Yahoo Autos ‘Team owner blues’ finally kicking in for Capps
Ron Capps knew it was coming.
It didn’t happen the first year, 2022, when Capps won his second consecutive – third overall – NHRA Funny Car championships. It didn’t happen in 2023 when he and the NAPA team picked up three wins and finished fourth in the championship. But it has arrived in year three: the ownership struggle.
“I just didn’t think it was going to be as trying as it has this year,” Capps told RACER at Pomona ahead of the season finale. “But I always wondered when I worked for Don Prudhomme and Don Schumacher, if I could be a team owner, how would I handle that? So, it’s been trying, but I’m lucky. I’ve got a great partner with NAPA, and that was key because it could have been a lot different. A lot more pressure. As it is, I haven’t slept a whole lot. But, overall, it’s been fun.”
Capps branched out on his own in 2022 and wasn’t naïve to what lay ahead. It helped that he immediately had the support of Schumacher, whom he spent 17 years with, and John Force, who called him weekly. Rick Hendrick offered advice any time it was needed.
There was even a group text that featured Prudhomme, Hendrick, and Jeff Gordon before his first year of ownership began. It was bizarre, to Capps, to have those legends offering anything he might need in his next venture.
When the 2022 season ended and Capps had won the championship, he admitted to thinking, “This is not so hard.” Even though he knew that as soon as something behind the ropes – something new – came along, it was going to create a challenge.
And that’s where Capps now finds himself in what he describes as perhaps a rebuilding year.
It starts at the end of the previous season; after the awards ceremony hangover wears off and the compliments from their fellow competitors fade away, Capps and Dean ‘Guido’ Antonelli, his crew chief, have a ritual of going through the season. Why did they win the championship? Where did they win it? But then, inevitably, comes the other side of things that fell short.
“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 of these teams have caught us. We need to get a step ahead. I’ve got to try this certain thing in the clutch area, and we might hit it right off the bat, or we might not. And then I got a new fuel pump I want to try.’
Capps’s team struggled to find its sweet spot during the first half of the season. NHRA photo
“So, that happens, and you don’t start so well, and you’re like, ‘OK, I’m behind you 100%.’ And it keeps going. You can’t go back to data from last year and go, OK, I’ve changed this, but here is where I’ve had all this. It doesn’t work that way in these cars, and I know that from being a driver all these years. So, we needed to get ahead and step out.”
It was Sonoma in late July when Antonelli started to feel comfortable with the setup in Capps’s car. Capps went to the final round that day and in two other events since.
But in a sense, it’s a little too late, and why Capps doesn’t necessarily want to see the season end. With the team finally hitting its stride, Capps has been frustrated and disappointed to have not been able to battle Austin Prock, the class of the field this year, if his team was at its usual standard.
It was most striking to Capps during the NAPA employee appreciation event he attends every season. Capps, along with other NAPA-sponsored drivers like Chase Elliott in NASCAR, are on hand and it was never a problem for Capps “to roll in there with many, many trophies and wins” that the executives track and remind the drivers about.
Capps has been to a total of six final rounds in 19 races. The bad news is that he’s winless.
“And I could tell you every single one we could have won and should have,” Capps said. “There were times my reaction time wasn’t as good as the person I was racing in the final. There were times the car went out and did something funny that it hadn’t all day, and we were favored to win in the final. But all of them were close.
“It’s tough. The first couple were like, I’m glad to be in the final. I feel better. It’s OK. Then we kept going to the finals and losing, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, it hurts worse.’ It hurt worse than not getting to the finals.”
And yet, Capps is third in the championship standings with a chance to move to second to end the year. The first goal in Pomona is to out-qualify Jack Beckman, who is driving John Force’s car, which is second in points. The second goal is to not go winless in a second for the first time since 2008.
“In the grand scheme of things, whatever,” Capps said. “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 that’s a pretty cool streak to have a win at least once a season.”
