"This is a really close team. Next year will be the fourth year that every single member of this team has stayed together. And I don't know many teams that that's ever happened to before. But a big part of this thing is our wives, our kids. We put a lot of the people we love on the backburner and they're just as important as how well I drive the car, how well [Neff] tunes it, how well the guys work on it."

Tony Pedregon claimed his second victory of the season as his Q-Racing Monte Carlo turned in a 4.751/319.22 against Eric Medlen, whose Mustang lost traction at the start of the final round.

Medlen ran off the track and into the sand in the previous round win over Tommy Johnson Jr. Medlen was not injured, but the car was severely damaged. Crew members from other teams assisted in getting the car repaired, helped out by a little extra time between rounds due to the Cacklefest entertainment.

"This is exactly the way you want to finish a year," said Pedregon, whose biggest round win of the day came when he defeated his former team owner, John Force. "We beat some big names and maybe spoiled it for some people when I beat John in the second round, but we came here to win and that's what we did."

Whit Bazemore was more than ready to be the spoiler as he faced off against third in points John Force in the opening stanza of the Automobile Club of Southern California NHRA Finals.

If he were to beat the 13-time champion, he would have opened the door for his teammates, points leader Gary Scelzi and No. 2 in the standings Ron Capps, to battle it out between themselves for the remainder of the event, as both Capps and Scelzi had advanced to the second round.

Bazemore's perennial rival took off at the light with the slightest edge (.057 to .068), but the Matco Tools Iron Eagle Dodge

Stratus R/T lit the tires almost immediately and made a sharp move to the right, resulting in a disqualification when it crossed the centerline.

Force's car also moved to the left and brushed the centerline, but he was awarded the win with a 4.790-second elapsed time at 315.34.

"It wasn't what we expected at all," said a disappointed Bazemore.

"The car smoked the tires twice. We pedaled it and Force's team went down the track and that's it.

"Our car just took a violent right turn out there. There's something really wrong with that chassis. I don't know what it is. We came here without having tested it since it's been front-halved from Murf McKinney (chassis shop).

"In the future, we'll never do that again, run an untested chassis, ever. We were lucky to qualify, quite honestly. In the very first run after 150 feet it turned hard left and we fought it the whole way and we were very, very fortunate that we didn't smoke the tires then.

"And last night it did the exact same thing, only, when we corrected it, it unloaded the rear a little bit and it made us smoke the tires. So when you're on the limit, you can't have a car that you have to drive that hard. It just doesn't work in this sport.

"We're going to have a new car next year. That's going to help. We're going to have to really assess our performance this year and all aspects of it; assess it and do what we have to do to get ourselves on the same level as our teammates."