Greg Anderson is all about winning championships, but Sunday he had to settle for second place.

Anderson beat his Summit Racing teammate Jason Line in the Pro Stock final at the season-ending NHRA Finals, but when the day was done he lost the championship by three points to Line.

“I can’t cry,” Anderson said. “I did everything I could possibly do (Sunday) and the only thing I can kick stones about is that I didn’t do a great job of qualifying on Friday. I messed up on Q2 on Friday and I lost three points to Jason, and those three points were a big three points. It’s a bum deal, but you do the best you can and sometimes you make a mistake and I did on Friday and it cost me. It was still a great fight.”

This was Anderson’s eighth win of the season and the 86th of his career. The latter total put him in second place on NHRA’s all-time Pro Stock victory list one in front of the legendary Bob Glidden. Warren Johnson is top on the NHRA Pro Stock list with 97 national event wins.

“To break Bob Glidden’s record is fantastic,” Anderson said. “That’s something I never considered or ever wanted to think about and now that it has happened it is unreal. He (Glidden) is a hero of mine and idol of mine and I wouldn’t be here today without him. He helped create this class with guys like Bill Jenkins and Warren Johnson and Frank Iaconio all those guys, we wouldn’t have Pro Stock if it wasn’t for those guys, thanks so much to them. They paved the way and we are just trying to carry on as well as we can.”

Through the first 10 races of the season, Anderson and Line won all the races and the duo, along with their other teammate, Bo Butner, also collected all the qualifying bonus points.

“We said every race, they are going to catch us,” Anderson said about the competition. “Everybody learns from everybody else. Everybody pays attention to what goes on out there and the racers look at other racers and see how they do things. You know the technology is going to get around sooner or later and we were shocked it took as long as it did.”

However, Allen Johnson broke the Summit Racing victory streak at the Mile-High Nationals in July in Denver, and Anderson knew he and Line would be in a battle to capture a championship.

“The last half of the year the rest of the class got involved,” Anderson said. “For us to dig and regroup in the (six-race) Countdown when we had a no-point advantage from 700 or 800 points was amazing to come back. We had a great season, 16 wins between Jason and I out of 24 is not bad, that’s two-thirds. If you would have told us that 12 months ago I would have told you, you were crazy. We overachieved this year, and I can’t be sad, I can’t complain. I’m proud of Jason, he’s a great racer. I hired my own assassin, but that’s why I hired him because I knew he would be good. I knew he would be bad bone. I would have a whole lot of wins if it wasn’t for him, but it is still neat and it is all good for KB Racing. Ken Black is the hero of the year, he got 16 wins. We are looking forward to 2017, it is going to be tighter than ever, we know that.”

And, Anderson knows his Summit Racing team can’t let up in the offseason.

“That’s where the gains have to be made in the offseason,” Anderson said. “If you don’t make any hay in the offseason, then you are going to get left behind because you race every weekend or every other weekend and you don’t have that time for R&D during the season. You have to get it done in the winter time. You can’t go to the beach and goof off.”

Anderson acknowledged when he and Line went visited U.S. troops following the 2015 season, it changed their perspective for the 2016 campaign.

“A year ago at this time we got our tails whipped at the World Finals by Erica (Enders-Stevens). She was the champion and we had this new rule change coming up (with fuel-injection) that we weren’t looking forward to. We were dragging our lip, we were sad, we were pouting and complaining. We packed up from here and we went home and we made a trip to Kuwait and saw the soldiers and saw what they go through and what they do for us and it completely changed our outlook. We thought we had a problem and we didn’t even know if we wanted to race anymore with this fuel-injection deal and you go over there and see what these soldiers go through day-in and day-out, and the way they charge into the battle like that and we wanted to run away from it. We saw the way the ran into battle without even a second thought, we left there with a whole new attitude. We came home and said this is not a problem, changing to fuel-injection is not a problem it’s an opportunity that these soldiers have created for us to be out here and race, so we need to make the most of it.”

According to Anderson, he and Line will be making another trip to Kuwait a week from Sunday.