After a career-best fourth-place finish in the in the NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle points standings last year, Scotty Pollacheck is staying put in 2018.

Pollacheck confirmed to Competition Plus on Thursday he will return to ride for the Underdahl-Stoffer Pro Stock Motorcycle team in 2018 and ride the same Suzuki he campaigned in 2017 with backing from Suzuki Extended Protection.

“I’m definitely excited to go back to this team,” Pollacheck said. “We did have a really good year last year. The team is good, and the bike is good. It seemed like we made progress throughout the year and I’m looking forward to it (the 2018 season). I think we definitely have the pieces of the puzzle to be very competitive and I think we should win a race or two and we should be in the hunt at the end of the year.”

The 2018 NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle season gets underway March 15-18 at the Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla.

Pollacheck joined the Underdahl-Stoffer Pro Stock Motorcycle team in 2017 after having an alliance with Matt Smith and riding a Buell for several seasons.

Greg Underdahl and Gary Stoffer merged their PSM teams together to form the Underdahl-Stoffer team. Gary’s wife, Karen Stoffer, who has won eight career NHRA national events, also rides for the team.

Pollacheck’s 2017 season was highlighted by eight semifinal finishes. He also captured his first career No. 1 qualifying position with a 6.822-second run at 196.76 mph Sept. 23 at the Dodge Nationals in Reading, Pa.

“I’ve known Greg and the Stoffers for a long time and we’ve always got along really well,” Pollacheck said. “They have a really good program, they have really good equipment. Greg is really good at tuning and what he does, and it just made for a really good package when you put it all together.”

Despite Pollacheck’s impressive performance in 2017, he knows there’s room for improvement.

“Last year was the first year I was back on a Suzuki since probably 2011,” he said. “It’s funny because I think if you just look at that we finished fourth, it looks really good, but I think in detail if you look at everything I feel like we struggled more than the No. 4 (finish) showed. Mostly that was just me getting used to riding something completely different. We really didn’t get any testing in before the beginning of the year, so we were testing when got to (the season-opening racing) at Gainesville (Fla.). It took us a while to kind of figure things out and get the bike setup for me and me to get used to the differences between the two. So, it took us a little while to get to where we were at the end of the year where we were consistent and running fast. That’s one reason why I’m so excited about this year (2018) because we will start out farther ahead of last year when we started. I feel like this year will be a lot smoother because we don’t have so many unknowns.”

A year ago, Pollacheck and the Underdahl-Stoffer team did offseason testing at Georgia Motorsports Park in Cecil, but that didn’t work out.

“That bit us,” Pollacheck said. “We went there and it so cold that we didn’t really get anything done. I think this year we will probably go to Bradenton (Fla.) to test probably in late February or early March. Last year, I didn’t have a full pass on the motorcycle before we got to Gainesville. If we would have got, say 10 or 12 laps, before we got to Gainesville, we would have been way farther ahead than we were.”