Cruz Pedregon, the veteran Funny Car owner-driver and two-time champion, believes he finally has found a crew chief and ideological racing soulmate in Aaron Brooks, a man whose team presence will allow him to step back  bit and enjoy the operation he has worked so hard to build.

And he had only one word to describe how that feels: “Halle-frickin’-luljah!”

The Snap-on Tools Toyota Camry boss didn’t make a pass in Thursday’s first on-track opportunity of 2017 at the Nitro Spring Training event. But he’s convinced that once he gets rolling, he’ll be the Cruz Pedregon fans have expected to see winning and fellow racers have expected to threaten them.

“We’ll be successful. The question is how soon will we get up to speed. There are some variables. Aaron has tuned a dragster for five years [at the now-parked Morgan Lucas Racing]. I fully expect this car to be running with the top group of cars immediately. And yes, I said it,” Pedregon said with a proud nod for punctuation.

He’s brimming with optimism, especially following a 2016 season he characterized as “just the bottom of the barrel” and a confession that he thought that in “2015 we pretty much sucked, too.”

With Brooks’ arrival, he believes that will change. Besides, he said, “There’s only one way to go, and that’s up.” However, no matter what his past two seasons had brought, Pedregon is confident Brooks is the no-longer-missing piece to his team puzzle.

Hiring the latest wrenching wunderkind following the NHRA Finals last November,

Pedregon said, “was a no-brainer. As an owner, when Aaron became available, I was over there [at the Morgan Lucas Racing pit] as soon as the last pair of cars ran. Within a half-hour, I was talking with Aaron. He was pitted right behind us. So there was no question [he was going to try to hire Brooks]. It wasn’t like Aaron came to me, looking for a job. I was like OMG, as the kids say nowadays, this is the guy I need over here. He’s a blue-chip, top-five guy.”

He said he thought someone else would snap up Brooks first. “I thought, ‘Well, there goes that. It was a good idea.’ Fast forward a month – it all came to fruition,” he said.

In conversations with top-fight tuner Alan Johnson, seeking advice for restoring his Camry to championship contention, Pedregon said, Brooks’ name came up repeatedly. “All this was happening in concert with what I was already thinking,” he said.  

Brooks on board is a reality, and Pedregon said he admires his crew chief’s professionalism and philosophy.

“He’s here. He wants to be here. He believes in the operation. He’s a Funny Car guy, like I am. We all love dragsters. I drove dragsters,” Pedregon said. “He said he’s ‘looking forward to mixing it up’ with these other Funny Car guys. And I like the term ‘mixing it up.’ That’s a competitor for you. I know what he means by that. He wants to beat their asses is what he wants to do. That’s my attitude.”

Pedregon likened the NHRA offseason to the NFL’s or MLB’s free agency free-for-all and said securing Brooks was a coup.

“A lot of teams are graded by who scored the biggest free agent, who upgraded. You can argue it back and forth, but I absolutely think we came out of this with Aaron Brooks – Are you kidding me? I couldn’t be happier.

“The thing that I’ve always known but that reared its head the last couple of years is that a lot of what you see out on the track – not only our car but any car – is what you do back at the shop, how you prepare. The product that you see out at the track is what you did, whether it’s training for months or lifting weights with athletes. In auto racing, it’s ‘How did you prepare? How is the car put together?’ And that’s where Aaron is going to take my team to another level,” he said.

“While I enjoyed success as a tuner-owner-driver,” Pedregon said, “I never would be a guy at the shop, for example, assembling the management box – which is the brains of the race car – or designing things. I’m truly a driver and an owner. I can tune with the best of them, in my opinion, but I never lived at the shop. I never was that guy who was in there daily, working with the guys and building the machine. I didn’t take the position of running and tuning the car as I saw fit just because I wanted to, like I wanted so badly to be so busy that I wouldn’t have time for the fans, wouldn’t have time for anything.  I did that because I have a vision. And he absolutely fits the vision.

“Aaron literally dazzled me,” he said. “My car hasn’t had that attention to detail. He built this car like a doctor would do surgery. That’s the kind of guy I want.

“I have a lot of faith in Aaron.  Part of what makes Aaron successful is his preparation,” Pedregon said. “The first thing you have to do as an owner is create fast horse, a fast car. You can put any jockey on a donkey and it’s not going to run out front. You can put any jockey on Secretariat and it’s still going to be a fast horse. That’s the way cars are.”

What will make the difference this season, he said, are “what you don’t see and what isn’t talked about that goes into these cars.”

Brooks was a breath of fresh air for Pedregon.

“There’s not one crew chief I’ve hired since 2000, when I formed my own team [to whom] I didn’t bring up the word ‘preparation’ as being the most important thing. Now, whether that got carried out is debatable. And in a lot of cases it absolutely did not - it went in one ear and right out the other. There’s only a few guys capable that could satisfy at least my hunger for what I call preparation. This guy [Brooks] is one of them. I could count on one hand the guys in this pit area who have that kind of capability.

“I support Aaron. We came together and formed a bond. He’s going to be here for years to come. And some things we didn’t have to talk about. Some things we didn’t have to say,”

Pedregon said. “Our first meeting we were going to meet for lunch for an hour, and it lasted five hours. Obviously, there was chemistry, a lot of things [about which] we thought alike. It’s me recognizing what the team really needed. I’m going to support him. You say, ‘How do you support him?’ Buy the things he thinks are important to making the car go as fast as it possibly can. I know what we’re up against. While he was racing Top Fuel, I was sitting here, a lot of times getting my rear end handed to me. So I know what it takes.”

If Pedregon thinks he’s lucky to have Brooks, he understands that Brooks, too, has a prime opportunity. Brooks was the Funny Car crew chief for Del Worsham at Alan Johnson Racing, and he was assistant crew chief under Mike Neff for Gary Scelzi when the Oakley-sponsored driver won the 2005 Funny Car championship at Don Schumacher Racing. He worked with Frank Hawley, Melanie Troxel, and Don Prudhomme Racing in the category, as well. So he joined current crew chiefs Jimmy Prock, Todd Okuhara, Richard Hogan, Mike Green, Jim Head, Brian Corradi, Mark Oswald, Todd Smith, and Mike Kloeber with both Top Fuel and Funny Car experience. So Brooks has a chance to show his talent and versatility.

Pedregon said, “He’s in a great spot here. He’s got an owner who believes in him. Luckily, with Snap-on and my other sponsors, we have a budget that it takes. He has come in here and -  I’m not giving him a blank sheet but pretty close to it, because he thinks the right way. He views racing the way I do.”