ESPN NHRA

	Capps

It's been a pretty interesting offseason in the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series. I actually got a little bit of an advantage on the competition and got to test the new Dodge Charger Funny Car body in mid-December for a couple of days at The Strip in Las Vegas. Usually you have to wait until January to get back into the race car, and at that point it always feels like it's been a couple of years since you were in the car last.

It's such a different feeling to get in the car and go from 0 to 300 miles an hour, so when you have any more than a weekend off or two weeks, like we did at the end of the 2005 season, you really need to test to get your senses stirred up just to go at that speed again.

After that test, I was able to make some more test runs in January, again at The Strip and then in Phoenix. In Vegas we got to shoot the Full Throttle promo for the Super Bowl for POWERade. My teammate Gary Scelzi and I ran special bodies on our Funny Cars, painted in designs to depict Seattle versus Pittsburgh. It was a two-out-of-three race between the two of us, where basically Full Throttle said, We want you guys to race like it was the final round in all three runs. I felt like we were back in Pomona. Gary and I kind of got our competitive juices flowing during testing when most teams were doing single runs. I felt great getting up there and staging the car like we were actually racing at a national event.

I know for Gary and me it always helps to get back in that mode. Pomona this weekend will open up the 2006 season and it's going to be such an exciting season. What makes the Winternationals at Pomona so exciting is that everything is brand new, everybody has their new ideas, everybody has their reasons why they didn't do better the year before that they want to improve on, and they have all the good reasons why they did do well and that they want to make even better.

It's what you call bench racing that goes on all winter long -- everybody talking about what they want to do. But when it gets to Pomona and it's Thursday afternoon, you can throw all the bench racing away because it's time to put up or shut up and there are no more mulligans. It's show up and everything counts.

Of course, we also have all the stuff surrounding the new Goodyear tire.

Unfortunately, all the testing during the winter was under pretty cool conditions. We never saw any track temperatures rise high enough to really tell what the tire was going to be like. People were tearing up the tires and only getting one run out of them, and a lot of people were complaining. We didn't seem to have a problem.

Because of this, NHRA said we could use the old-style tire at Pomona. So, now we have the dilemma at Pomona of using a tire that is not the same one that we tested on, so that's going to throw in another variable.

I feel very fortunate right now, as we start a new season -- my second with Don Schumacher Racing -- that there's not a whole lot that has changed on our team. I can tell you that 90 percent of my crew is back and that excites me.

The guys on my crew could not wait a week after the 2005 season was over. They couldn't wait to get back on the track, and that's something you don't ever hear. That's how much excitement they have to get back on the track in '06 and see if we can win a championship.

And more than that, we really did well last year on a lot of parts that may not have been the most up to date. We were a new team and some of the parts were from Alan Johnson's team (Tony Schumacher's Top Fuel team) or Scelzi's Mopar/Oakley team. This year we have the more updated Alan Johnson cylinder heads, which most of the top teams were running, and I think you're going to see a vast improvement on our end, knowing that we now have exactly what everybody else has.

Other than that, when we show up at Pomona we'll have the same Dodge Stratus body on the Brut Funny Car and we're basically putting the car back on the track just like it was when we left Pomona back in November.

I've always said, you can't win the championship at Pomona in February, but you can definitely lose it. And you just need to have a good race. If you can win Pomona it's a great start, but there are not too many times you've seen the winner at Pomona guaranteed a championship trophy at the end of the year. In fact, it's not been the case more often.

So, you really just want to have a good start to the season. You want to get into the show and leave Pomona with good points. A lot of the drivers, and I can probably speak for most of them, feel that once you get to Gainesville in March the points will kind of shuffle around and people will start talking about who the points leader is at that time. Because, after Pomona you have Phoenix, and in these first two races there can be several teams, even part-time teams, that may do well at those first couple of races but then don't hit the rest of the races.

You just need to have a good start. One thing that made me so proud last year was that we peaked at the right time and you need to have great races. We had a very, very good second half of the year, and especially the last third of the year. The Brut Dodge team did a great job and we probably earned more points than anybody in that time.

In the last couple of races you saw a lot of teams come on, with Cruz and Tony Pedregon, the Del Worsham team winning Indy, and a lot of teams that may not have been one of the three teams battling for the championship at the end of the year but who sure finished strong. That just tells you it's going to be a very, very tough Pomona to kick off the season. You can't count anybody out. There are going to be a lot of variables, with new teams coming in as well as teams with new sponsors. We say it every year, it's going to be tough, but I truly believe this is definitely going to be the toughest season in the history of Funny Car.

Pomona is basically our Daytona 500. It's one of the biggest races we have right in the beginning of the season. It's the Winternationals, which is one of the oldest races. It was around before I was around and it's right in the heart of Southern California, which is where drag racing got its start.

I did a lot of dirt-bike riding in the offseason. I'm a big fan of the Supercross series. We're going to have some Supercross riders as our guests at Pomona, like James Stewart. They're racing down the highway in San Diego in the Supercross Series on Saturday night. It's going to be neat to have some of those guys come out, like Jeremy McGrath, and get their fix of nitro, and we'll make our trek down Saturday night to watch the Supercross.

With the way the 2005 season ended, with John Force, Gary Scelzi and I battling it out for the championship at the last race in Pomona, the preseason ticket sales for this weekend are already higher than they've been in a long time. It's going to be great for the fans and I know that we as drivers can't wait to start racing in Pomona.

It's kind of a home race for us. We live in Carlsbad, which is about and hour south from Pomona, and it's become kind of a race where I have more family visit than anywhere we else we go.

Wish us luck.

Ron Capps drives a Funny Car in the NHRA for Don Schumacher Racing. He is providing a diary to ESPN.com throughout the 2005 season.