A race is never over until it’s over, which is what Jeg Coughlin Jr. learned the hard way at Houston Raceway Park.

Coughlin nailed final round opponent Ron Krisher in the ugliest of starting line reaction time battles, .025 to .116, and appeared to have a lock on his 43rd career victory at the NHRA O'Reilly Springnationals. Then the mechanical gremlins struck and Krisher raced by a coasting Coughlin. A race is never over until it’s over, which is what Jeg Coughlin Jr. learned the hard way at Houston Raceway Park.

Coughlin nailed final round opponent Ron Krisher in the ugliest of starting line reaction time battles, .025 to .116, and appeared to have a lock on his 43rd career victory at the NHRA O'Reilly Springnationals. Then the mechanical gremlins struck and Krisher raced by a coasting Coughlin.

"Our heads are held high," Coughlin said. "It's pretty rare when you have a nine-hundredths of a second advantage going by the 60-foot timer and not go on to win the race but the tires wadded up early and just knocked the momentum out of it. I felt them paddling in low gear, grabbed second real quick and that didn't help, so I shoved it into third as a last resort and it just didn't respond.

"We really felt like we solved a lot of our problems today and I was fully expecting a 6.57 or 6.58 in the final. We danced all day on the edge of what we could get away with and obviously we were just a tad too aggressive there."

Coughlin moved into second in the championship points lead, just 26 points behind point leader Jason Line.