When you've been mentored as Daniel Wilkerson has, success becomes a natural byproduct. Along with sophomore Funny Car driver Chad Green, the second-generation tuner who sometimes makes cameo-driving appearances is a chip off the old block.

Wilkerson serves as Green's tuner and team manager, who, except for a Sunday snafu in Pomona, has been running and winning like a seasoned veteran team.

Saturday afternoon, while racing in the #2Fast2Tasty Challenge during the NHRA Winternationals in Pomona, Ca., Green drove to victory in the Funny Car portion of the race-within-a-race.

"I didn't realize how hungry they were for a win until after we won that deal," Wilkerson said on the CompetitionPlus POWER HOUR show. "They were absolutely stoked. I was really proud of them. I was super happy for them. But they were super stoked to get that win. Now, as soon as you win something, obviously, you want to win something bigger. And then once you win that, you're going to want to win more because we've all been there; once you win one, it's like you're super excited for a week. Then you get to the next one and then you're mad you don't win that one. We're definitely hungry, and we're capable too, so when you're capable, it definitely adds a little bit to it."

Wilikerson credits his fuel upbringing, learning the ropes from the jack-of-all-trades fuel racer Tim Wilkerson. It's been said one can be a jack of all trades and master none of them. But in the elder Wilkerson, he's mastered them all from driving to tuning to team management, and has the wins to prove it.

Wilkerson readily admits his greatest lessons were learned in watching his father deal with the roller coaster of emotions drag racing can evoke.

"I've been dealing with the highs and lows for a long time being his son because when you race, as long as Tim's raced, you definitely get to experience all of it," Wilkerson explained. And with my, I don't want to say limited driving experience, but I drove an alcohol car for a while. We won the championship in '07, which I know was a long time ago, the Division 3 championship. So then the next year was a total mess, and I've had to live with that my whole career.

"So I definitely, I've got the experience of, man, this is the best thing ever. And then a month later I have no idea why I'm doing this to myself? And a lot of these, I say, kids, I feel like I'm an old man now; they haven't really got the ups and downs yet. So they're getting their first ups, so we'll see how we all deal with the downs."

If the emotional rollercoaster travels up, it must come down as Wilkerson fully expected. Last Sunday was his oops moment. The rev limiter was left on Green's engine and led to a first-round loss to, of all people, his father.

Wilkerson didn't need FoxSports analyst Tony Pedregon to call the move an amateur mistake to know it was one.

"It was on my birthday, was Sunday too, so forever now, my birthday's going to be the anniversary of by far the most humiliating and inertia-killing mistake I've ever made in my life," Wilkerson admitted. "Two semi-finals to start off with, we had a decent car, I think we definitely had something for Tim, and honestly, I have zero excuses and zero ideas.

"I checked that thing three times. Every time I try to do it, as soon as the body comes off before I walk away, I look at it, and then before I tell Chad to go get them, I always look at it. And I missed all three checks somehow, so it hurts. It's still very painful.

Days later, Wilkerson was still chapped.

"We were just eating dinner, I just looked at my wife and said, 'I can't believe I left that freaking throttle stop on," Wilkerson said. "It still hurts pretty bad, but to be the one that ruins the momentum is even worse because these kids are hungry to work on that car. I'm going to get over it, we'll be over it by Vegas, and by the time we get to Vegas, we got a pretty badass tuneup for Vegas too, so I think we'll be a threat there."

Wilkerson isn't superstitious but is intent on keeping his routines to the letter of the law, more so now than ever. If you're watching the team's starting line routine, once he prepares his driver, he runs to the back of the car.

"I joke around about superstitions, but I'm not super superstitious, but like the stupid throttle stop on Sunday, when you get out of a routine, you miss something," Wilkerson said. "I try to have the same routine every single time. That way, nothing gets missed. I made a run, or I let Chad make a run with no oil pressure last year, one time too. So that gets added to the routine. I triple-check and make sure we have oil pressure. I look down, and I was looking at the dash too, but I make sure there's oil pressure, make sure the throttle stop's off.

"It's happened to me a couple of times where something kicks me off my routine, and I miss something. So for me, the most important part about the sequence is not superstition, it's making sure everything gets done up there, in a timely fashion, and you look like you know what you're doing."

Wilkerson understands that one mistake does not sink the ship forever, and despite the Pomona miscue, this team is performing remarkably well.

"We're a young team, but we have tons of experience with Tim Wilkerson helping us out," Wilkerson said. "It seems like we flipped a little bit of a switch between this year and last year, but we've bought a lot of parts from Tim and did a notebook for them. Parts were very thick, so we had a lot of data to look at, and we had a lot of help from Tim. I know a lot of guys that buy setups, but this setup we got from Tim was tried and true tested; he went over 330 miles an hour, six runs in a row with it at Pomona."

"It's not like we all started from scratch. We had a tremendous amount of help from Tim and all of his guys too. They're instrumental in the success we've had so far, really."

The one thing Wilkerson can do that his father cannot is brag about his driver without appearing cocky. He's very high on Green's abilities and how they put him in the upper echelon [our words, not his] of nitro tuners.

"When we started, he was good," Wilkerson said. He's got good instincts and stuff when we started, but that last year he acted like he's been driving for 20 years. This dude, if he wants to deep stage, he deep stages. If he wants to shallow stage, he shallow stages. The thing had holes out last year all the time and he scared the crap out of it. I drove his car, it was having a whole lot of issues. So we changed some parts and I drove it to the match race and tried to run over the cones. So, I got out and immediately texted him. I was like, 'Dude, thanks again for being so badass because this is harder than it looks."

"He's awesome as a driver. He's awesome as an owner. The thing he doesn't want for anything, that car gets, if it needs parts, they're on there. I've worked on ours, and I've been around a lot of people just in the pits, and not every team that's self-funded is getting the top-quality stuff that we are. So that's a big shout-out to Chad. Getting the top stuff, getting the right stuff is the first step."

Some might argue it was getting Daniel Wilkerson as his crew chief that was the first step.