DEARBORN -- Robert Hight turned 40 on Aug. 20, and felt every bit of it.

His Auto Club Mustang was a favorite for the 2009 NHRA Full Throttle Series Funny Car title but had shown exactly none of the form that had earned 11 wins and five top-5 points finishes in four years. Once the top driver in the John Force Racing stable, Hight had fallen to fourth on the four-car team, doubting his driving abilities and overreaching for solutions. Ace crew chief Jimmy Prock also spent night after night scratching his head, wondering what went wrong.

Days before his birthday, Hight and the team failed to qualify at Brainerd, Minn., the third-to-last race before the Countdown to the Championship cutoff. He was 12th in points. Full mid-career crisis.

Three months later, all that must feel like years ago. And that’s not because Hight feels old—he’s feeling like a champion.

Barring a catastrophe this week at Pomona, Calif., the California native and his Auto Club team will take home a first Funny Car title at its sponsor’s race, the Auto Club Finals. The car that was all but dead two-thirds into the season got just enough of a boost from shakeups and circumstances to make it into the six-race playoff, and Hight vowed that the 10th and last seed was all his team would need if its car was all the way back.

He was right. In the five playoff events, Hight has three race wins and 14 round wins—one fewer round win than in the 18 regular-season races. He also has two poles and an average starting position of 2.6, easily the best in the class. All that catapulted him from 10th at the Countdown’s start to the top of the standings, with a generous 108-point cushion over second-place teammate Ashley Force Hood.

Two weeks ago at the season’s penultimate event in Las Vegas, Hight dropped the hammer throughout eliminations with four passes of 4.125 seconds or better at 1,000 feet, clocking low ET in every round.

“We’re doing this on performance and we’re out-muscling these guys,” Hight said.

That was an unthinkable concept throughout much of the season. The Auto Club Mustang was a preseason title contender after last year’s fourth-place finish that, statistically, was Hight’s best as a driver (career-high 36 round wins, three race wins for third consecutive year). There was no reason to think the blue and white flopper wouldn’t continue at that high level, and Prock and Co. set out to make the tweaks that would keep the car on top.

Except nothing worked. Hight made it to the semifinals at the season-opening race at Pomona, but two races later started a skid of seven dates with only one trip out of the first round. Included in that was a DNQ at Bristol, Tenn., in the season’s eighth event, which dropped Hight into 12th in points, where he would remain for four long months until Indianapolis.

“We had limited testing this year, and we put some different stuff on our car that we were hoping would work. We got goofed up, and it took us a long time to get back,” said Prock, one of only a handful of crew chiefs to win races in Top Fuel and Funny Car. “It’s hard to fix it. We changed something major, and you’re focusing on so much making that work that you miss other things that’s wrong. You keep making mistakes or bad calls when you’re racing, and we dug ourselves a big hole.”

As the struggles continued, Prock would tinker with the car constantly as it approached the starting line. Change the timing map, change the clutch speed, add fuel, take fuel away.

“You could see he was second-guessing himself,” Hight said. “He had no confidence.”

Hight’s confidence also waned, as he tried to make up for the car’s shortcomings from the cockpit. He never turned a red light but said he should have, moving away from the shallow staging that allowed him to turn the two fastest ET’s in the quarter-mile era a couple years earlier, among other triumphs.

Desperate times required desperate measures, and team owner John Force stepped in after the Brainerd DNQ with a radical idea—he would drive Robert’s car and Robert would drive John’s Castrol GTX High Mileage Mustang. Neither won the next time out at Maple Grove Raceway in Reading, Pa., infact Hight’s second-round exit didn’t help him in the standings. But Force went to the semifinals in Hight’s car, and the team began to believe in changes it had made a couple weeks earlier.

“I looked at what I thought our weaknesses were. One that we still had was our engine combination wasn’t as good as Ashley’s,” Prock said. “They helped us, we took the manifold, the nozzles, put it in our car went and tested. That was the turning point for us.

“Everybody here has always worked together at some point one time or another, every one of us has helped the other one. That’s the way it works here.”

At the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, there was widespread speculation that the team help went too far in the semifinals, when Force faced Hight. Force was already secure in the Countdown (along with JFR drivers Force Hood and Mike Neff), while Hight could only make the top-10 by advancing to the final round (other dominoes had fallen perfectly for him earlier in the race).

Force, after a slow reaction time, smoked the tires and got out of the groove quickly in the right lane, and Hight sped away to a Countdown-clinching win. Over the cries of team order shenanigans, Hight was unapologetic. This can win it all, he told the media, and if it does, it deserved to be in the playoff.

“People can talk about all that all they want, but you look at the way my car’s run in the countdown, we’re winning on performance,” Hight said. “To bring up all the other stuff just takes way from what Jimmy Prock has done and how well he’s got this car running.”

The only disappointment in the JFR camp is that teammates couldn’t draw the battle out just a bit longer. Force Hood had just as high hopes for a first title in her Castrol GTX Mustang and trailed Hight by 13 points with two races remaining, but at Las Vegas was plagued with a bad piston/ring combination. The malady landed the team near the bottom of the qualifying bracket, setting up a first-round date with Hight.

Hight beat his sister-in-law, and in going on to win the race he all but eliminated a teammate from a title run while virtually clinching his own.

“It’s just slowly still sinking in here, what we’ve accomplished last weekend. I fully expected it to come right down to Pomona, fighting it out and trying to be like we’ve been in the past where you have to win the race at Pomona to win the championship,” Hight said. “It was very unfortunate that had to race Ashley in the first round, that’s definitely not what we wanted to have happen.

“I’m usually confident going to the starting line, but (Ashley’s) car had been so good for so long. I just knew they were going to fix it, and it was going to be the other way around, she would probably beat me. If she’d had beat me, she would have gone on to win and be on the brink of a championship. It was just unfortunate, but it was the way it goes. I really feel bad about it, because they were the guys that helped us turn our season around and fix our cars.”

Force Hood will certainly be back in 2010, on the short list of title favorites. But Hight will be the man to beat, having survived a wild ride.