Although Jack Beckman came up short this season of winning his second career nitro Funny Car world championship, he isn’t dwelling on the missed opportunity.

Beckman arrived at the season-ending NHRA Finals fourth in the points and out of title contention, trailing leader Ron Capps by 151 points.

Yet, none of that mattered to Beckman on Friday.

He clocked a blistering 3.865-second run at 332.84 mph to set both ends of the track record at Auto Club Raceway.

“We had hot conditions all day and the track definitely wasn’t the best it has ever been, and us running new track records is a testament to how fast the Funny Cars have gotten in the last year-and-a-half,” Beckman said.

Beckman, who pilots the Infinite Hero Dodge for Don Schumacher Racing, has been No. 1 qualifier five times this season and 20 times in his career, which is highlighted by his 2012 world championship.

“It was an amazing run, not just for the 1,000 feet we were accelerating, but also because Jungle Pam Hardy backed me from the burnout. She is an absolute icon and legend in the sport and never drove a race car. It was a bit of a pinch me moment. I’m still a huge fan and as I’m backing up, I was like ‘that’s Jungle Pam backing me up.’ I kind of had to smack myself in the cheek and say OK get your act together, it is time to make the run. With 1,000-foot, sometimes you have time to glance up at the scoreboard as you go by and it looked pretty good to me. When I stepped off, the drive shaft hit me in the butt, which is underneath the seat and it’s probably not a good thing that it does that, but it is letting you know that car is torqued up so hard and that chassis is arching so much, that when you step off right as the chutes hit the thing comes down and does that, and right about that time I saw the 3.86 on the scoreboard. Everything felt fine. Pomona is a different race track and it really keeps you on your toes.”

Beckman acknowledged his performance in qualifying Friday was a good step in the right direction for this team in more ways than one.

“We ran a six-disc test in preseason testing and Jimmy (Prock, Beckman’s crew chief) just didn’t feel like we had enough data,” Beckman said. “Let me tell you when you have 1,800 runs of data on a five-disc clutch, even though you’re changing motors, and superchargers and chassis, you still have this inherent understanding of how it works. You go to the six-disc and it looks better, better, better, worse, better, worse, better, better, worse. It throws you a curveball, and it comes a time when you say I’m committed to this thing and we will struggle our way through it or I’m going back to what works, and we went back to the five-disc. Last year we went back to the five-disc after testing in that preseason and look how well we did. What happens is a five-disc is three new and two used discs and we are completely out of those three discs we ran last year and we cycled new ones in and we just can’t make it work consistently. So, he (Prock) said you know what, the heck with it. After Vegas, we threw the six-disc back in and tested it and came here (to Pomona). We are so new with the six-disc we didn’t know what we could get away with, so we were soft on Q1. We got a little bit more aggressive on Q2.”