The "Ace" Ed McCulloch, Doug's tuner, is heading to crew chief for a new funny car at Schumacher Racing so the sharing of data between Amato's Wayne Dupuy and the Herbert team will be beneficial to both.

In Pro Stock it was the Anderson/Line/Ken Black Racing show once again as the dominant team of the last two years showed no loss of power. Greg Anderson beat teammate Jason Line in the final on his way to setting a new single-season winning total by a pro driver in NHRA history, 15 wins in 19 final round appearances while also taking home the 2004 Pro Stock Championship.

Anderson says of the victory, "We come to these races to win. The championship is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but the race win is what gets me fired up. It's instant gratification for all the long hours."

After the hard work of this season the entire team is headed to Hawaii for a much-deserved vacation. At the NHRA Awards Banquet held in SoCal¹s Palm Springs area Jason Line was picked for the Automobile Club of Southern California Road to the Future Award, which recognizes NHRA's Rookie of the Year, and was handed a check for $20,000.

The Pomona Finals brought another DNQ for the GM Performance Parts Pontiac and also marked the announcement of Warren Johnson's "School's Out" final tour. Johnson had agreed to make 2005 his last season as a driver when he negotiated his current GM Racing contract back in 2002. Johnson has a new Jerry Haas standard production chassis on order and will replace it with a Pontiac GTO before mid-season.

The Professor has seen significant horsepower gains with the new third generation GM Drag Racing Engine he's been testing, but called the heads supplied with it "junk". He's looking forward to the new Dash-4 cylinder heads, but feels that his current block is quite good. He's struggled this season, but "I feel we're right on the edge of making the new engine a competitive piece It's got some significant advantages on the short-block, it'll allow us to run a lot more RPM with it."

After 2005 Johnson will still drive occasionally and often on testing days once his days in competition are done. Johnson says, "We'll be running the two cars next season, the year after that we may run three cars with me driving intermittently as a test driver."

As the winter off-season develops it looks as though some Pro Stock teams may be fading away as the costs of running a competitive car may be the biggest factor.