For NHRA Funny Car racer Robert Hight, the “Cruz Pedregon Factor” is guiding his thinking heading into this weekend’s Auto Club Finals at Southern California’s In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip.

The Auto Club Chevy Camaro driver is in a battle for the championship with Bob Tasca III and fellow three-time titlist and points leader Matt Hagan. Hight is in third place, two points behind Tasca and just 17 off Hagan’s pace.

The scramble has added drama with the sanctioning body awarding points and a half, a relatively new twist to competition at both the U.S. Nationals and this season finale.  This weekend, each round will be worth 30 points rather than 20. And, for example, the event winner will receive 150 points instead of the traditional 100.

So the stakes are higher, and the opportunities to earn a championship are fewer.

Hight – winner of four races this season and 65 overall (third-most in class history) and Countdown victories at Reading, Pa., and Las Vegas – knows what Hagan and Tasca have done this season. He knows Hagan was going to be a tough rival from the start of the season, as the two of them dominated the first five races. And he knows Tasca has steadily climbed up the ladder with victories at Epping and Topeka, a Countdown triumph at Charlotte, and a brief taste of the points lead after St. Louis.

However, Hight said, “We can’t really focus on each other.

“You look at what happened last year,” Hight said, referring to Ron Capps’ championship margin of three points as he took second place in the final standings for the fourth time. That ambush by Ron Capps – after Hight had won eight times in 12 final rounds – was the second-narrowest margin for a Funny Car championship (after Jack Beckman’s two-point edge over Capps in 2012).

At this race last year, Hight entered having led the standings for the previous 12 events and on three earlier occasions (and never was worse than second). But on race day, Hight lost to Tasca in the quarterfinals, and ninth-place Cruz Pedregon won the race.

“We came in, and we were looking at all the points scenarios. And Cruz Pedregon comes from nowhere and screws everything up – all the points, everything,” Hight said. “So we’ve got to watch the guys we’re racing first round.” The cause of a downfall in the closing days of the season, he said, is “usually beating yourselves.”

He said racing at Pomona, the home track for the Orange County resident and John Force Racing president, isn’t something he can count on for any advantage.

“I’ve had great success at Pomona,” he said, “and I’ve also fallen on my face [there]. You can’t look at history. And you can’t even look back as far as Las Vegas [the most recent race].”

Hagan said, he, Hight, and Tasca “know you’re capable of doing it . . . but it has to be your day, too. There’s some mornings you wake up and you go, ‘It just feels right.’ And there are other mornings you can’t tie your shoes right and you’re like, ‘Damn – I’ve tied these three times.”

Hight understood. He said, “Every day’s different. Some ays are better than others. All we can hope for is that we got three good days left in us and [we] do the best we can.”