Chris McGaha heard the old line that once a racer earns his first victory, the triumphs tend to come in bunches or at least more easily.

But what he didn’t know until recently is that in between them, he could become swept up in a tsunami of secret-keeping, sleuthing, scheming, squabbling, and even spilling the beans about a competitor’s future moves – all against a promising Countdown to the Championship backdrop.

Ultimately, what McGaha did discover is that he can win despite distractions and the departure of his crew chief. He realized Brian “Lump” Self’s defection to Elite Motorsports wasn’t a team-shredding event but rather simply a familiar beat in the rhythm of the sport. And he learned his own capacity to forgive.

What started as a rumor McGaha heard at last month’s U.S. Nationals turned into the unraveling of his professional relationship with Self. The two forged a winning combination at Sonoma and Seattle to lift McGaha to third in the standings and lock down a berth in the playoffs. Within eight weeks, Self had switched to a rival team.

Owner-driver McGaha and Elite team owner Richard Freeman went to war with each other. McGaha accused Freeman of poaching his personnel and behaving cryptically by arranging a test session Sunday night at St. Louis following eliminations. Freeman didn’t like McGaha’s meddling in his attempt to buy Mopar parts from the Deric Kramer team, who operate out of McGaha’s shop at Odessa, Texas. It escalated into what McGaha said was a loud conversation “that at the time wasn’t very pleasant. Since then he has apologized to me. But we did get very heated on the phone, me and him did.” And McGaha took a poke at Freeman on national TV, likening him to cartoon character Eugene Krabs, the greedy, unscrupulous boss of Sponge Bob Square Pants.

McGaha won the Reading race, the third of six in the Countdown, with veteran Pro Stock tuner Tommy Utt on loan from Joey Grose’s team. That moved him 104 points within leader Erica Enders, buoying his title hopes.

In an interview this past week with Joe Castello of WFO Radio that’s available through Competition Plus, McGaha traced the trouble. But he looked forward as the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series action moves to Texas Motorplex near Dallas.

“We call it karma: what goes around comes around,” the Harlow Sammons of Odessa Camaro driver said. “And sometimes, I guess, it takes longer to go around. But maybe, in this instance, it didn’t take as long. You just sit back and you look at it and you think, ‘Did that just really happen? Did all that just happen from my last win to this win?’ ”

Seeds of the Reading victory took root at Indianapolis, McGaha said, but he said he was suspicious before then that something was amiss.

“We left Seattle. Everything seemed normal,” he said.

Self, who lives in Oklahoma, used to drive to West Texas on NHRA’s idle weekends and work in McGaha’s engine shop at Odessa. He did so after the Seattle race. However, McGaha said, “When you got to Brainerd, you could just get that gut feeling: something seems different. But it also seemed like business as usual. That feeling nagged him even at the St. Louis event more than a month later, especially after Self didn’t make his usual trip to Odessa.

Back at Indianapolis, when McGaha got to Lucas Oil Raceway the Sunday morning of the U.S. Nationals, he expected his only headache to be an engine swap. But he got a bigger headache as he knocked over the first domino in a chain reaction of events.

“The first thing I hear is Allen Johnson’s losing his Mopar deal,” McGaha said. “And I was like, ‘Wow – that’s kind of shocking.’ You look at rumors and you think, ‘Does it have traction?’ Again, it’s all rumors, and you’re thinking, ‘That’s just a rumor.’ Well, the next thing you hear out of it is there’s going to be a Mopar team run out of Elite Performance [Freeman’s operation]  . . . they’re going to run two Mopar cars and they’re going to run two Chevrolets.”

Trying to ignore it all, McGaha said he thought back to the rumblings that the NHRA was going to impose sweeping changes on the Pro Stock class and how the majority of racers pooh-poohed the hint of it. “Well,” McGaha said, “Every rumor I’ve heard lately has come true, it seems like.

“So, being the proactive guy I am,” he said, “I walk over to the American Ethanol team, who has a Dodge program that is based out of my shop.” He asked the Kramer family “if they had been approached to sell any of their Dodge parts. And lo and behold, they had.”

McGaha said he urged the Kramers to say no to any kind of a deal like that, telling them, “It’d probably be in your best interest not to do it, because they’re going to promise you the moon and give you nothing. That’s just the way it works out here. So the only thing we can do is take care of ourselves.” Then he told his own team, which still included Self, about his concerns. And they went back to focusing on their performance at the U.S. Nationals.

It was grim, as was his next round of gossip. “The rumors keep flying. You sweep them under the rug and go on – until you get that one phone call that punches you in the gut,” McGaha said. What he was hearing was that same rumor – only this time the caller informed him Self’s name was linked to the rumor. So he called Self, and he said the conversation went something like this:

“I hear you’re leaving.”

“Nope, I’m not leaving. You’re going to have to fire me. I’m not leaving.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’m dedicated. I’m 100 percent in.”

McGaha said, “You believe in your heart and you go with it.” But his suspicion continued after Self indicated he would come to Odessa and help repair the engine that broke at Indianapolis. He didn’t, and McGaha said it was his understanding Self had personal matters to attend to.

“Next thing I know, he’s out racing himself the very next weekend while we’re here at the shop, working on the engines. It is what it is at that point,” McGaha said.

They attended the Charlotte race and had a cooperative, if frustrating, weekend, fixing another engine glitch. Meanwhile, McGaha continued to get wind of rumors that Self was going to depart the team. “But all along you’re thinking, ‘No, no, no – He’s telling me he’s not leaving.’ ”

Then came the unconventional post-race test session for Elite Motorsports. McGaha said he recognizes that does not violate any rules, but it led to the confrontation with Freeman. In that conversation, Freeman assured him, in McGaha’s words, “that he wasn’t trying to get my guy.” McGaha said he accepted that but more text messages and phone calls and gossip flooding his way forced him before the Reading race to confront Self again. That’s when Self’s reply changed, McGaha said, “from ‘I’m never leaving’ to ‘I’m thinking about [leaving] at the end of the year.’

“That’s when I told him, ‘[It] probably would be best if you just go now and we part ways, call it quits right here.’ A guy can tell you his heart is in it . . . [but] if he’s going somewhere else, it’s just not worth it to me at that point [to have him finish the season]. I’m better off just going down the road, kicking rocks,” McGaha said. “And that’s how I arrived at where I was the Wednesday and Thursday before Reading.”

McGaha reached out to Utt, who still is committed to Californian Joey Grose’s program. Grose gave his blessing for the Reading weekend. And McGaha ended up in the winners circle.

Grose is entered at all three remain races. So he and McGaha likely with share Utt's work.

“We totally understand,” McGaha said, assuming that Utt “is probably going to be doing some co-crew-chiefing, which I have no problem with. That was an agreement that we had up front. We’ll finish the season and then sit down and talk about the directions we all want to go.”

As for whether McGaha can overlook Self’s move or his method of informing him and whether he'll be able  to interact with him socially or professionally again, McGaha said, “I don’t know that I could right this second. Eventually, we will put our differences aside. It’ll be one of them deals [where] we’ll act like nothing ever happened and go on about our business.

“I guess you can’t knock somebody for chasing the American dream and wanting to better themselves,” he said, lamenting only that “it’s just sometimes it has to be at others’ expense.”

He shrugged off any bitterness.

“That’s the nature of the sport. I knew it when I got into it. That’s why I tried not to let it get me down,” McGaha said. “Yeah, it probably punched down on a personal level, but I had to put my differences aside on that and do what was best for us.”

By “us,” he meant the team.

Through it all, he said, “It definitely makes you realize our original deal is still here. We just had a piece break off, and we had to put a new piece back on it. That’s how I look at it.” He said soon it will be a mere blip on the 2015 radar, considering “all the struggles you’ve had to endure just to get there, to win that first one, anyway.”

McGaha told Castello he plans to stay in the Pro Stock class.

“Oh, yeah. I ain’t got nothin’ better to do,” he said. “The only thing that might happen to us is . . . if business gets bad enough, if business continues to be slow, you might see me become a part-timer. But I’ll be there. I will be there until NHRA tells me I can’t come back.”  

He said he isn’t too concerned about the newly mandated technical rules that will take effect Jan. 1, 2016: “The only rule change out of the whole deal that I never really agreed with was the 10.5 [rev limiter]. It’s not a back-breaker for me. I don’t care much for it. The rest of it, you just need time to adapt to it. It’s another bump in the road. So be it.”   

The Reading results, he said, “did send the signal out. It proved he [Self] was very capable, and it proved I was very capable. And it proved that anybody that is on this team is very capable.”

That, in turn, gave him extra confidence in racing and momentum in the marketing effort: “Your contract can get a lot bigger.”

As the Dallas race looms in his home state, McGaha said, “I have momentum now. All we’ve got to do is just keep doing what we were doing at Reading. Let’s keep staying focused. Let’s keep chipping away. Whatever [life] throws at us, we’ll just keep overcoming it. We need Erica to go out early. If she can continue to go out early and me and Greg [No. 2-ranked Anderson] can keep doing what we’re doing, it could get interesting in a hurry.”

Of course, that’s as if it hasn’t been interesting enough for him lately.