Jack Beckman has had an up and down season, so Friday he had a reason to smile.

Beckman, who pilots the Don Schumacher Racing Infinite Hero Foundation Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat, clocked a 3.922-second elapsed time at 327.19 mph Friday to take the provisional No. 1 qualifying spot at the NHRA Toyota Nationals in Las Vegas.

Beckman, the 2012 NHRA nitro Funny Car world champion, entered the Vegas race ninth in the points standings.

“It’s unusual, we come out for Friday qualifying and this is the first time I can recall in recent memory that we’ve run this early on a Friday,” Beckman said. “So, what happens Q1 always just sets the run order for Q2 and Q2 is the one that’s going to set the qualifying order. We knew that probably wasn’t going to be the case here. In fact, for the Funny Cars, our first session actually had slightly better track conditions than the second one. I think that’s going to tip the other way for the dragsters simply because we are getting later in the day. It was unusual to see and expect that what you ran right off the trailer was as good as you were going to see on a Friday. That’s always nail-biting time for crew chiefs, but not for me as a driver. My job is just to get down the track, but they have to make an educated guess and recognize that if you squander it on the first one, you probably will not improve on the second session. I’m very happy with the amount of data that Guido (Dean Antonelli) and (John) Medlen and Neal Strausbaugh were able to get.”

Beckman has one No. 1 qualifying position this season at the Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla. He has two wins at the Gators and in Brainerd, Minn. Beckman has 24 No. 1 qualifiers in his career.

Beckman’s run came in the first qualifying session and it was enough to hold off Courtney Force’s 3.926-second lap in Friday’s second session.

“It was interesting we didn’t have the cylinder heads bolted on, and everybody had already warmed up,” Beckman said. “I walked up there jokingly and said, ‘Did we just decide to sit out Q1?’ Guido said I didn’t realize we were running as early as we were. Then we went out there and got the extra three (bonus) points and I said maybe we should leave the heads off an extra 20 minutes every time we run this thing.”

Saturday’s qualifying sessions will be early again, which Beckman addressed.

“Night runs are for the fans,” he said. “Night runs are not for the crew chiefs, and night runs are not for the drivers. You don’t necessarily learn a thing that’s going to help you on race day. The benefit of running early on Friday here (in Vegas) is that it means all four of our qualifying runs will be in representative conditions we will see on Sunday. So, what does that mean for Sunday? I don’t have a crystal ball, but it should mean that every crew chief has at least one run or 25 percent more data than we would typically have going into race day. Maybe that makes it a tuner’s race on Sunday.”

Beckman acknowledged the 2018 season has not played out like he had hoped it would.

“We are not were we wanted to be here,” Beckman said. “We are out of championship contention and realistically our goal is to try and get into the top five, but there’s still two trophies up for grabs. I’m happy with the fact that nobody is dragging their chins over at Infinite Hero. We do great things even without the car running. We literally, with the funding we raise, we change lives. That being said, Don Schumacher spends a lot of money for us to come out here and be successful on the race track and we have missed the mark too many times in the Countdown to be a contender for the championship. But, it is so gratifying to know that every time I drive into the race track on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, that I have a car that’s is capable of running as good or better than everybody else and we proved that today.”