Bazemore lost to Del Worsham by 0.0246 of a second in the second round, vowing at the end of the run of his Matco Tools Dodge Stratus team, "We don't give up . . . and . . . we don't give up . . . and we aren't giving up."

Bazemore's bulldog tendencies came out after his 12-inch triumph over Tommy Johnson Jr. in the opening round. Television reporter Bill Stephens remarked, "You're lucky to be going to the second round."

"How were we lucky?" Bazemore shot back.

Stephens offered that the margin of victory was only 22-ten-thousandths of a second.

"That's not luck," Bazemore told him. "That's talent."

Still, he couldn't shake the Force factor. But that isn't stopping him from throwing everything at his closest rivals in the last two events. "We don't live in a pipe-dream," Bazemore said, "but the fact is it is not mathematically over. We obviously have to win the next two races and hope that our competition has some bad luck. We're not going to wish bad luck on them. All we can do is try to do what we do and that's try to win races. If we win the next two races we'll see where we are in points. If we don't, we'll be way better prepared for next season than we were this season."

Force just liked that winning feeling. "It felt real good to win," he said after a sixth victory on the all-concrete quarter-mile. "I didn't realize it had been so long. But we're still alive in the

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championship chase, and I win either way. Being the team owner, if Tony wins, I still get to be part of that too."

But at Dallas, only Dixon and Anderson knew for sure that they are champions.

"We lost the battle but won the war," Miller Lite Dragster crew member John Collins said after Dixon squeaked past Darrell Russell by 0.0133 seconds in the quarterfinals to earn the $400,000 champion's check but failed to outrun Bernstein in their semifinal match-up. Dixon sloughed off the fact that the red beer wagon of Brandon and Kenny Bernstein is the only dragster to have a winning record against his blue Don Prudhomme-owned rail.

"Winning the championship is something I'll remember forever," Dixon said. "I will remember it much longer than losing to Bernstein in the semis.

"This is a big deal. It's hard to win a race. It's very hard to win a championship," he said. "Anytime you don't win the race, you are disappointed, but we accomplished our year-long mission today."