Reigning champion Steve Torrence started the season at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona, Calif., with confident Top Fuel rookie Austin Prock telling him that Friday night, after only the second qualifying pass of his career, “I’m coming for you.”

As the season draws to an electrifying close right back here at this same racetrack nine months later in the Auto Club Finals, Torrence isn’t overly concerned about Prock, who’s ranked sixth, coming for him. He has a handful of others in line ahead of Prock who are eager and able to spoil the nine-victory, 14-final-round effort the Capco Dragster driver has made this year.

Brittany Force, the Advance Auto Parts Dragster driver for her father’s race team, is a dangerous 16 points behind Torrence. She aced him out of the 2017 championship, one he thought his eight victories and three runner-up finishes and second-half points domination would help him secure. He came back in 2018 and won every Countdown race to make sure neither Force nor anyone else gave him a November surprise. But she is hoping her numbers indicate the title is waiting for her again this year.

She has qualified No. 1 eight times, run quick time of the event at 10 races, and has posted top speed of the meet seven times. All are category bests. She has momentum from her victory two weeks ago at Las Vegas and her distinction as the first Top Fuel driver since Tony Schumacher to simultaneously own the national performance records for elapsed time (3.623 seconds) and speed (338.17 mph). Now she wants to become just the 10th driver in Top Fuel history to win multiple championships.

“I’m very confident going into Pomona this weekend,” Force said. Torrence understandably brags about his “Capco Boys,” and she has her version: “I’m lucky to have David Grubnic and Mac Savage in my corner and the eight other guys around me who are the most dedicated, hard-working guys I know. The key to this season has been the support system I have around me. I’m proud to be in the fight with them and wouldn’t choose anyone else going into Pomona.”

Force said, “We really turned a corner at the right time, and we’ve made some big moves this season. The start of the Countdown, at Reading, that seemed to be the turning point for us. We set the national E.T. record, qualified No. 1, and made a semifinal-round appearance. Charlotte, we qualified [in the] top three and made another semifinal-round appearance. Vegas was a big weekend for our Advance Auto Parts team. We moved up to second in points and came home with our second win of the season. Now there’s only one race left, and we are looking to finish this year off with a championship.

“The biggest difference this time around is I’ve been in the hunt for a championship before,” she said, “so I have a better idea of how to deal with the pressure.” Although since claiming her title in 2017 she has changed crew chiefs, crews, engine and drivetrain components, and her primary sponsor, she’s ready to knock off Torrence again.

But she isn’t the only one Torrence is keeping an eye on. Trailing him by a mere 55 points – with a points-and-a-half system in effect – is long-overdue Doug Kalitta.

“You start every season with one goal, and that is to win the world championship,” Kalitta, driver of the Mac Tools Dragster, said. “You have to be in contention in Pomona at the Auto Club Finals to achieve that goal.”

And he knows how numbers can give a false sense of comfort. In 2005, after two straight years as series runner-up, he led the standings for 10 weeks but wound up third in the end. In 2006, he topped the leaderboard for 10 weeks and was perfect in five finals, but Tony Schumacher crushed his opportunity in the final pass of the season by winning the race and setting the national record that carried 20 points to edge out Kalitta for the title by 14 points. In 2014, Kalitta led in points for 16 weeks but being successful in only two of 11 final rounds played into his fifth-place finish. Two years later, he was tops in Top Fuel for seven weeks in mid-season and won four of six final-round chances but for the fourth time was second in the year-end standings. So he’s more than ready to halt this pattern.

“We have had a really strong season, and I feel as confident as ever that we can race for this championship,” Kalitta said. “We had some bad luck in Las Vegas, but we put that behind us.”

Two weeks ago at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a broken connection wire in the safety box broke during the burnout, causing the parachutes to deploy and cutting off the engine – all against Steve Torrence. It was a colossal opportunity missed, but Kalitta said instead of dwelling on that, his team is “focusing all our energy on winning this last race.”

Kalitta entered this weekend with two final round appearances in the Countdown to complement that semifinal finish at Las Vegas. He only has one first-round loss at Dallas – same as Torrence and Mike Salinas, who was No. 4 at the time.

He has been in the top five in the standings all season, and he said of this energy surrounding the Finals, “This is pretty exciting for me, just to have another opportunity to finish the Countdown and see how it ends up. We worked hard to have a good position to open the playoffs and we’ve stayed in the top three throughout with a chance to win it at Pomona. My guys are really working their tails off on my Mac Tools Toyota, and it’s running well. It’s what it’s all about for my team and everybody out here. So we’re going to give it our best. We can’t control what everyone else does, so we’re just to go out and try to win the race.

“We have gone rounds at every Countdown race this year. It has been a wide-open battle, and we have a really good shot at this championship,” Kalitta said. “We need to run well in qualifying and get some of those bonus points. Qualifying on Friday and Saturday will be critical to setting us up for success on race day.

“We run really well at Pomona, and I would love to book-end this season with a win here this weekend to go along with our win at the Winternationals. The Southern California fans are great, and this track has so much history. I have two tough competitors in front of me in the points. We are just going to take care of our business, and hopefully we can catch them early on race day. We aren’t going to save anything for the off-season, that’s for sure,” he said.

At this race, Kalitta has a 2016 victory and runner-up finishes in 2013 and 1999. So for 20 years, he has known the quick way down this dragstrip. He also was top qualifier in 2004 and 2006. At the moment, he’s 13th with Saturday qualifying sessions still left to improve in the order. Leah Pritchett has low E.T. at the moment, with the rest of the top-half lineup reading (in order) Mike Salinas, Billy Torrence, Jordan Vandergriff, Brittany Force, Antron Brown, Richie Crampton, and Scott Palmer.  

So Friday one other threat became more real for Steve Torrence: father Billy Torrence. Dad, a part-time racer, was a surprise Countdown qualifier at No. 10 and has won twice in the six-race playoffs to climb to No. 4. He entered this event 86 points behind his son and is driving an identically set-up car. Billy Torrence has said repeatedly that he is racing the second family dragster “by invitation only.” John Force, referring to Tony Pedregon, used to joke, “I hired my own assassin.” Can Steve Torrence say he invited his own assassin?

This is who our readers believe will be the champions this year courtesy of our ARP Question of the Week. #DragRacingNews #dragracing #NHRA #NHRAFinals - https://t.co/uHWUFa1gE6 pic.twitter.com/6smOKQmKf9

— Competition Plus (@competitionplus) November 16, 2019