Tony Schumacher won’t let up

Even after winning an unprecedented six consecutive NHRA top-fuel championships, Tony Schumacher still is driving scared -- much to his rivals’ chagrin.

“I’m afraid to lose right now,” he said Friday. “[My title streak is] going to end at some point, I just don’t want it to end this year.”

This year starts this weekend with the 50th Winternationals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona, the season opener for the National Hot Rod Assn.’s Full Throttle Series.

The series’ fastest class is top fuel -- dragsters that reach 320 mph -- and Schumacher, 40, is top fuel’s preeminent driver and reigning champion.

In addition to his record six straight titles from 2004 through 2009 -- and seven championships overall -- Schumacher also holds the record for most top-fuel wins (61), most wins in a season (15) and most consecutive wins (seven).

Schumacher also is a two-time winner of the Winternationals, in 2004 and 2008.

But with each title has come heightened expectations for Schumacher to keep winning, even though it’s widely agreed that the competition is stiffer than ever.

The NHRA’s late-season playoff, the Countdown to One, also gives its 10 drivers in each class a fresh chance to grab the title in the season’s final six events.

Regardless, Schumacher said that as his career winds down, he doesn’t want his performance to ebb with it.

“I’m only going to race a few more years. It won’t be 10, it probably won’t be five,” he said. “I want to go out with a bang. Because we’ve seen too many people in the past, in all sports, go out on the bottom when they were [once] on the top.

“Our goal is to run quicker than anybody else, beat them down, break them down and break their hearts, that’s our goal,” he said.

Schumacher, known as “The Sarge” for his U.S. Army-sponsored car, drives for his father’s team, Don Schumacher Racing, which also includes top-fuel drivers Cory McClenathan and Antron Brown.

Schumacher’s accomplishments might be even more underrated than those of NASCAR’s Jimmie Johnson, who has won four consecutive Sprint Cup Series titles.

Yet stopping Schumacher from winning a seventh consecutive title is “going to be very difficult,” said Kenny Bernstein, a legendary drag racer and now owner of a top-fuel car driven by his son, Brandon, who finished fifth in the standings last year.

“You’ve got to give the guy all the credit in the world, and his team,” Bernstein said of Schumacher. Still, he said, “now there are four or five cars that are a lot closer [in performance] than they were two years ago and even last year.”

Schumacher has remained champion in dramatic fashion. In both 2006 and 2007, he won the title with his final run in the final race of the season, also at Pomona.

And last year, after his longtime crew chief Alan Johnson left to help lead a new team with driver Larry Dixon, Schumacher and new crew chief Mike Green won the championship on the season’s final day by only two points over Dixon -- the closest margin in history.

“I never expected to win six championships in a row, and I don’t expect to go on and win every championship from here on out,” Schumacher said. “The competition is too tough.”

On Friday -- the second of three days of qualifying before Sunday’s final eliminations -- Schumacher ran a 3.835-second elapsed time at 317.57 mph, placing him fourth in the field.

Dixon took the top-fuel qualifying lead with a pass of 3.795 seconds and 317.79 mph. In funny cars, no one matched the two fastest runs set by Robert Hight and Del Worsham on Thursday, but 14-time champion John Force jumped to third Friday with a pass of 4.066 seconds and 310.41 mph.

james.peltz@latimes.com