Rob Wendland, crew chief for Amalie Oil Dragster owner-driver Terry McMillen, has issued a challenge . . . to his own team.

“Earlier this year, I said our goal was to be in the top 10,” Wendland said. “And I told them I think we need to change our goals to top five. With the way this car runs and track prep and all these other things, we could be champions. And everybody was ‘Whoa.’ We just need to do better first round. Qualifying is very important to your position. If this team could get past first round, I’d make it pretty ugly on the rest of them. That’s the way we run.”

McMillen looked back to the 2017 Seattle race in which he was runner-up to Antron Brown. That weekend seemed to turn on a switch for his young crew hands who were starting to work in unison but needed confirmation that they were progressing.

“I think overall the team won. What happened is that they all believed in Rob and what we do. I think what that final-round appearance did was give them a confidence. They really just said, “We got this now.’ It’s pretty much changed his position and what he does. He can spend more time on the car now because he doesn’t have to come out here and worry about if the car is put together right. Boot camp is over,” he said. “They picked the ball up and they ran with it, and that’s what’s changing. Now we’re giving him the chance to do what he’s really good at. Not that he’s not good at anything else. He can sit there, and I’ll watch him analyze each run, every increment of that car and then he comes up with a better solution. He’s got confidence in the team. Their confidence came when they went to the final round and we outran them. I think from then on, it was our turning point for the rest. You look at it now: we’re second in final-round appearances to Torrence. That’s not a bad deal.”

Wendland said prior to Monday's monumental Indy Top Fuel win, “My biggest satisfaction here was winning Vegas. And that was for the team, because a lot of them never won a race. Bob [crew chief Peck] has been out here for 15 or whatever years and never won a race. The other ones, they’ve had no part in that. It was really funny. I tell this story a lot. So Steve Johnson came up to me and he goes, “Hey, they always have the drivers up on stage. How cool would it be to have your team up there?” And I go, “Do they do that now? I don’t know. I’ve been out of the picture for awhile.” And he said, “No, but I think I could arrange it.” So he went to all the team guys and said, “Hey, we’re getting you guys all on stage.” They had no idea if we could do it or not. So they introduce Terry and here comes the whole team up behind him. And here I am standing out in the crowd, watching them celebrate this moment. To me, that was awesome, because I know how hard this team has worked to get to that point.

“I always say we work twice as hard as any of these other guys, because we have to service so much in the weekend – because we don’t have this big old giant depth of parts like some of these big teams have,” he said. “So we service a lot of stuff we have right then. We don’t pull from as big an inventory. Since Sonoma of last year our parts usage has probably been half of what it had been a couple years prior. I think we had a defective part in the engine and we didn’t realize it and we got a good deal on it. So it was hard to push that thing off to the side and I think it cost Terry a tremendous amount of money over the past five years. As long as we got that dialed in and, like Terry said, the confidence in the team [rose].”

Winning the Chevrolet Performance NHRA U.S. Nationals on Monday, took the confidence to a level they could have only dreamed.