National Hot Rod Association

A five-time winner last year, when he fell just two points shy of rival Tony Schumacher for the NHRA championship, Dixon has six victories in the first half of 2010 and a commanding lead in the Full Throttle points standings heading to Norwalk, Ohio, this weekend.

Dixon, who passed Joe Amato earlier this year for the most round-wins in Top Fuel history, spoke with ToyotaRacing.com about his season to date and his expectations for the rest of the year.

Is this year going better than your most recent championship season, 2003, when you won eight times?
I don't know if it's better, but it's at least as good. Everybody dreams of having a year like this and everybody works toward it, but you can't manufacture something like this. Both times, we got off to a really good start. In '03, we didn't win a race after August; we went into a defensive mode and just tried to preserve our lead. But with the Countdown format we've had for the past few years, that really isn't an option anymore.

With a spot somewhere near the top of the Countdown standings virtually assured, will your team use the remainder of the pre-Countdown races to test?
No way. There are still trophies and money on the line, right? We're still after every qualifying bonus point, everything we can get, because if you're not getting them, someone else is. The best part of winning all these races is that we've won them in different ways. We were smoking the tires in Houston, we won in the heat in Las Vegas, and we've won when the conditions were ideal, a few weeks ago in Chicago. It just seems like [team manager] Alan Johnson and [crew chief] Jason McCulloch have a tuneup to get the car down any kind of track.

Is the car running so well that you don't need to test?
I wouldn't say that. It's just that we get only four test days a year, and to me, a test day is like having a wild card in a poker game. It's a great thing to have in your back pocket to pull out when you really need it. We've only used up one so far this year, on the Monday after Gainesville. We'd like to keep the other three for the Countdown, but if some new trick part, something way out of the realm, happens to come out before then, we wouldn't hesitate to use one if we thought it might give us an advantage. The car will dictate what we do.

What has been the highlight of your season?
I don't know if I really have one. With six wins, I'd say the whole year's been one big highlight. I have no complaints; we've been fortunate. We've been to six finals and have won all six, and there's a big difference between winner and runner-up. Hopefully, our highlight is still to come.

What has been the difference this year?
I don't think there is one. I think this is just a continuation of what we were doing at the end of '09. As the season went on, we got better and better. When we lost the championship in the second-to-last round of the year, no one on the team was disappointed. We would have loved to win the championship, obviously, but we all thought the same thing: we just wished the [2010] Winternationals was the next weekend, so we could get right back out there. Then we won the Winternationals after waiting all winter, and it justified everything.

What are you looking to accomplish over the last two and a half months of the regular season?
Things keep progressing, keep getting better, but we still want to continue refining our setup. We've been on the right side of some really close drag races lately – the second round in Chicago, against Antron Brown, when we won by six-thousandths of a second, is a perfect example – and you know there's no way you're going to keep winning those every time. It's all about going rounds and gathering as much data as possible. It's like Don Garlits always used to say: Nothing gives you more information than simply making runs. If you lose in the first round or you lose in the final, you're out either way, but the runner-up gets four times as much data to use down the road as the guy who got beat in the first round. I don't worry about "wasting" wins – getting a bunch of them that don't help us in the points because we already have this big lead. We want to win every race, set ourselves up for the Countdown, and keep this momentum going after the playoffs start, because let's face it: when you get to the Countdown, everybody's starting all over again. Even if we keep this up and go into the playoffs number 1, we'd still only have a 30-point lead on whoever is in second place. And after just one race, that can all be gone.