Don’t look now, but Steve Torrence is finding his groove.

Torrence, who won four NHRA Top Fuel world championships in 2018-2021, is transforming back into his former dominant self.

Torrence, who won his first race of the season in Seattle July 23, and has won the last two episodes of the Mission Foods 2Fast/2Tasty Challenge, which features the semifinalists from the previous Camping World tour event, rocketed to the top of the qualifying board Friday in Topeka, Kan.

Torrence, driving his CAPCO Contractors Top Fuel Toyota, clocked a 3.764-second elapsed time at 326.24 mph in Friday’s lone qualifying session at the Menards NHRA Nationals presented by PetArmor at Heartland Motorsports Park.

“This is a huge confidence booster, just for getting the momentum going early in the weekend and getting us set up to go into (Saturday) for the Mission #2Fast2Tasty Challenge,” Torrence said. “We needed to have a good qualifying run (Friday night) to set us up to go into that race tomorrow with a competitive car and try to compete for those three points.

“That's going to be huge going into the Countdown, where we're able to kind of cut that lead down or see if we can cut it to nothing between now and then with Justin Ashley being so far ahead of us. These guys, we've been working hard. Everybody is putting in a whole lot of blood sweat and tears in this thing."

Torrence arrived in at Heartland Motorsports Park second in the season points standings, a mere 32 points behind leader Ashley. 

Torrence, a 54-time NHRA Top Fuel winner, also has had plenty of success in Topeka. He was runner-up in Topeka last year to Antron Brown. He beat his father Billy in the 2019 finals and has six straight semifinal appearances at the facility.

Torrence won twice at the Topeka track in 2005 on his way to the Lucas Oil Series Top Alcohol Dragster World Championship.

If Torrence’s No. 1 qualifying spots holds through Saturday’s two sessions it will be the 35th of his Top Fuel career and first this season. Torrence has qualified second at three events this season – Gainesville, Fla., Las Vegas and Norwalk, Ohio.

Torrence has a solid 22-11 elimination-round record in 2023.

As Torrence sees it, years of experience is what led to Friday's top run. That's about how much he knows about what went into it.

"If I told you what it would be I'd be lying, because I just drive the car and try not to run over anything or anybody," Torrence admitted. "We've been picking away at it a little bit at a time, and we got to where we felt confident in the tuning up, but we needed to start working on polishing it and getting that thing where we could go down a racetrack like today. These conditions are something that we've never seen with the way we're running the car now. So that was really an educated shot at the dark, and it did exactly what we wanted it to do.

"It's like a fighter that gets in with a lot of fight wins and a lot of experience, and that's what I attribute to the Capco boys going up there and throwing that shot, calling their shot and doing what we needed to do. When you see the funny cars go 94, 95 out there, typically we're 18 to 20 quicker than that. That was representative of what the funny cars did. I don't know what happened to the rest of the gang, but I'm glad they didn't run as good as we did."