If Leah Pritchett learned one lesson early in her career, it's to understand the regular season is a marathon and not a sprint.
 
Pritchett, who led the NHRA Top Fuel points earlier in the season, has now dropped to third behind Antron Brown and Tony Schumacher headed into the tenth race of the season. Peaking too early in the season is the least of her worries.
 
"If we can peak in the beginning of the season I think we can peak multiple times throughout the year," Pritchett explained. "[Fox TV pit reporter] Amanda [Busick] had asked last week if I was discouraged with qualifying last week when we weren’t on top and we weren’t in the bottom half of the field and I still have that same mentality of ‘absolutely not."
 
"I think it’s good that we had a small peak at the beginning of the season – call it small, call it big – because it shows that we can do it. So if we did it then we can do it again. But from a marathon standpoint, I’m just going to cut it up into a lot of mini sprints because I’m a terrible long distance runner and I like to sprint."
 
Learning you win some, and lose some is not hard to accept for Pritchett.
 
"I don’t think that part is tough for me to accept at all because racing for so long and understanding that, I’d actually told [Papa John founder] John Schnatter that in the off season, I think it was after we won the first two, I said “we’re doing really, really well. Not to say that’s abnormal but this is a perfect storm, a perfect case scenario; we’re not going to win them all.”
 
"He said, “well don’t say that. You won’t win them all if you don’t think you can win them all.”
 
"I said, 'touche."
 
"We go to the race every single day thinking, knowing we can win but, last time I checked with Lewis Bloom, no one's won every race of the entire season, ever."