.

Me and him really got to hang out and cut loose, and when we got to go shoot some guns, it takes your mind off of what you would think about if you were sitting at home or you’re at the race shop, where you just think about everything that’s about to happen, the next week that you’re going to the track. All it does, it just bogs you down and stretches you out and drains your energy emotionally because you’re so focused on the end game, and you want to make it that same result of winning that championship.

Where it felt really, really good to break away and get a breather and get a breath of fresh air. Nobody is around, just me and Steve, and I think it did him some good, too, where we really just got to relax, and when we came back out in Vegas, he ended up winning the race and I won the championship. He goes, ‘AB, want to come back to Kilgore?’ I said, ‘I might have to. We’ve got to do this more often, brother.’ It just gives you that peace of mind to just go ease your emotions, bring you back down to ground level so you can come back out there, and when you come back out there you’re just fresh and you’re ready for battle, and you can just see that much clearer, and it helps you focus better for sure.

Q. You mentioned Langdon and I asked you about Steve Torrence. Langdon the last couple years or at least two times in recent history has bookended Pomona, winning the opener and the closer, and Torrence won the opener this year, so even though you’re the champion, how can you climb past both of those guys to win the Auto Club finals?

ANTRON BROWN: We’ve got to go out there and compete. That’s the name of the game. They’re both aggressive drivers, they’re both great off the tree. They have a really good skill set, where Stevo has been a championship contender for the last several years on the brink of winning a championship, and Langdon has done it. He knows what it takes to do it, and let me tell you something, what people don’t realize about Shawn Langdon, he’s one of my good friends, too, and I’m going to start calling him Professor X, because he studies everybody, what they do, how they do it, their motion, how they stage their car and their characteristics at the racetrack, and he uses it for his advantage. That’s what makes Langdon so good is that he is a student and a studier of the game.

I’ve always done it, but he breaks it down to a whole other level that I never even thought about doing it, and he’s really helped step up my game in that aspect, also, and when you’re seeing those two, you still never take him for granted on how well you ran the round before. You can go in the next round with lane choice and lower ET, and if you race either one of those cars, they’ll take it right away from you and beat you in the lane that’s not lane of choice, and that’s what you have to go in.

You know where the stakes are at. You know how great your competition is and know how great those two are, but our main focus is that we try to qualify in the higher position where we won’t see them until a later round like the semis or the finals, because let me tell you something, if you line up against them in the first or second round, they can give you an early exit really quick, and that’s the name of the game is trying to strategize, get qualified well, and don’t face an opponent like that until later rounds where all the chips count because it can go either way when you race them. They can take you out or you can beat them, and that’s the name of the game, and that’s the strategy that we look at as a team is to qualify well so you can race a competitor like that in the later rounds.

Q. You’re at the starting line concentrating, the green light goes, it’s just a couple of seconds and you’re down that track, but it takes your crew an awful lot of time to get that car ready, so you’re just the end result of a lot of people’s hard work. It seems like it’s a symphony to me. I watch these guys in the pits, they’re just moving around on their own getting all the parts taken care of. How key is that? That’s something people just don’t see when you’re on the strip? what’s going on back in the pits?

ANTRON BROWN: That’s always been the big key for me. It’s always been — that’s why everybody always hears me say we, us, the Matco Tools team. You never hear me say me because it’s not me. I’m just the last one that gets to step on the pedal. I’m just the one that gets to tear it all up or blow it up or turn the win light on at the end. That’s it. The guys never get the credit that they’re due, and I’m glad that you mentioned our team, because that’s one thing that we need to exploit more, each guy and what they do.

They work so hard, not just at the racetrack. That’s just what they do week in and week out at the racetrack. But even all the hard work that goes back on in the race shop, preparing, making sure everything is flawless, there’s not a crack in the chassis, from the engines being put together to precision and perfection, and the cylinder head guy making the cylinder heads right, the clutch guy making every part of the clutch is perfect, from the discs being straightened to the levers being right, the blower guy making sure the blower makes the boost the same way every time, the tire guy, rear end guy making sure nothing goes wrong, because not just for us to perform, but they’ve got my life in their hands. And then our crew chief, making sure that every management and keeping all the guys working in unison together, and then you’ve got our two crew chiefs who orchestrate the strategy and the planning to make it all happen and work. It’s just so much that has to happen, and to have a team come together and do what we have done is just — that’s why I tell them I’m always blessed to drive this car because I’m fortunate to be on a team that has this much talent and is truly just an all-star cast of a group and is going to go as being one of the best teams in NHRA history, I can tell you that for sure.

Q. Don Schumacher has put together a whole bunch of those teams —

ANTRON BROWN: And Don knows the magic formula for sure, trust me. He knows it takes not good people but great people, because if you want good, good doesn’t get it cut in NHRA Drag Racing because there’s no do-overs, there’s no mulligans, you don’t get second chances. Your second chance is when you go to the next race and you have a chance to redeem yourself to get back in the game.

And from the Army team with Mike Green to Jimmy Prock with Infinite Hero team, Tobler with the NAPA team, JC the crew chief, Todd, Phil, all of our crew chief list goes on and on and on that we have some exceptional star talented crew chiefs. All these crew chiefs have won championships here pretty much, every single one of them, or has been on a team that’s has won a championship if they’re running a car now, and when you look at all of them, you’re like, man, you look at it, this is kind of like, if you ever want to go to like — you go to an All-Star team, like you have the All-Star Game at the end of the year like in the NBA or you have the Pro Bowl for NFL, well, we have the Pro Bowl sitting right here at Don Schumacher Racing. We have the best of the best, and our team takes each other out because they’re going against each other for the championship, and you’ve got Force and all them out there, Lucas’ and Torrences and Kalittas, but when you come to DSR, we have truly an all-star cast all the way around, and Don knows what it takes to win championships. That’s why he’s such a successful businessman. He brought that same work ethic and know-how and collaboration to his race teams.

MODERATOR: Antron, we’re joined by Ron Capps. Do you have any quick words of advice for your teammate down in Funny Car?

ANTRON BROWN: Me and Ron talk on a personal level. He knows what to do. He just got to go out and live it now. He did all the work. The team has done all the work. They did all the preparation. All they’ve got to do now is just close the eyes, take a deep breath, take it all in, enjoy the moment, and just live it.

MODERATOR: Thank you for talking with us today, Antron. Congratulations again.

MODERATOR: We’re now joined by Ron Capps, driver of the NAPA Auto Parts Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car. Ron has five wins and five runner-up finishes so far this year. He is first in points and leads teammate Matt Hagan by 86. He’s got 50 career wins and is yet to secure that elusive world championship. Ron, can you feel that championship on your fingertips?

RON CAPPS: Yeah. I mean, definitely a little bit looser going into Pomona than we were going into Vegas. We had it decently going into Vegas. With two races left, you start to I guess whittle down the amount of rounds left more then — and sort of run them out of rounds trying to catch it than anything else.

Yeah, it’s by far not over, and a lot of people at SEMA and at the race yelling out across the parking lot, ‘Hey, this is your championship,’ but it’s not over. We still need to get there and do our business and clinch it. I’ve seen some pretty miraculous things happen at Pomona over the years, and we definitely don’t want to be one of those statistics.

MODERATOR: You got off to a good start winning the Winternationals here in Pomona, but the summertime is where you really hit your stride. What was going on mid-season that provided us with some of the most consistent racing up until now?

RON CAPPS: Well, a lot of things were going on. We had a lot of guys in the shop building some new things that we knew were coming down throughout our teams, and right around Topeka, our teammates really went fast in Topeka, and we didn’t run that bad, but we knew we were getting those parts right after Topeka, and Tobler, right after we lost in Topeka, he said, ‘Okay, we’re going to be fine.’ We got the parts we’re waiting on that race, and Epping was that race. We started there with a track record, and I think at the time the second quickest run in history, the first run in Epping off the trailer, and low qualifier there and won, and then went on to Englishtown, did the same thing, and it just — we just gained a lot of momentum through the summer.

We were able to sort of get our lead back after leading the points at the beginning of the season, and we did that through the summer and positioned ourselves to end the regular season and gain a 20-point bonus, which was big. Everything sort of came together as a plan with Tobler and our NAPA team, and you know, I said to the media, many of them, that I thought to win a championship it was going to have to be a semifinals or better average in the Funny Car division.

Then my teammate Tommy Johnson went on a roll and he was in a bunch of final rounds, and we were next to him for several of those, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, he’s going to prove us wrong, you’re going to have to be in final rounds, just how tight the Funny Car division is.’ But we were able to keep the pressure on and gain those points in qualifying, and here we are.

Q. Do you feel more comfortable going into this final race than any other previous season, or do you feel even more pressure going into this event than any other season?

RON CAPPS: Well, it’s a little of both. You would think I would — you know, gosh, a lot of people are saying it’s sewn up, even on our team, and I just keep holding my hand out going, ‘No, stop, stop thinking that way.’ Right now it’s 86 points. We need to keep that above 80 points to be realistic and know that we’re going to for sure clinch without having any pressure of having something go wrong on Sunday. And if we gain those qualifying points and match Hagan’s team or gain more of those qualifying points than they do, we’ll keep it above 80, and I say above 80 because then they have to go 100 to pass us, and that’s more than what’s there for Sunday at Pomona.

If they gain the points and out-qualify us and get it below 80, then we obviously have to win first round to clinch it, but you just don’t know. You don’t want to assume anything.

The good thing is Rahn Tobler is so experienced that it’s business as usual, and he’s been able to reach in the window and point to me every run in qualifying and race day, and especially in Vegas, where it just — to me I’m going up and trying to do the same thing I’ve done for 19 years, and that’s just be — I guess be money for the team and just do the same thing every time so they can count on me and not make a mistake.

So that’s what we’ve done.

To answer your question, we just need to keep doing it at Pomona, and listen, we didn’t qualify the first Vegas race in April, and there was lots of big-name teams that didn’t qualify here and there throughout the year. You can’t take that for granted.

That’s the one cool thing about NHRA is you have to earn your spot every weekend. There’s no provisionals like NASCAR, so you’re not guaranteed. So when we’re qualifying, we run a good lap, hopefully Friday on the first run, that’s the first step of our goal is to get qualified. There are 22 cars entered, and it’s going to be a good show for the fans.

Q. A little pressure on you: If you can win this championship, who’s the first person you’d love to hear from?

RON CAPPS: Well, most of my family, it’s a home race, so they’re all going to be there. You know, besides the people that are actually going to be there, it would probably be maybe Don Prudhomme. I’m not sure if he’ll be there that day. He was such a big mentor for me as a professional, my first owner and driving for him for almost a decade as one of my heroes, probably him. Besides obviously Don Schumacher and everybody that’s going to be right there at the race.

Q. Do you have any mental preparation you do in the car no matter if you’re up or if you’re down? Do you have say a little session that you do to keep your mind up and to keep yourself headed in the right direction before you hit that starter and go down the track?

RON CAPPS: Yeah. You know, that’s one of the biggest questions we get is if we’re superstitious, and I always say, ‘No, I’m not,’ and then I rattle off all the things that I do every single time before I get in the car, and so I guess it’s not really superstitious, it’s just I try to do the same thing every time. I sit in the tow vehicle and I kind of hang out with my crew guys a little bit before I get in the car, and two of them help me get in the car and get strapped in, so it’s always the same thing, same sort of conversation, same handshakes from each one of them, put the left glove on first every time, little things that we just do naturally every time.

You know, my daughter, I just got her Super Comp license two weeks ago at Fontana, and I was so adamant to her about going over in your head everything over and over and over, and I found myself in Vegas sitting in the staging lanes getting ready to run and laughing at myself because I was sitting in there touching the reverser lever, then making sure the ignition switch was off, then touching my air bottle, then touching the fuel lever, over and over, and I do that — I’ve been driving 19 years, and I’ve done that religiously.

It’s kept me in check and made sure I didn’t make any mistakes in the car. I guess to answer your question, I’m just — I keep doing what we’ve been doing, and obviously I had a lot of anxiety in Vegas, all of us did, to make sure that we kept the points lead.

Doing the same thing really helped me, and especially race day. I went up there and was able to act like it was just another run, and I think that’s probably what’s helped us mostly.

Q. And that helps keep some of the pressure off then?

RON CAPPS: Yeah, and again, Rahn Tobler has been there. Look at his past, as being a mentor, a crew chief. We have a great relationship. He’s sort of a bigger brother to me, and we’ve had — this year has been a great year for us relationship-wise. We’ve really come close. So when I see that confidence and I see him point at me and he walks away from the starting line, I realize my confidence level is higher than it’s probably ever been, and that helps me roll up and light the pre-stage light.

Q. You say you don’t want to count things — don’t want to get ahead of yourself, but you’re going to Pomona. You’ve won there before. Along with Sonoma, it’s one of your home tracks. The fans are going to be going crazy for you. A whole lot of them are going to be coming down from the central coast. Does it give you any more confidence with all of that support, any more energy from the crowd? Does it make you relax a little bit more?

RON CAPPS: Yeah, it is. When you tow back at Pomona, you go right in front of the grandstands, and historically this race is packed, and I’m sure we’re probably going to have a sellout like we have had at a lot of these races this year, being that it’s going to be good weather, it’s the end of the year, and it’s the finals.

I’ve already gotten the phone calls and text messages from a lot of the actor friends I know, the rock stars that I’ve gotten to know that always attend Pomona, and so far it’s kind of typical for Pomona, but I can sense that it’s a lot more people hitting me up and a lot more excitement in the air.

So I know a lot of my cousins, a lot of my relatives that are coming down from my hometown of San Luis Obispo, the people I’ve known since I’ve lived here in San Diego, it’s more than usual, so I sense it, but I’ve got good people around me. My wife and my cousin, Donnie, who lives right near Pomona takes care of my ticket situations, which takes a huge load off me for Pomona. They hand out where the tickets go, and believe me, that sounds easy, but you talk to any athlete, guys playing last night in the World Series, football players, that can be a distraction when you’ve got to worry about making sure all your family is taken care of with their tickets, as easy as that sounds.

That’s always been a big deal for me is to make sure I’ve got everybody covered that I want to make sure are covered. It’s going to be huge. It always is towing back in front of that grandstands. I get the biggest applause and people yelling. It just is such a killer feeling, man. It’s just a great feeling.

I can’t wait. You know, I’m hoping we can do everything right and we can finally finish this deal and I can do it — somebody asked me about Vegas, and I said, I’m almost glad we didn’t clinch it there because the historical value that you get at Pomona with Wally Parks and his name right there and the fact that it’s Pomona, it just could not be better, and on top of it, it’s the 50th birthday of the Funny Car, and it’s been counting down all year long, and it’s been fun to celebrate that all year long. We’ll have all the hitters, all my heroes, Funny Car guys probably at the track, so I just couldn’t think of a better weekend to do it.

Q. It looks like Don Schumacher Racing is going to double up in the Nitro Fuel, at least the chances of that are pretty good. I know you said you don’t want to get ahead of yourself, but how much support and encouragement have you gotten from your teammates and Don?

RON CAPPS: Oh, a huge amount. Dickie Venables even came over afterward on Sunday and just kind of — we had a little talk, and we’ve been battling him for a championship and still are. They’ve got a chance. But it was a neat thing for him to come over and give me the speech that he gave me.

A lot of us have been around the sport a long time, and it’s neat that you battle these people that are also our family when things go down for somebody in our sport. Everybody is quick to be there for them.

Having teammates, the funny thing is they’re my teammates, but we battle them — the hardest battles I have are against my teammates, and here we are fighting for a championship, and the three guys behind me basically are my teammates.

It has been tough, especially when they’re sharing information, our crew chiefs are close. That’s made it a little tougher. But it’s good that everybody has been able to stay friends, Monday through Friday at least.

MODERATOR: Good luck in Pomona, Ron.

MODERATOR: We’re now joined by Greg Anderson, driver of the Summit Racing Equipment Chevy Camaro. Greg is a four-time Pro Stock world champion. He’s notched seven victories this season and 13 final-round appearances. Greg also has five Auto Club NHRA finals victories. Greg, thanks for calling in today. Tell me, how are you and your buddy Jason getting along these days?

GREG ANDERSON: Probably a whole lot better than we are come this Sunday. No, we’ve been doing good. We’ve been together a long time, and you know, we work as one around here at KB Racing. We try to make each other’s car as fast as we can every day of our life, and we have a great battle. When we put the helmet on, obviously, and stage, you don’t want to beat anybody more than you want to beat your teammate. It’s like a brother, like you want to pick on your brother. So it’s a battle then, but in the downtime in between and the time at the shop here and the time leading up to the race, we’re one. We work as one.

No problem right now. A lot of harmony right now, but it may not be that way come this Sunday.

Q. Earlier this year you and Jason dominated the start of the season, and then you guys saw some competition nip at your heels. With the reset of the points and the start of the Countdown and drivers like Allen Johnson and Vincent Nobile, Alex Laughlin and Shane Gray starting to perform pretty well, did you ever think, hey, this might be tougher than we thought?

GREG ANDERSON: Absolutely. We’ve been scared to death that after the dream season that we’ve had that come Countdown time, come playoff time, it’s going to be a different story, it’s going to be hard to close the deal. It’s been a lot of sweat and a lot of nervous nights and a lot of nervous days, and we certainly made our mistakes through the Countdown. We’ve raced pretty good, fairly well, but we’ve made mistakes at several of the races, and thank the Lord that some of the other guys have, too, so it’s kind of swapped back and forth. We’ve each landed blows to each other throughout the races, and we’ve come out with more knocks in the nose I guess than the rest of them, so we’ve been fortunate. But yeah, we’ve been scared the whole time. You just don’t want a season like this with the dominance we had early to go up in flames and not get the deal closed, but just because you had a great early season or mid-season, whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t get you anything. When you reset the playoffs, it’s game on, start over, everybody starts from scratch, and that huge points advantage we had went away, so we had to regroup and find an extra gear.

Fortunately we’ve been able to do that. We’re going into Pomona with I don’t really think realistically — barring lightning striking, Jason not qualifying or me not qualifying, I don’t really think anybody can catch Jason for the title except me, and I can be caught from behind for second place if I stumble. As long as he qualifies, nobody can catch him for the title. Hopefully it comes down to we do our job in qualifying, it comes down to a two-car battle, and the dream scenario, obviously in our mind, if we can make our way through competition on Sunday, qualify well, and on opposite sides of the ladder make our way through the rounds on Sunday and match up in the final round for all the marbles, that would be a dream come true just to have that opportunity.

I remember standing on the starting line a couple years ago when it came down to the final round with Jason and Erica and just thinking to myself, ‘Man, would I love to be in his shoes right now, would I love to have this opportunity.’ You can’t imagine an opportunity like that once in a lifetime. If it were to happen, that would be the best scenario ever, and may the best man win.

Looking forward to this weekend, and hopefully we can execute and make it a dream race.

Q. It’s down to the final round, it’s you and Jason; what have you got in your pocket or wherever you would put it for good luck?

GREG ANDERSON: I’ve got a lot of stuff in my pocket. Every race I’ve got medals from soldiers, I’ve got a good luck charm from my wife. I’ve always got something in my pocket, so it may be something different come Pomona, but there’s always going to be what I consider a lucky something in my pocket, and usually have a medal or something taped to the dashboard in the race car, and yeah, if people tell you they’re not superstitious when it comes to things like this, they’re probably lying.

I will try anything. I’ll take anything, I’ll try anything, I’ll take a chance on anything that could possibly help me.

It’s going to be cool either way that it goes down here, and as I said, dream scenario would be for us to plow through the field and make our way to the final and then duke it out in the final, and it would be historic. It would be the coolest thing of my career and probably Jason’s too. That’s what we’re going to hope for and look for, but there’s a lot of land mines along the way. We’ve got to dodge them all, and hopefully we can make some memories come Pomona.

Q. You call it the coolest thing in your career; where would it rank in your life?

GREG ANDERSON: It’s big in my life. I mean, since I last won a championship, I’ve gone through a heart reconstruction, heart surgery and had questions in my mind if I’d ever be able to do this again. I remember laying in the hospital bed after getting my aortic valve replaced and hearing the doctors talk like I’d probably never race again. There was problems, there was issues that went down, and a lot of things went through your mind, ‘This could be the end of it. I may never even be able to get back in a race car.’

As it turned out, we got everything rectified, and I got a second chance to get in the race car, and everything went great, and it’s been two years to build my way back to the top, and now I’ve got that chance. Kind of a second lease on life, a second lease on drag racing, and I really want to make the most of it. It would probably make it the most special one yet.

Q. Greg, you’ve got five victories at the finals, four world championships. How can you use that past experience specifically at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona to make that final push against your teammate Jason?

GREG ANDERSON: It is. It’s a great racetrack for me. It’s a feel good racetrack for me. I love racing there. I love come Sunday and trying to make your way through the rounds and come final round when that sun goes down and it’s dusk and you’ve got lights shining and the grandstand packed. I love it. The only problem, so does my partner. He loves it, too, and he’s had a lot of success there.

It sets up great for both of us. You know, if you could pick anyplace you’d love for a dream finish to come down like that, this would be the place. It’s magical. It’s where drag racing started, and it’s just got so much history. It’s so cool to be able to race there in the final round, as I say, when the sun goes down.

I love it. I look forward to it. My partner does, too, and it’s all good, so if that happens to be and we can make that happen, it’s going to be one we’ll never forget.

MODERATOR: Thank you for joining us today. Good luck next weekend.

MODERATOR: We’re now joined by Andrew Hines and Eddie Krawiec, teammates on the Screamin’ Eagle Vance & Hines Harley-Davidson team. Andrew and Eddie are currently tied for the Pro Stock Motorcycle points lead. Andrew is a five-time 2016 event winner and the reigning and five-time world champion. Eddie is also a five-time 2016 event winner and a three-time world champion.

Thank you, guys, for joining us. You’re currently tied heading into the final race. How friendly or how competitive are you guys right now?

ANDREW HINES: I’d say it’s going pretty good right now. We both have the desire to want to win this race, so we’re going to do whatever we can to try and take out the alligator that’s chasing us.

EDDIE KRAWIEC: And again, I think ultimately coming back to it, our goal is to bring the championship back to Harley-Davidson and obviously Vance & Hines. In my eyes it’s kind of irrelevant who does it right this minute. We just want to bring it back.

Q. You guys have been so good, two of the best all season. What makes this Harley-Davidson team so special?

ANDREW HINES: Well, we have a great group of guys here in our shop. They bust their butts to make sure that we can get the parts we need in a hurry, and as we speak right now, like we’ve got our machine shop here making parts that we’re going to fly out to Pomona with us next week. We’ll be working on the bikes on Thursday, and it just shows how much everyone at our shop wants to win. Everybody puts forth the maximum effort they possibly can to make sure we’re in the position that we are in right now, and we’ve been here fortunately a lot here the last few years. If all goes well, hopefully we can bring another championship to Vance & Hines. Like I said, it’s just a great group of guys that makes sure we have perfect equipment every time.

Q. Vance & Hines is obviously excelling at a very high level in everything you all do right now; if Jerry Savoie were to pull it off next weekend, would the success of your Suzuki program ever spoil the relationship you had with Scooney and the Motor Company?

EDDIE KRAWIEC: I mean, to be honest, they came aboard as a partner before we were doing it, when we were doing it, and we still are doing it, so I don’t think it’ll have any impact on it. We have great customers that support our program and believe in us, and we give them the best products we can, 100 percent.

Q. What a season you guys have had. There’s been a few other winners, but you guys have really dominated virtually every race that they race the Pro Stock Bikes. Do you attribute it to just how good the Harleys are, or is it a team, or is it you on the bikes, because you have won some races by reaction time, not by ET?

ANDREW HINES: Yeah, I wouldn’t say we’ve dominated. I think the only race we really had a big advantage was probably Reading, and we just had our tune-up spot-on there. You can see by the field, there’s people going quicker at these last couple races than they were going at Reading, where you had air where you’re supposed to go that fast.

We’ve won probably — we were talking about this the other day. We’ve probably won four or five races this year between the two of us that we should not have won. We didn’t have the fastest bikes on the property. We just had more consistent motorcycles, and come Sunday were able to tune on them a little bit and keep them in the window where they were happy.

Yeah we’ve both won races on the holeshots this year. We’ve won rounds on holeshots to keep each other going, and we’ve benefitted from faster bikes going out earlier in the day. It’s frustrating on a dyno guy, engine, R&D level that we’re not able to have the quickest bikes every weekend, but it’s nice that we can help out the team here and there and have good reaction times and make up for a little bit of the slack the motorcycle has sometimes.

It’s nice to have all those wins, but they’ve been hard-fought all year long. Everybody has been super fast, and you had multiple No. 1 qualifiers from different teams, and we’re just here trying to win them when we can.

EDDIE KRAWIEC: Yeah, I think this year Andrew and I have been brought to a better level of riding. Definitely with the level of competition, there’s about eight or ten bikes on any given weekend that could possibly win, and when you sneak out of there with the win when you shouldn’t, it’s definitely high-fived by the team guys when we get back to the back, because that’s a weekend that the rider carried the bike, and there’s been many weekends that the bike has carried the rider. It’s definitely good to win on a weekend where you know you pulled it off.

Q. Jerry’s engines come out of your shop, and even though he won the last race, even though he’s doing so well and it’s really tight, does it give you any sense of gratification knowing that you have a hand in propelling Pro Stock Motorcycle to where it’s at?

EDDIE KRAWIEC: Absolutely. You know, one of the things years ago, Byron and Terry basically when they were racing, there was two or four motorcycles on any given day that were going to win, and back then it was the Dave Schultz, John Myers, and then it turned into Angelle Sampey and Matt Hines. The thing that they did from there is when Matt started really running well and dominating, it opened up a window to create an engine program, and Terry’s vision of that was to make sure the class had very competitive bikes.

At one point in time, there was 15 out of 16 motorcycles qualified were running Vance & Hines engines. It definitely is something that we take pride in, we look forward to, and no matter who it is that beats us, if they’ve got a Vance & Hines engine, they’re a team guy in any aspect of it, and we do take pride in it when every individual goes out there and does well. And to be quite honest, we try to help out some of the guys when they’re maybe struggling a little bit or not going down the right road. We do what we can to make sure that they have the best equipment under them and can get the job done.

Q. You’ve talked about the shop and how you’ve sometimes been lucky that some of the strong competitors have lost in early rounds, but you’re going to Pomona. Both of you have done well there, but you’ve only got a three-point lead. Any advantage or disadvantage at that track?

ANDREW HINES: Pomona is a little bit different. We have a downhill racing surface there, so that’ll benefit the heavier bikes, so it’ll be easier to accelerate them than like Vegas where it’s slightly uphill. That’ll help us out a little bit. Obviously with being a V-twin without a fairing, we’re at an a aerodynamic disadvantage, so it’s still going to be tough on that aspect of it, but like you said, we’ve had a pretty decent track record there. I think Eddie has been to eight straight finals there and won a handful of them. We’ve got good notes for that track. We ran decent there last year, and our engine package is getting better and better by the day, and I’ll be making dyno pulls here in another half an hour after we get off the phone. We’ll be bringing parts out there, and I think we can find a little bit more of an edge, and hopefully if we can find another one or two hundredths, it’ll get us closer to Jerry, where hopefully he doesn’t gobble up all the little bonus points in qualifying, and we need to keep him behind us going into Sunday, that way we don’t have to go around past him.

Q. For both of you gentlemen, you get the biggest break, whichever one of you wins this championship gets a bigger break than the other champions in the NHRA. Is that something you look forward to, or do you almost want to run another race as immediately and as soon as possible?

EDDIE KRAWIEC: Well, to be quite honest, I don’t want to go out racing the next weekend, but man, I’ll tell you, the extra month, month and a half is quite long. But on the reverse side of things, it definitely lets us prepare. It’s worked to our favor in the past few years because we haven’t had to totally redesign or reengineer an engine, so we’re able to focus and really keep after the dyno sessions. Andrew handles most of the R&D and development on the spearheading side of it, and when you’re dealing with vendors and other people, sometimes it’s difficult to get parts.

I, for one, I don’t mind the break, but it is quite long.

ANDREW HINES: It’s four months off, and when we get back out there for our test session right before Gainesville, seems like it’s been three years since we rode the motorcycle. But you put your helmet back on and you’re ready to go racing again.

As the off-season rolls through, I’ve been fortunate enough to win the championship the last two years and go out to the Winternationals to collect some hardware out there, and standing around on Sunday watching all the cars running up and down the track and smelling the racing gas, it’s like, ‘Man, I wish I had my motorcycle here so I could go make some runs.’ There’s times that you need some time for development, but as a racer, we want to be racing a lot.

Q. Given that both of you all have won championships, who’s the greatest person you’ve been able to meet because you’ve won a championship?

EDDIE KRAWIEC: I’m not going to say I got to meet him because of the championship and stuff, but to be quite honest, the fans, and I don’t want to sound like a cliché answer or something like that, but it’s amazing everybody we get to meet throughout the year. A lot of fans and a lot of people that swing by the trailer, it’s just — we have the most I would say unique fan base, being supported by Harley-Davidson. Somebody that’s great, getting to hang out with Willie G. Davidson and others that come to the track is just something that’s really special, and it’s not because we won the championships, it’s just because we’re part of a big, great team. I mean, the category itself right now is just phenomenal, and like I said, all the fans that we have that stand behind us, and I do think some of that is because we’ve won championships, but the fans that come out to the race and stand behind us and cheer us on is just awesome.

One guy that’s a die-hard Harley guy that looks like he’s ready to rip your head off at the back of the rope standing next to this lawyer in a suit that’s just happy to be there. So it’s just unique. But the one thing that does make it extra special for us is we get to go overseas every year and possibly because we are champions, and go visit the troops with Summit Racing guys, being that Greg and Jason were on the call here, to be able to be a part of that with those guys and do Operation Appreciation is something extra special and something that I hold close to my heart. So definitely to see all the troops and everybody is something special to me.

ANDREW HINES: I think Eddie pretty much hit it on the head there, but if you really want an answer, I think being a champion and racing for Harley, I was invited to the Love Ride out in California years and years and years ago, and I got up on stage with Jay Leno, and that was a very cool deal except he did make fun of me because I was wearing shorts that day, and my legs are pretty darned white because wearing pants and leathers all day long, we don’t get a chance to get a tan. So I got a national celebrity there cracking jokes on you. I think that counts for being a champion. I was up on that stage.

MODERATOR: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Andrew and Eddie, thanks for taking the time to come talk with us.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports