Three-time and current Top Fuel champion Antron Brown said people ask him what his defining moment was last year, and his answer often surprises people. He replies, “the St. Louis race.” Puzzled, people come back with “What? You lost in the first round at that race.”

Oh, he remembers. He reminds them that he and his Matco Tools/Toyota/U.S. Army team had a strong run and lost to Shawn Langdon by a mere three-thousandths of a second.

“We could have beaten any other car but two cars, and we happened to race one of them. We messed up in qualifying,” Brown said, lamenting that if had earned a more advantageous position on the ladder, “we would have been on to the next round. If we qualified in our normal spot, we wouldn’t even be talking about it.

“The cool part is it was like a wake-up call. We stayed after and tested. It wasn’t like we needed to test,” Brown said. What his team needed to do right away was to invigorate themselves. They decided, he said, “that we were going to come out of the box charging. We ain’t going to come out twinkletoes. We’re going to go out and throw the hammer down. From now on, that’s what we’re going to do.”

And that mindset didn’t end with the season or with Brown’s championship speech at the year-end banquet in November. It rolled out of the trailer here at Chandler, Ariz., along with the dragster, in the hearts and minds of crew chiefs Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald, assistant crew chief Brad Mason, and each crew member on that team. It translated to Brown firing the first title-defense salvo here in the preseason testing called Nitro Spring Training.

With a 3.701-second elapsed time at 323.97 mph on the 1,000-foot course near Phoenix, which improved his previous pass of an equally impressive 3.77-second E.T., Brown threw that hammer down. No one was going to call him Twinkletoes.

It was just the opening day of the three-day test period. “But the good part is getting the cobwebs broke out," Brown said. "The guys didn’t skip a beat, but when you don’t drive one of these monsters for two months and you get back in, I can honestly tell you when I stepped on the gas pedal and I looked away from the tree, and I looked down the race track, usually I can see the 60-foot clock cone going by. By the time I caught up with the race car, I saw the 330-foot cone.

"So, when you get back in and you’re on a low .70 run, and we shut off and went .75 though the first pass, I mean it definitely caught my attention,” he said. “But by the third run we made a really good run, like a .701.

“We started out of the box trying something different. And the next run we did something else different. And that last run we did something else different. So we got Brian, Mark, Brad, and all of our crew, they got a list of stuff that we’re doing. So each run they’re going to keep on turning, do a little of this, do a little of that. That’s what testing’s all about. We have a great combination that worked from last year, but they’re just trying to make things better. That’s why we come out and test and do what we do,” he said.

“And the track is plenty good,” according to Brown. “There’s still more out there. But we made a really good, good quality run. I tell you what, it gives you a little confidence boost.”

Brown said he has prepared each day for these days during the offseason.

“I work hard to make myself right for them [the crew] so we can be right on race day,” he said.

That’s not an exaggeration. Imagine a racer trying to match Brown’s intensity and beat at him at his own game of exhaustive physical and “focus” work. Here’s what they’re up against: Brown works with his usual personal trainer, but he has added another. He plays basketball, and buddy Tony Pedregon, who comes out one night a week to shoot, verified Brown’s intensity. “He’s a frickin’ wolf!” Pedregon, himself a one-time aspiring boxer and two-time Funny Car champion, said.

But they live in Indiana, where basketball and auto racing of all kinds are rivals for the most popular interests. So both have adopted Hoosier Hysteria – and Brown said it is helping his driving: “I got my endurance up a lot better than in previous years.”

Brown, who’ll be 41 years old in March, increased his court time from one day a week to three mid-week days and a game on Sunday for a church-affiliated league as a teammate to younger athletes, many of them college-aged.

“So I’ve been running a lot. It helps me. I wouldn’t run that hard on a treadmill, trust me,” he said.

Brown has one motivator.

“I hate losing. I’ve always hated losing,’ he said. “And when I get defeated, I always look back. I’m my own worst critic. I always try to find a way and say, ‘How can I get better? How can I learn from when I lose?’ ”

The beauty of it for him is that he doesn’t have to fight for supremacy or make victories happen all by himself, for this is not an individual sport.

“When you play a team sport, which NHRA drag racing is - there’s not just one person who can make this happen – it’s very seldom you find every single guy on the team shares the same desire. Everybody has different mottoes, like: ‘I’m just happy to be on a great team. Man, we’re doing good.’

Those are ‘come-along guys.’ We don’t have any of those guys,” Brown said. “Everybody here is to put the work in to fight to win. When you get that, that’s when you get this special team. Those teams don’t come around every day.

“Brian, Mark, Brad, ‘Red,’ all the crew guys, we all share that desire. When you get that, no matter how hard it gets, how hard we fall, we get back up even stronger,” Brown said. Of anyone wishing to replace him as champion, he said, “They’ve got to get to that realm where they want it just as bad as we do – but not just want it. They’re going to do things to go get it.”

Brown went after it both days of testing here. After Thursday’ performance, he said he didn’t make a full pass but “we almost did. I shut off at 800 feet. We didn’t go all the way down, but it was good enough to run a [3].75 at 300 miles per hour, 307. I tell you what, it catches your attention, you know what I mean. Hey, it’s just like diving in the swimming pool. You can’t ease in, you might as well just go jump in. Back home where it’s going to be cold and you know it, you may as well go jump in and get used to it. That’s always been our theory, my theory. I couldn’t be more happy or more stoked just to be back out here, doing what I love to do.”