The first person to greet Ron Capps when he exited the NAPA Dodge Charger that carried him to his long-awaited NHRA Funny Car championship was wife Shelley.

She threw her arms around his neck and planted a kiss on his lips – which might sound predictable.

But in between their “I now pronounce you man and wife” kiss in November 1992 and that congratulatory kiss in November 2016, Ron Capps rose from wishful drag racer to worthy champion. Twenty-four years of meshing marriage and motorsports came full circle with that kiss at the top end of the racetrack at Pomona, California – in their home state, in their anniversary month, in the cradle of drag racing.

After Ron Capps said, “I do,” he paid his dues in the sport he immersed himself in as a child in San Luis Obispo.

“My dad brought me into the sport of drag racing,” Capps said. His mother raced on the dragstrip, as well, in a front-engine dragster. “I was in my mom’s belly at my first race,” he said. He was a six-year-old in the bleachers at the legendary “Last Drag Race” at storied Lions Drag Strip. When they weren’t playing with their Snake and Mongoose Hot Wheels cars or reading every word of some hot-rod magazine, he and brother Jon worked on dad John’s race car in the family garage, sometimes keeping the clothes dryer running to knock off the chill. They traveled to Santa Maria, up to Fremont, and as far back as he can remember, to Bakersfield for the March Meet. That’s where he had one of his coolest moments in a career of cool: when he was about eight years old, he handed “Big Daddy” Don Garlits a ratchet that he dropped on the ground.

“I grew up going to the dragstrips. I was probably conceived in a parking lot at Famoso. People think I’m joking when I say I was conceived at one of their races. They insist it isn’t a joke,” Capps said. “As long as I’ve gone back in my memory, I’ve been at a drag race. My mom and dad, I’m grateful they brought me into this sport. It has been a family sport. I love it, and it has never changed.”

He started with a family, working on the Top Alcohol Dragster crew for the late Blaine Johnson, under the direction of tuning whiz Alan Johnson. “They took me under their wing and taught me a lot of things, working on their alcohol car,” he said.

Then he met Shelley La Fave. And she played a pivotal role in his career.

“We got married in November 1992, and she let me go on the road full-time as a crew member on an alcohol dragster [team] for Darryl Hitchman three months later. Whose wife lets him do that? Unbelievable,” Capps said.

It’s not like she had his same background. “My wife’s mom and dad knew nothing about racing when we got married, and now she’s one of my biggest fans,” Capps said.

So with Shelley Capps’ blessing, Ron Capps began his career in drag racing.

“It was that very next year. I was in the staging lanes as a crew member. John Mitchell came up and we chatted. The next day he came over, and he said, ‘You want to go get your license in one of my dragsters?’ Had that not happened, had she not let me go on the road and get that out of my system, I would have never met John Mitchell, would never have gotten a shot, would probably still be a crew member and happy to be so,” Capps said.

In those 24 years, Capps’ cheering section has expanded, with daughter Taylor and son Caden.

In a guest article for the Los Angeles Daily News during the recent Auto Club NHRA Finals, Capps wrote: “Taylor, who’s 20 and in junior college, earned her Super Comp competition license a few weeks ago in Doug Foley’s Pure Speed drag racing school at Fontana. When we lost the championship by two points in 2012, she hugged me and cried. You never want to see your little girl cry. This year I want my angel to hug me at the end of the day with happy tears. And then there’s my wonderfully wacky son Caden, who’s 15 and makes me laugh all the time. Thanks to my great friend and reigning Funny Car world champion Del Worsham, Caden started to race in the NHRA Jr. Dragster youth program earlier this year to become the third generation of Capps to become a drag racer.”

A few years ago, Capps said, “It’s weird for me still to walk out of the trailer and see little kids out there at the ropes, because I feel like it’s yesterday being at the March Meet. It’s strange to be in the position that I’m in to be paid to do what I love to do, get paid to do what I used to be such a huge fan of as a kid.”

He also has been blessed throughout his career to have co-operative cars and prominent crew chiefs: Roland Leong, Dale Armstrong, Ed “The Ace” McCulloch, Tim and Kim Richards, and now Rahn Tobler, who learned how to tune a car with drag-racing legend Shirley Muldowney in her three NHRA championships and won a Funny Car title with Cruz Pedregon.

So that’s one reason he had learned to live with the bothersome label of the NHRA’s – not just Funny Car’s but the NHRA’s – most successful driver without a championship.

“I know the time is going to come,” he said earlier this year. “But I’m OK with it, because I wake up in the morning and I started in this sport as a crew guy and worked my way up. I’m the American dream, if you will. I wanted to drive someday but had to start from the very bottom, wiping tires. I had people let me hang around their cars and learn and worked my way into a driver job. I’ve done it for a living. I have a house, a family, that this sport of NHRA has given me. But since the very beginning, I’ve done it for the love of just racing, driving a race car. The championships, I never sat down as a kid, and I can’t give you some story as a five-year-old I said someday I’m going to be a world champion. I never thought about being a Mello Yello champion. I just wanted to be a race car driver, and I wanted to drive a Funny Car. It will come, I’m sure.”

It did. And when it did, he was ready, with a wealth of experience, 49 Funny Car triumphs second only to runaway leader John Force, four No. 2 finishes, and a fancy pair of boots. The shiny silver knee-highs, which he had custom-made not too long ago for a March Meet gig as a nod of respect to his predecessors, were part of his inspiration.

He said he wanted to “go back and wear the boots they did when I was a kid. These are the boots I saw Ed McCulloch wear … and Don “The Snake” Prudhomme and Don Schumacher … when I was a kid. I gave them to James Day. He won the March Meet this year, driving a Nostalgia Funny Car. So I called him and said, ‘Can I borrow those back for just a couple of days?’ He was here [at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona] in 10 minutes, brought them over and handed them to me.

“It’s been fun to put those on,” Capps said, waxing nostalgic.

It struck him that this was the place where he was proud to clinch his long-sought championship. He was relieved but happy to do it at fabled Pomona and not the previous race, at Las Vegas, where Antron Brown, his Don Schumacher Racing colleague, secured his Top Fuel title. No, Pomona was the fitting venue.

“To do it on Wally Parks Boulevard on a November night with the sun going down and just the legendary track at Pomona is crazy,” Capps said. “I sat in the grandstands and watched Joe Amato and Gary Ormsby as a kid. So to strap on a pair of boots and go down that track and be crowned the 2016 Mello Yello champion here is awesome.”

He said if he could visit with anybody at that moment, wearing his champion’s jacket, that person would be the late NHRA founder Wally Parks.

“He was John Wayne to me,” Capps said. “If he could be here to see where the sport’s at, see how it’s grown … when he walked in the room, you knew Wally was in the room. If he was to walk in here right now, he would be extremely happy with where our sport is and what NHRA has done this past year.”

Capps, too, was happy: “To be Mello Yello champion and to take the crown from Del Worsham, who I thought represented Mello Yello and NHRA as a champion as good as anybody could, I’m really proud to take this and carry it on.”

Photos courtesy NHRA/National Dragster