In the previous three trips to Auto Club Raceway at Pomona for the NHRA season finale - last year’s pandemic-shortened season notwithstanding - Robert Hight entered the event with a chance to earn a championship. His final finishing position in those three races? First, second, first.

This season, the picture is a bit different. Despite two wins, four final round visits and a couple of No. 1 qualifiers, Hight is seventh in the Funny Car championship standings, well out of contention for a fourth title.

One of these things is not like the other.

“I told my guys this morning this isn’t much fun. The last three years that I have come to Auto Club Raceway I’ve been in contention for a championship. And to be here this year and not be in contention, this isn’t where we want to be next year,” Hight said. “I told them, ‘Remember this feeling and make sure we are not in this position next year.’”

Hight got his quest to end the year on a high note off to a good start on Friday, claiming the provisional No. 1 qualifier at the season-ending Auto Club NHRA Finals at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona.

Hight drove his Auto Club of Southern California Chevrolet Camaro to a stout 3.894-second pass at 330.55 miles per hour, edging out championship leader and megateam rival Ron Capps as he looks to earn his third top qualifier award of the year and the 71st of his career if his time holds on Saturday.

“That is all we can do from here on out is try and win this race,” Hight said. “It is kind of bittersweet because we know in our camp that this Auto Club Chevy is capable of doing this every race. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs and not much consistency.

“Jimmy (Prock) said it was going to run a 3.89, so he’s got a good handle on it. We’ve just got some little inconsistencies in our tuneup that we’ve got to work out over the winter. But we want to go out on top and this is the race that we can win and celebrate for the longest period of time. It sets the tone for the offseason.”

Capps slipped into second in his NAPA Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat with a 3.908 at 329.83 mph, but most importantly picked up three more points in the highly-competitive NHRA Camping World Funny Car championship battle.

Hight’s teammate John Force was third Friday at the California-based track with a 3.939 at 328.14 mph, while Cruz Pedregon (3.939) and Alexis DeJoria (3.954) rounded out the top five. Capps’ closest competitor entering the weekend, Don Schumacher Racing teammate Matt Hagan, placed his Dodge 12th on Friday.

Now, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Hight and his team shift gears on Saturday to studying the track and learning as much as they can to help them advance rounds on Sunday.

While Hight opened the year with a trip to the finals and three total final round visits in his first six races, a rocky summer saw Hight plummet from a high of third in the Funny Car standings to his current low of seventh. It is unfamiliar territory for the perennial championship contender, and one he pegs on missing an entire year in 2020 due to the pandemic.

“At first I was worried about us taking the whole year off last year. Did we fall behind? But then we showed up at Gainesville and we go to the finals. In testing we were the quickest car. We didn’t forget how to do this,” Hight said. “But over the course of the season and all of the different conditions that you race in, maybe we did fall behind. It is mostly the clutch setup. It is not very friendly and we don’t have a big tuning window.

“It has to cooperate every run for it to go and if it doesn’t, it tips over. Clutch discs are the evil that we all fight and they haven’t changed, so we have to have a combination that can deal with inconsistencies. In 2017, 2018, 2019, we had that. We had a lot of great runs, set records, won a lot of races. This year has been kind of a letdown.”

Still, there are plenty of takeaways that can be had from this weekend and Hight knows just how much success at the end of the season can mean in taking momentum into a new year.

“I don’t want to make excuses because I think we have the best team out here, we just have to do a better job,” Hight said. “I can’t wait until next year to redeem ourselves.”