Winning is, and always will be, a big deal for decorated crew chief Lee Beard.

Sunday's victory via driver Larry Dixon at the City of Ipswich Winternationals at Willowbank Raceway, the final stop on the inaugural Thunder 400 tour, ranks high amongst Beard's many accomplishments. He is now the tuner of record for back to back wins at the largest drag race held outside of North America. 

"When you’re in the twilight of your career, everything is very important because you never know if it’s going to be your last one," said Beard, whose victory with Dixon marked the 13th different driver in his career he's won with. 

Beard gave Dixon a fierce race car, and a 4.52 elapsed time, which stood the challenge of the weekend. He also gave him a winning race car opposite newly crowned Thunder 400 Top Fuel champion Damien Harris and series runner-up Wayne Newby in the final round. 

"It’s great for us coming out here with low E.T. with that 4.52," Beard said  "We tried our best to run in the 40s; we had some runs going, and it looked like it was going to do it, but something went wrong."

We were trying to get it up and going a little bit sooner and see if we could have put that magical .40 up and be the first car outside of the United States to run a 4.40 in a quarter-mile; that would have been a real milestone for us. I think the people of Australia really want to see that. It’s so cool to race quarter-mile; shame on what happened to us in America where we race only 1,000 feet because drag racing, what I grew up with as a kid and most of my career, was quarter-mile racing. That’s what we do here, and I really love that.”

Where does Beard go from here?

"We’re going to Disneyland," Dixon interjected. "Just going to take us 24 hours to get there.”