Two-time NHRA Funny Car champion Ron Capps has been around drag racing long enough to know it's not how one starts a race but how they finish that counts. On Sunday, the NAPA Auto Parts-sponsored driver's race day started off ugly with an uppercase U. 

Capps entered eliminations as the No. 9 seeded driver and was on his way to victory over Paul Lee in the opening round when the engine grenaded in his Toyota Supra GR, causing severe damage to his new Funny Car body. If not for the quick thinking of a crewmember who guided him down the track with his disheveled race car at 270-plus miles per hour, he might have crossed the centerline or collided with Lee. 

"It's funny. I do some SIM racing with a bunch of NASCAR people on Monday nights," Capps explained. "TJ Majors, he's a legendary spotter in the NASCAR series; he races with us. I literally, when it blew up, it also got the windshield, and I couldn't see, and that was my biggest concern. I didn't know where Paul Lee was.

"I got on my radio, and I said, 'I can't see." 

"And [crewman] Travis, at the starting line, got on his radio and guided me at 280 miles an hour to a stop, almost like a remote control car. He just kept telling me I'd be all right. Just left or right. Keep it; you're all right. I literally could not see, it had gotten fuel all over, and it cracked the windshield. I couldn't unbuckle and lean out to the side to try to see. So that was a scary moment as a driver. 

"What do you do? My first instinct was to unbuckle and then lean out, and you're like, 'Dummy, don't do that. That is not what you're supposed to do."

Capps and team saved the best for last, running the only three-second pass on race day to stop Tim Wilkerson in the final round. He ran a 3.984 elapsed time at 324.36 seconds in the final round to score the first race win in Funny Car for the new GR Supra. 

Much of the 2022 season has been dominated by Matt Hagan and Robert Hight, but on a muggy day on a track that required a seasoned driver and tuner, Capps reminded everyone he's still very much in the race for the championship.

"This year has been an emotional year, being now a team owner, having people to worry about, and just a lot of noise going on in the background for me, besides just showing up in my helmet," Capps explained. "The win in Vegas, I was still in shock, honestly. I mean, it was great. A couple of weeks afterwards, I was still in shock. We actually did this. It's an amazing thing. I'm living the dream, the American dream, small business owner, and I'm getting to do it in the sport I grew up in. So it's been fun.

"Today felt different because it just felt like we, not that we didn't earn the other one, we just worked really hard at this one. We knew that win for Toyota was out there. I almost felt a little bad because JR Todd's team, the DHL team, and Alexis and Del Worsham's team, they worked so hard on getting that Supra body out here."

Make no mistake, Capps loves the new Toyota Supra GR body, and as a freshman team owner, when he grenaded the engine in the first round, he was more concerned with the damage to it than his wallet.

"When it happened, I was so bummed," Capps said. "I was just kind of looking at the body like, 'oh, we spent so much time massaging and getting this brand new Supra body." 

"A lot of work went in. Yes, we got it. We got it mounted. But my guys, they spent so much time beyond what our manufacturer mounted it and all that stuff. There were a lot of man-hours, a lot of man-hours behind the scenes to get the car where we wanted it. I didn't even think about the money. I was just like, 'Oh, this body, oh my gosh". 

"I knew we had another one, and I was just devastated that we had hurt that body. It felt like I hurt something very close to me."

Refocusing after the incident was no problem for Capps, and as he headed into the final round, he knew his tuning duo of Dean Antonelli and John Medlen had a little special sauce in the tune-up. Following the first round snafu, Capps admits his car performed like a bracket car.

However, it returned to being a horsepower-breathing beast in the final round. He felt it in the seat of his pants following the final warmup. 

"We were rushed on the warmup for live TV," Capps said. "We warmed the car up and I sensed something in the motor. It was definitely hopped up more, I could tell. We had a thing, we always check with a clutch. I told Guido when we shut off, I go, 'It had more than it had all day of what we were talking about." 

"He said, 'I know. I had to make adjustments after every warmup in the staging lanes, and it came out perfect." 

"When it does that, it's going to get up and go. And that's not what you want on a track today, that heat and those bumps."

Antonelli told CompetitionPlus.com he had the car tuned to run the only three-second run of the day. Capps knew the run would stick.

"It went 274 miles an hour the run before, in the right lane, at half-track," Capps said. "That's thumping on a track like today. That is a feather in the cap for those guys to go 3.98 in that final round because nobody thought we would see a three-second run today. Everybody thought 4.0s were going to win this thing."

Why? This weekend's race had character, and since the tour was in the heart of NASCAR territory, Capps used a stock car reference to describe it.

"I know that NASCAR's off, so I got a lot of buddies and teammates in NASCAR watching us today, and I said [on TV], 'This is a lot like their Darlington. The Southern 500."

"I mean hot, humid, demanding. You cannot take your mind off it for one second. And as a team, you got to do everything right every single time. And we pulled it together. It was pretty cool."

And just like a roundy-round race, it's not the first lap that counts; it's the last.