Force Is Fiery, Funny and Nearly Champion : Drag racing: After burning up the track all season, he needs only to qualify at Pomona this weekend for the title.

When John Force got off the plane from Texas at Los Angeles International a couple of weeks ago, his three daughters greeted him with signs that read, “Welcome Home, Champ.” They also had empty soft drink cans tied to the back of his truck for the drive home to Yorba Linda.

Force was aghast. At least he pretended to be.

“Hide those signs,” he said. “It isn’t over yet. This is drag racing. Nothing’s for sure until it’s done.”

He gathered up the signs and the cans and put them in the bed of the truck. They’re still there, where they probably will be used very soon.

Force, 18 years after launching his drag racing career as “Brute Force” in an old fuel-altered called the L.A. Hooker, is as close to being the National Hot Rod Assn.’s Winston funny car champion as he can be.

All he needs is to qualify his Castrol Oldsmobile in the 16-car eliminations at the Pomona Fairplex in this weekend’s Winston Finals. That will assure him enough points to beat Ed (Ace) McCulloch of Hemet for the $150,000 champion’s bonus.

“I know the girls meant well, but like I told them, this is drag racing and it ain’t over yet,” Force insisted. “I’ve been burned before, and you know, I came to Pomona in ’87 with a good car and didn’t make the field. I had seven blower explosions in a row.

“There are no guarantees in drag racing.”

Force knows. He “guaranteed” Dallas writers earlier in the season that he would run under 5.20 seconds for the quarter-mile in the Coca-Cola Funny Car Classic at Texas Motorplex.

“We’d run 5.22 at Phoenix and were fast qualifier at Pomona with a 5.26, and I knew the Motorplex was the fastest track around with its all-concrete strip, so it seemed like a cinch. I told them so.

“When one of the writers challenged me, I told him I’d eat his paper if I didn’t run in the teens. He printed that, too.”

Force strung together runs in the low 5.20s and beat Tom Hoover in a tense final, 5.25 to 5.28, but his best was a 5.21 in the semifinals.

“I should have been out celebrating, but my trailer was surrounded by a bunch of newspaper guys and their friends who wanted to watch me eat my words,” he said. “So instead of enjoying myself, I went to the press room and ate the article in front of them.

“It tasted terrible. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

Force, 41, has been the dominant force in drag racing this year. He has won seven races, equaling the single-season mark set by Don Prudhomme in 1976 and Kenny Bernstein in 1987. He has been the low qualifier in 10 of the 18 races. And he won the non-points Winston Invitational and the Big Bud Shootout.

With a record like that, it’s no wonder his daughters--Ashley, 7; Brittany, 4; and Courtney, 2--painted their “Welcome Home, Champ” signs, knowing he needed only qualify at Pomona to make it official.

“Hey, we’ve left a path of broken parts and burned cars laying in the dirt from here to Gainesville, (Fla.) this year and nothing we’ve done winning those seven races will mean a thing at Pomona,” Force said. “I know Ace (McCulloch) will be trying to put the hex on us, so I’m not taking anything for granted until I pull my Olds into the lane for the first round.”

Fiery blower explosions have haunted Force all season.

The most spectacular occurred during Saturday qualifying for the NorthStar Nationals at Brainerd, Minn. The engine blew and sent a connecting rod out of the side of the block, starting a small fire. Seconds later, a second fire engulfed the car.

“I was going pretty quick, with one hand on the brakes and one trying to keep it off the wall,” Force said. “Finally it got too hot, so I went out the escape hatch in the roof and fell on my head. That didn’t hurt, but it hurt while I watched the fire burn the body to the ground. What kept it going was the fumes built up inside the clutch area, and friction ignited the titanium clutch housing.

“The car was still hot when (crew chief) Austin Coil said we were going to fix it. No one could believe we were even going to try, but the crew worked nearly all night. All the wiring was burned, the seat was charred and the fiberglass was completely destroyed.

“The next day when we showed up with the car still all burned black, the other teams figured we were just there to get first-round points. But you know something? The way those guys worked gave me such a motivational high that I drove better than I’d ever driven.”

Force beat McCulloch in the final round.

“By the time we got to the semis, seeing our car all burned and still running strong probably psyched out the other guys because by then they knew we were serious.”

Two weeks later, in the Big Bud Shootout at Indianapolis, Force won the $50,000 final against Bruce Larson, but when Force let off the throttle at the finish line, the supercharger exploded and once again his Olds erupted into a ball of fire.

“That was the scariest one for me because before I could get myself unhooked and out of there, I was running out of oxygen and I could feel the fire burning my butt,” he said.

“One thing you got to say about me, though, is that I leave ‘em cheering. It’s not every guy who goes through the (finish line) lights on fire and wins, too.”

After going through an engine during qualifying at Texas Motorplex two weeks ago, Force got on the public-address system and apologized to the fans: “I can’t even get it far enough down the track to set it on fire for you.”

Being this close to the championship is a new experience for Force, although he has been driving funny cars since he left Bell Gardens High.

“You ask most of the top drivers and they’ll tell you they dreamed of winning the Winston championship when they were growing up. Not me. I used to watch through the fence at Orange County (dragstrip) and my dream was to do a burnout like Snake (Prudhomme).”

A burnout is a spectacular pre-race rite in which the driver spins his rear wheels in water to heat and clean the tires for better traction. It also results in thunderous noise and a huge cloud of steam and smoke.

“I thought if the day ever came when I could smoke my tires that way, I’d be the happiest kid in B.G. (Bell Gardens). Then one day I was sitting in a car doing my own burnout. But even then I never dreamed of winning anything more than a race. It’s a good thing I didn’t have big dreams because it took me long enough.”

Force reached the final round nine times between 1979 and 1987 before he finally broke through for his first victory, in the ’87 Grandnationals.

“I made a career of letting other guys get their first win against me,” Force said. “Kenny Bernstein, Raymond Beadle, John Lombardo, Tim Grose, John Collins all got their first win against me, and Mark Oswald got his first funny car win against me.”

Force credits Coil and Bob Fisher, his team manager, with the turnaround this season. Coil joined the Castrol team several years ago from the Chi-Town Hustler team for whom Frank Hawley won Winston funny car championships in 1982 and ’83.

“As long as the blowers don’t go until we get to the finish line, Coil’s doing his job,” Force said. “He has the expertise, and he’s always coming up with new ideas.”

Coil has always been innovative. A few years ago, when he ran the Chi-Town Hustler out of his garage in Chicago, the car was shorter than most other funny cars. When asked why, Coil replied that he couldn’t make it any longer because it wouldn’t fit in the garage.

“As it was, the garage was so small that we couldn’t put the body panels on the frame without moving it outside,” Coil recalled.

Fisher is an old truck driver friend of Force who helped him get started in racing. They parted eight years ago, but Fisher returned this year shortly before the Houston Nationals, the third race of the NHRA season.

“It’s hard to say just what Fisher does, but what he does seems to be what keeps the team winning,” Force said. “Coil runs the team, I do the driving and Fisher’s the guy who keeps everybody happy. It was the missing ingredient we needed to win. When he joined us at Houston we went on a streak. We fight all the time, just like we did 18 years ago, but we need his type of personality to see us through.”

Last Sunday, with nothing else to do while he waited for the Winston Finals, Force took his funny car to Firebird Raceway, near Phoenix, where he won a match race against Gary Densham.

Why would he risk demolishing his car in an insignificant match race less than a week before he was preparing to win his first national championship?

“I just love to drive and I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting home when there was a race to run,” he said. “It’s magic for me to sit in a race car. That’s about all I can say.”

Then he added, “Besides, Austin had a few new ideas he wanted to work out.”

They will be on display when Force makes his first qualifying run today.