National Hot Rod Association

Though winless in the 17-race regular season, Brown, who, in the eyes of many should have won the championship last year, has been in contention right from the beginning. With the points reset for the six-event Countdown format, Brown is a solid fifth in the standings, just 60 points behind the leader, fellow Toyota-supported driver Larry Dixon.

Pedregon just failed to make the Funny Car Countdown, finishing two spots out of the all-important top 10, but a recent resurgence has him on the verge of what would be his first victory since he closed out his 2008 championship season with three in a row. With form like that, he’s a potential spoiler – the sort of guy the 10 championship chasers will be hoping to avoid in elimination rounds.

"We've been preparing for this Countdown all year," says Brown, who scored five times during the 2009 regular season but came up empty through the first five races of the playoffs, scoring only at the final event, after the title already had been decided. "Last year, we were in 'race mode' the whole regular season, and that bit us in the end, when we ran out of the right clutch parts."

Brown made six final-round appearances during the 2010 regular season, which came to an end last weekend at the Lucas Oil Nationals in Brainerd, Minn., where he reached the quarterfinals. "Of course we wanted to win them – who doesn't?" Brown says. "But to our team, the regular season is all about getting set up for these last six races. That's what matters most."

Pedregon is just as anxious for the Countdown to begin, but for a different reason. It's his shot at redemption after stumbling through the first half of what was turning into a lost season. Lately, it's been anything but; he advanced to at least the quarterfinals at all three races on the Western Swing and reached the semi's at the last one, the Mile-High Nationals in Denver.

"We're on a little bit of a roll," Pedregon says. "I wish we'd been doing all year what we're doing right now. At the first few races, we couldn't seem to figure out if we wanted to run the '08 setup that won us the championship or go with what we developed in '09. We finally realized that we were never going reach our goals switching back and forth between the two, and now we're like a football team that's balanced its running game with its aerial attack."

The slow start cost Pedregon's Snap-On team a spot in the Countdown, but experimenting and letting rookie crew chief Danny DeGennaro find his footing is starting to pay dividends.

"We pretty much had to win Brainerd and have [brother] Tony [Pedregon] lose in the first round to get in, but I'm not worried about it," Pedregon says. "Not making the top 10 isn't the end of the world. The encouraging thing is that the car is back to doing what we tell it to do most of the time. A few months ago, we'd set it up for a consistent 4.20-something and it would either smoke the tires or run a 4-teen. Now, for the most part, the car responds to changes we make. And the year is not over, either; we can still win the U.S. Nationals, we can win the other five races, and we can make things miserable for people who are in the Countdown."

Brown has bigger things on his agenda. "This year, we'll have the right clutch package and everything we need for all six races," he says. "We've only used up one of our test days [NHRA rules allow a maximum of four]. We'll use one before Indy, one after Charlotte, and the last one before either Las Vegas or Pomona, and we'll have a combination and a power level just for each track."

Physically, Brown will be stronger than ever. "I've been training hard all year, going from push-ups to jumping jacks to back down on the floor for more push-ups to back up for more jumping jacks or bicycle kicks and never stopping for 25 or 30 minutes straight," he says. "I've worked on my core strength, run two-and-a-half miles four or five nights a week, and watched my diet to keep myself lean for this Countdown. When it starts, I'll stop training so hard, let my body heal itself, utilize all the strength and energy I've built up, and just do light exercise to maintain."

The Matco team's mental game should be as solid as its parts inventory and Brown's physical conditioning. "We have a whole different mindset now," he says. "It's not that we should have won the championship last year, but we could have. We lost in the first round at Indy and that made us jittery when we got to Charlotte. This year, I'm going to treat each race in the Countdown like it's any other race. And we're not going to let ourselves get down if we get a few more runner-ups, either. You can win a championship with runner-ups. Our goal is just to be consistent and win rounds. I still think we should have won it last year – it was our championship to lose, and we lost it – but that's all over now. That was last year."