Part-time driver Blake Alexander has fielded the question more often than he cares to. But he said the fact he might have qualified for the Countdown had he not been scheduled to skip the Seattle and Brainerd races “doesn’t bother me that much.”

The driver of Bob Vandergriff Racing’s LoCo Cookers said, “I think it’s just we want to show up and be able to win, and if we spend all of our money going down the road at events that we don’t have sponsorship for, it’s not going to help us.”

The team owner is engaged in the business side of racing far more than the emotional, romantic aspect of it. Alexander won at Norwalk, Ohio, and Sonoma, Calif., was runner-up at Atlanta, and recorded a pair of semifinal finishes in only six appearances this year. But Vandergriff wasn’t swayed enough to deviate from his business plan. And his young driver said he understands that.

“People have tried that out here,” Alexander said, “and I think you can see that it wears down their inventory of parts. And the income that you have off of the winnings doesn’t really pay for the next steps that you need to take to continue winning. It’s all about having good partnerships that are thriving and do it in the right places where they want you to be.”

But surely Alexander has some pangs of yearning.

“Yeah, it would have been cool. I definitely won’t deny that,” he said. Just as quickly he said, “It doesn’t keep me up at night. There are some days that I was home and I had a great time being home with my wife. I can’t complain. It’s nice that we won last time I raced.”

He said, “It’s my best year drag racing ever. We aren’t done yet. We come here with every intention to winning the first round and then start mixing it up tomorrow and see what happens. Just because we won twice it’s not like all we’re doing is forgetting about it now. Because everyone else, there’s congratulations in order for doing well, but at the same time everybody’s going to start forgetting about it. So we need to be focused on the next task at hand, which is winning Indy.

“There’s two races that have happened since then and another first-time winner [Billy Torrence, at Brainerd]. Life goes on, and the sport will go on,” Alexander said. “We want to continue to be a part of it and keep working hard towards the next steps.”

Those next steps aren’t finalized yet.

‘We’re working on everything right now with plans to expand with Pronto and some of our other sponsors. We don’t have everything ironed out yet, but we’re going to expand and we’ll definitely be out here more,” Alexander said.

He said a full schedule isn’t likely to be on the agenda for 2019: “I think we’ll come close. We probably won’t, though. Just because you’re at three-quarters of the way there, you still have to find seven or eight events to cover. I’ve had meetings that would do that, but that doesn’t mean that everything’s signed, sealed, and delivered yet.”

Alexander said he’s “very involved in” the sponsorship-procurement process. “That’s the only reason why I’ve ever drag raced,” he said.