It has been three years since the Pro Stock category last raced at Bandimere Speedway, the track affectionately known as Thunder Mountain.

At that event Greg Anderson picked up the win in a very close race against Matt Hartford, after which the class took a break from the facility until its return this season. And no one has looked forward to that return more than Hartford.

A race that still haunts him to this day, Hartford returned to the facility located just outside of Denver with one mission on his mind - redemption. And he got that on Sunday as the driver of the Total Seal Chevrolet Camaro turned on four win lights on an improbable road to victory to collect his first win of the season and the fifth of his career at the Dodge Power Brokers NHRA Mile-High Nationals at Bandimere Speedway.

“I love Bandimere. It is one of the best facilities you can go to, but it is a hard facility to race at because you are at 9,000 feet. And it eats me up every time I see that replay of Greg and I in the finals. I know for a fact that if I had driven anything on my shift points right we win that round. That is a hard pill to swallow when you know the driver let you down, but the car was going to be good enough to win,” Hartford said. “To come up here and have redemption, it is great for the team.”

Hartford matched his round-win total for the season on Sunday, earning his first victory in over a year - his last win coming at Houston in 2021 - against one of the hottest drivers on the NHRA tour in Aaron Stanfield.

After surviving one crazy round after another, Hartford finally saw it all come together in a near-perfect final round, hammering the tree with a .004 reaction time and recording the best pass of the entire day, a 6.967-second lap at 196.36 mph, to collect the win. Stanfield wasn’t far behind in his Janec Brothers Chevrolet, but wasn’t able to make up time lost on the tree with a 7.054 at 172.61 mph in his sixth final round visit of the year.

Adding to the excitement of the moment, the teams had just 20 minutes between the semifinal and final rounds to turn the cars around due to the live television schedule. After the race, Hartford was complimentary of his crew and the work they did to get the car ready in a crunch.

“Everybody from the KB team jumped in and helped us get the car turned around in 20 minutes and rolled up to the starting line,” Hartford said. “The irony of the 20-minute turnaround is, when we got done, we were waiting (on Stanfield). They didn’t even have the transmission together in the car yet. They have a pretty sophisticated team over there, so for a little team like us to turn the car around in 20 minutes and get back up there, that is a feat that says a lot about our team.”

The race between Hartford and Stanfield had an extra element of drama after the most recent race on the tour when Stanfield’s Elite Motorsports-backed team had a few choice words for Hartford following some starting-line gamesmanship in a race against championship leader Erica Enders. Additionally, coming into this weekend the Elite Motorsports team had won every race this season with the exception of one, until Hartford’s win on Sunday.

“Aaron is mean and his car is fast. He is probably one of the best drivers out here. The Elite camp kind of got mad at me at the last race because they said I was playing some games,” Hartford said. “I appreciated the games they played on me in the final round. He went in and pre-staged immediately. As soon as I rolled in to pre-stage his stage light was on. I gave him a solid five and a half to six second count before I went in and I let the clutch out and went .004.

“Coming up here it closes the gap with all of the cars. It is an equalizer when you come to altitude. So we knew it didn’t matter where you qualified, you can win on race day. I said this morning before the first round that the person who gets their foot off the clutch the best and makes the least mistakes on the shift points should win today without a problem. Honestly I was relaxed. We know we have a good car, we just went out there and had some fun.”

Stanfield had wins over Bo Butner and Troy Coughlin Jr. in collecting his fourth runner-up finish of the season.

While the final round was nearly flawless for Hartford, the rest of the afternoon was anything but. The eventual race winner overcame obstacle after obstacle to reach his first final round of the year, surviving as much as succeeding on the track.

In round one Hartford fell behind quickly and had to outrun Deric Kramer, nipping him at the finish line by a few inches in a 6.980 to a 7.028 matchup. It was much of the same in round two as Hartford won on a holeshot over Mason McGaha, with McGaha recording a quicker 6.981 at 196.10 mph to Hartford’s 6.991 at 196.24 mph.

“In the first round I sucked, let’s be clear. To give the guy 47 on the tree in Pro Stock you are not winning that round 99 out of 100 times. Luckily, he fell off a little bit and we actually made a nice run. I didn’t know who was winning. I knew when I put the car in fifth gear I was behind and that is not a good feeling” Hartford said. “But we ran him down and the win light came on. It really made me realize I needed to wake up and I went back to the trailer and thanked Eddie (Guarnaccia). I told him, ‘you saved me, but that is not going to cut it going forward.’

“I needed to get a little bit better and, honestly, I got to the second round and was 32, which wasn’t great, but it was good enough to get the win light. Those first two rounds we had five thou margin of victory between them.”

In the semifinal, another close contest that would have gone down to the wire was negated when Cristian Cuadra went red by one thousandth of a second to advance Hartford to the final round.

“I beat Cristian one other time this year, but he has been a sore in my side. Every time I race him, he always beats me,” Hartford said. “Rolling up there he had as fast a car as we had, but we didn’t have lane choice.That kid is one of the best drivers out here right now and we went 12 against him and put the car in fifth gear and went across the stripe and I was saying a lot of things in my helmet that weren’t pleasant and Eddie is like, ‘let's turn this around and close the deal.’ I was like, ‘dude, we lost,’ and he told me he went red. I didn’t see the win light, so I didn’t know we won the semis.”

While the path to victory was far from easy, Hartford felt that Sunday’s win further proved that his team has turned a corner and can be a car to be reckoned with on Sundays the remainder of the year.

“The last two races in the second round we have had to run Erica and they have a fast car. She has had me covered by five or six hundredths every race, but yet we have lost to her within a hundredth. Had we been in other pairings, I think we would have went farther at some of the previous races,” Hartford said. “Since Epping we have really turned our program around and I feel confident going to Sonoma that we are going to qualify well, but come race day we have as good a racecar as anybody out there right now.”