Ron Capps knew it was coming.

That didn’t happen the first year, in 2022, when Capps won his second straight — third overall — NHRA Funny Car championship. That didn’t happen in 2023 when he and the NAPA team took three wins and finished fourth in the championship. But it has entered grade three: the ownership struggle.

“I just didn’t think it was going to be as grueling as it has been this year,” Capps told RACER at Pomona ahead of the season finale. “But I always wondered when I was working for Don Prudhomme and Don Schumacher, if I could be a team owner, how would I handle it? So it’s been trying, but I’m lucky. I have a good partner with NAPA, and that was the key because it could have been a lot different. A lot more pressure. As it is, I haven’t slept much.

“But overall it’s been fun.”

Capps branched out on his own in 2022 and wasn’t naïve about what lay ahead. It helped that he was immediately supported by Schumacher, with whom he spent 17 years, and John Force, who called him every week. Rick Hendrick provided advice when needed.

There was even a group text featuring Prudhomme, Hendrick and Jeff Gordon before his first year of ownership began. It was bizarre for Capps to have these legends offering everything he could need in his next venture.

When the 2022 season ended and Capps had won the championship, he admitted to thinking, “This isn’t that hard.” Although he knew that as soon as something behind the ropes – something new – came along, it would create a challenge.

And that’s where Capps now finds himself in what he describes as perhaps a rebuilding year.

It begins at the end of the previous season; after the awards show hangover wears off and the compliments from his fellow contestants wear off, Capps and Dean ‘Guido’ Antonelli, his crew chief, have a ritual to get through the season. Why did they win the championship? Where did they win it? But then inevitably comes the other side of things that failed.

“After (winning) back-to-back championships,” Capps recalls, “Guido said, ‘If we’re going to get ahead of everybody, we can keep running what we’re running, but all these teams have caught us. We’ve got to get one step ahead. I have to try this thing in the clutch area, and we might hit it right away, or we might not. And then I got a new fuel pump that I want to try.’

“So, it happens, and you don’t start off so well, and you go, ‘OK, I’m behind you 100%. And it continues. You can’t go back to last year’s data and go, OK, I’ve changed this, but this is where I got all of this. It doesn’t work that way in these cars, and I know that from being a driver for all these years. So we needed to move on and step out.”

It was Sonoma in late July when Antonelli began to feel comfortable with the setup in Capp’s car. Capps went to the final round that day and in two other events since then.

But in a way, it’s a little too late, and why Capps doesn’t necessarily want to see the season end. When the team has finally hit the ground running, Capps has been frustrated and disappointed not to have been able to battle Austin Prock, the class of the field this year, if his team lived up to its usual standard.

It was most striking to Capps during the NAPA employee appreciation event he attends each season. Capps, along with other NAPA-sponsored drivers like NASCAR’s Chase Elliott, is on hand and it was never a problem for Capps to “roll in there with many, many trophies and wins” as executives track and remind the drivers.

Capps has been to a total of six final innings in 19 races. The bad news is that he is winless.

“And I could tell you every single one we could have won and should have,” Capps said. “There were times when my reaction time wasn’t as good as the person I was racing against in the final. There were times when the car went out and did something funny that it hadn’t done all day, and we were favored to win in the final. But all was close.

“It’s tough. The first couple were like, I’m happy to be in the finals. I’m feeling better. It’s okay. Then we kept going to the finals and losing, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, that hurts worse. ” It hurt worse than not making it to the final.”

And yet Capps is third in the Championship with a chance to move into second to end the year. The first goal at Pomona is to disqualify Jack Beckman, driving John Force’s car, which is second in points. The second goal is not to go winless for a second for the first time since 2008.

“Basically, anything,” says Capps. “It’s going to be written somewhere if we don’t (win). The storybook ending would be to win this weekend, and that would make (this) interview even cooler. It’s frustrating, too, because it’s a pretty cool series to win at least once per season.”