They were a sight at the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals Saturday afternoon at Norwalk, Ohio, NHRA Pro Stock team owner/driver Matt Hartford and his crew chief, Eddie Guarnaccia.

The clock was ticking toward the second and final qualifying session of the weekend. Rain showers had wiped out both scheduled chances Friday at Summit Racing Equipment Motorsports Park, so the pressure was on from the outset. Hartford was third in the provisional lineup, but he said he hadn’t been happy with his driving earlier in the day: “We should’ve been No. 1 after Q1, but it was driver error.”

So the two of them were debating how to use their last pass down the track before Sunday’s eliminations.

Factory Stock Showdown cars were running – Pro Stock’s clue to get to the staging lanes. But at Hartford’s Total Seal/Rottler Chevy Camaro pit, the transmission was still apart. Three sets of tires were scattered. And the car wasn’t close to being ready for action.

But there stood Hartford and Guarnaccia, bickering back and forth: “Are we going to try to run a tire and put a gear box in and get ready for tomorrow because we know what the weather’s going to be?” one of them wondered. The other argued that maybe they should go for Hartford’s third No. 1 qualifying berth in five races and the third of his career.

Hartford laughed later at the thought of it and said, “We finally said, ‘Let’s try to go for the pole. Maybe the clouds will be in our favor. If we get a little bit of cloud cover, we’re going to the front.’ It was a very methodical process of set-up A or set-up B? We chose to go to the front.” 

The decision paid off. Hartford improved his elapsed time from 6.597 seconds to 6.593 on the northern Ohio quarter-mile. It wasn’t much, just four-thousandths of a second. However, it was enough to leapfrog Erica Enders and Troy Coughlin Jr., who had identical 6.595-second E.T.s and Enders had control because of her 208.36-mph speed to Coughlin’s 207.56. But the Elite Motorsports tandem discovered that the “enemy” wasn’t each other but rather another KB Titan Racing affiliate, Hartford.

Hartford said his accomplishment Saturday “comes down to just a great team. I’ve got to send praise to Jerry Haas and everybody back at the Jerry Haas organization. They build such a great car. We definitely don’t have the newest car out there, but it’s a great car. He [Haas] is with us week in and week out, and that says a lot about the tubing he builds.”

The Phoenix racer earned four qualifying bonus points as he joined Leah Pruett (Top Fuel), Bob Tasca III (Funny Car), and Gaige Herrera (Pro Stock Motorcycle) as a top qualifier. And he said, “We’re counting every point we can. It’s going to mean something, come the Countdown.”

He said Deric Kramer, winner of Saturday’s Pro Stock Challenge specialty race and the three additional banked Countdown points, “is on the hottest streak out here. We were in the beginning of the year, and we didn’t capitalize on it. He’s been going to every final since.”

So Hartford said he knows he has a chance to win the Pro Stock series crown, but he also knows so many of his rivals can say the same thing.

“Name me one person in Pro Stock right now that you think can’t win the championship. I can’t,” Hartford said. “We need to go in [the Countdown] with as many points as we can. We want to get some more semifinal and final rounds and get into the [Challenge] again, because there’s points there.

“Right now,” he said, “we have a chance to win the championship. It’s our best chance we’ve ever had.”

How easy will that be?

Hartford joked, “Deric says it best: ‘Pro Stock’s easy – just make less mistakes than everybody else.’

“To close the deal, honestly, any driver out here, if they give you any other answer, I don’t believe them,” he said. “The answer’s ‘luck.’ You have to have some luck play into the cards. You can do everything right and still come up on the short end of the stick. So, you need to do everything you can to make the least mistakes as possible for four rounds.”

Hartford will face No. 16 starter Fernando Cuadra Sr. in Sunday’s first round of eliminations. The starting time has been moved up to 10 a.m., because of a threatening weather forecast.