Bob Tasca III knew his team found something in Sonoma, Calif., last Sunday.

The veteran nitro Funny Car owner/driver took home the title in California wine country and his team continued to roll in the lone qualifying session Friday night at the Flav-R-Pac NHRA Northwest Nationals near Seattle.

Tasca took the provisional No. 1 qualifying spot with a 3.965-second time at 319.82 mph on a warm track.

“It was a great call by the guys,” Tasca said. “I asked the guys what they thought it would run (co-crew chief Jon) Schaffer said ‘we are going to try and run a mid-90 and it ran a .96. When you can get to that level of confidence with your set-up and the team, you become a pretty dang good car out there race in and race out. We will take one run at a time. I don’t know if it will hold. I looked at the run and we should be able to pick it up to be honest with you. I think we will run quicker in the same conditions (Saturday).”

If this holds for Tasca it would be his first No. 1 qualifier of the season and the eighth of his career. Tasca arrived in Seattle fifth in the points standings.

“Listen, we wished we would have picked things up a little bit sooner,” Tasca said. “The bottom line is that we ended last year winning Pomona and we were disappointed we didn’t run harder earlier in the Countdown. We just needed to work on our set-up. We saw what the top cars were doing early in the season and we knew we didn’t have a set-up that could run with them. Heck, we might have looked a little silly, but we don’t look silly anymore.

“We’ve just worked really hard getting this car to run early numbers and Sonoma was an opportunity to show that because those are the conditions we are going to see at the end of the year. I said to Mike (Neff, co-crew chief) and Jon when I got to the racetrack this morning I said, ‘Do you guys know how to slow this thing down now?’ Clearly it was on mean in Sonoma. They said they could slow it down. The hardest part of these cars is getting them to run early numbers. If you get it to run hard early, you can really kind of tune it from 300 feet on. That’s where I think we have a really good handle on this car right now.”

Taking a step back – early in the season – to make progress for the long-term wasn’t easy for Tasca.

“It was tough,” Tasca said. “We have very high expectations of our program, and we have championship-caliber people throughout, especially with Mike and Jon leading the way. They are methodical and I’m thrilled with the performance of this car, and I truly believe the best is yet to come. This is, counting Sonoma, our 10th run on that set-up. We have a lot of data that we can learn from as we go, but we are very confident coming into this weekend.

“It would be nice to qualify No. 1 here for a couple of reasons. No. 1 qualifier gives you a pretty good advantage coming into Sunday.”

This is the first time an NHRA national event took place in Seattle since 2019. But that what wasn’t Tasca was concerned about.

“The only place we look at the data from the year before is Denver,” Tasca said. “The set-up is so different. When we come into this race (in Seattle) we are looking at the data from last weekend. This is a great racetrack, and the air is good here. It is a lot hotter than I ever remember in Seattle and the guys were able to slow it down enough to run mid-90s and that was good enough.

“I did more driving on that run than I did all of Sonoma combined. On a 135-degree track, it is loose. As much as the car is hooked up it will move around. There was a lot of glare on that last run and sun is almost in your eyes. It made some moves, particularly after halftrack and I had to make some quick adjustments. That’s what we are supposed to do as drivers, right? They give us the best set-up they can give us and we go get it to the finish line and don’t hit nothin’.”