Yorba Linda’s Force All Over the Place, but Now He’s on Top of the Drag Racing World

It’s a good thing for John Force that a typical trip down the strip in his funny car lasts about five seconds and could end in a fatal fireball.

Anything longer or safer wouldn’t hold his attention.

He can shoot bullet-straight down a quarter-mile racetrack at more than 300 mph a few times a week, but he spends the rest of his frenetic 16-hour days attacking life with all the subtlety and focus of a hand grenade.

His brother, Walker, who recently joined the Force team after 33 years with the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, says his younger sibling is “polyphasic,” meaning he has the ability to concentrate on a number of tasks at the same time.

Spend a few hours with Force, though, and you might be more inclined to go with “scatter-brained.”

Still, the guy won an unprecedented 13 of 19 National Hot Rod Assn. funny car events this year en route to his sixth Winston Funny Car championship in the last seven years. And Tuesday, Force was named 1996 driver of the year, becoming the first driver in the 29 years of the award to come from a series other than NASCAR, CART or Formula One.

Force’s Pontiac set NHRA records by winning 65 rounds, appearing in 16 finals, winning 13 events, being the low qualifier 13 times, having the low elapsed time 14 times and recording the top speed in six races.

So you can bet there’s a good portion of method in all this madness.

“Ever since he was little, John always wanted to be champion of something,” Walker Force said. “He has this absolutely amazing will to win. But he also has an amazing mind. He truly can do several things at one time. You really have to concentrate or you lose track of where he’s going.”

Only his travel agent knows for sure. Unlike most of his top-level competitors, Force competes in match races during off weeks when the twice-a-month NHRA events aren’t scheduled. While his two 18-wheel mobile garages and luxury motorcoach are on the road between races, Force squeezes in numerous sponsor-related appearances around the country.

The rest of the time he’s on the phone, a shotgun array of ideas and observations spewing from his brain and out of his mouth.

Crew chief Austin Coil manages a tired smile. “Life with John is never boring,” he says. “Sometimes painful, but never boring.”

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Daughters Adria, 27, Ashley, 14, Brittany, 10, and Courtney, 8, don’t see much of Dad and when they do, he’s seldom available for conversation.

“If I walk in the house and Laurie [his wife] says, ‘Oh look, there’s Daddy,’ everybody runs to the TV set because that’s the only place they usually see me,” Force said.

A fan recently sent him a picture taken while Force was vacationing in Hawaii. Force, wearing a sponsor’s hat, is standing in the surf, a cellular phone pressed to his ear.

“The guy wrote a note saying I should take a real vacation because I looked really stupid,” Force said. “But you know I really believe you can be a drag racer and be home to barbecue. But if you want to be a champion, you have to give up your life.”

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Force, 47, sits behind a sprawling desk that is still under construction--he says he designed it to resemble the “cockpit of an 18-wheeler”--in his new office in his new building, a former auto dealership that sits on almost three acres in a Yorba Linda industrial park.

Mr. Motormouth already has blown out his vocal cords during a three-hour monologue this morning, but the lips are still running like one of those engines in the television commercial where they drain all the oil and watch them burn up.

He’s talking--rather rasping--about how many thousands of dollars he’s put into remodeling the facility. Currently, it’s half garage and half museum, but some day it could include a television studio, a gift shop, a restaurant, a nightclub . . . and he’s probably come up with some new possibilities in the last 15 minutes.

The 10,000-square-foot former showroom in the front of the building includes a vintage Coca-Cola bar--”don’t use the napkins, that [stuff] is authentic antiques”--a retired funny car he built to race once and then display, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he always wanted but never has time to ride, bits and pieces of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and JFK memorabilia and a computer-driven baby-grand player piano.

“I went to a Mercedes dealership to get decorating ideas because I figured they were a pretty classy outfit,” Force says, “and I kept hearing this piano music. The guy told me it puts people in the mood to buy.”

So what is Force selling?

“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

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When he does, it probably will make him richer, as did the $1-million deal he recently signed with Action Collectibles to sell his souvenirs. His T-shirts and caps account for almost half of all drag racing merchandise sold.

He has a luxurious home a few miles from his new headquarters, complete with a pool that features a rock-strewn creek and waterfall designed after his favorite childhood swimming hole in a little town near Redding.

He has the same agent as Clint Eastwood and Sharon Stone.

But you won’t find a pair of Gucci shoes anywhere in his wardrobe, which includes only a couple of things that don’t have a sponsor logo on them--a tuxedo, his jeans and boots--and one piece of fine jewelry, a Rolex watch his wife recently gave him.

“I always wore a Seiko because I thought that was the best there was,” he said with a shrug. “Hell, I don’t need no watch that works on the moon. I ain’t goin’ there.”

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Force grew up in what he calls a “trailer house,” the youngest of five children. The trailer--like the man who grew up inside it--was always on the move, following in the wake of his father, who drove logging trucks.

“One year, we were in six or seven different schools,” Walker Force said. “You would think you’d get used to it, but I don’t think a kid ever gets used to the terror you feel when you walk into a new school where everyone already knows everyone and you don’t know anyone.”

John was a bit luckier than Walker, who is eight years older. The family had settled in Downey for the last three years he was in high school. But they were still crammed in the same trailer and often ate dinner in a nearby Denny’s where his mother worked as a cook.

“I guess that’s when my love of cars really started,” he said. “I’d put my football helmet and school books in my ’55 Chevy and I lived in that car as a teenager.

“I used to stay in the parking lot of Taco Bell until midnight, do my homework or just hang out. The car became a way of life. You didn’t want to go home until you were ready to get into bed.”

The trailer is still there, its tires long sunken into the ground in the middle of a shabby little park off Imperial Highway in Downey. “Go over there and take a look at it and then maybe you’ll understand why I work every day from six in the morning until midnight, or whatever it takes,” he said. “You always have this fear of going back.”

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Fire is the greatest enemy, and biggest fear, of a funny car driver. So Force tries his best to keep laughing in the face of the flames. But the scar tissue on the back of his hands--he was trying to protect his eyes when the heat of a fire was melting his goggles--isn’t very funny looking.

“We had new cars in 1994 and we wanted a new look to motivate us, so we asked the fans how they would paint a John Force car,” Force said. “They said, ‘Paint it like it’s on fire.’ ”

During the semifinals of the 1992 Mid-South Nationals in Memphis, Force’s engine blew and the car exploded in flames. When the burning inferno came to a stop, Force crawled out on his hands and knees.

“It was kind of like running full speed across your living room and diving headfirst into the fireplace,” he said. “I got out and the local TV guy was standing right there in shock, holding the microphone, and the first thing I said was, ‘Are we live?’ ”

The reporter wasn’t sure if this blackened and smoking form was asking about its state of being or the status of his telecast, but he managed a question: “With all that fire, what did you see?”

Force: “We were in Memphis, so I told him, ‘I saw Elvis at a thousand feet.’

“They made a big deal of it, but, of course, I didn’t see Elvis at all. I lied. You see, I used to be a truck driver and when you’re at a truck stop and you tell a good story, somebody will buy you a cup of coffee. And what’s better for the sport than a guy who can run 300 mph, catch on fire, crawl out and tell a story?”

Force has been actively campaigning for a spot on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno and says producers have told him he’s “getting closer.”

“If I do,” he promises, “I’m going to set myself on fire and run around the stage and then burn a hole in his couch.”

Even when he’s trying to stick to his best one-liners, sobering truths about his sport slip in: “I can’t hate any of my competitors; I’ve seen them all on fire.”

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As a child, John Force dreamed of being a football hero and was the starting quarterback at Bell Gardens High as a junior and senior. He had polio as a child, however, and the growth of his right leg was stunted. He wasn’t exactly a threat to scramble.

“John could throw the ball a mile, still can,” Walker said, “but he couldn’t run much and he fell down a lot.”

Force says all he really ever wanted out of life was a job that included wearing a helmet and offered a chance at becoming a hero. So he tried to get into law enforcement.

“I flunked the ink-blot test, though,” he said. “Walker told me to just tell the truth. All I saw was snakes and spiders and [stuff] and that’s what I told ‘em. So they failed me.”

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Twenty-two years ago in Australia, a sometimes fearless and often reckless 25-year-old from Bell Gardens finally discovered his calling . . . in the seat of a dragster.

“Some people call it a coffin,” he says, “I call it home. I mean, I walk the staircases when everybody else uses the elevator ‘cause I’m claustrophobic and [stuff], and yet I can get in that cockpit. I can’t explain it, except to say that car is my personal buddy.”

Force had been working as a truck driver in Vernon when his uncle, who had been drag racing in Australia, crashed his car. Force cashed a $1,200 income tax refund check and boarded a plane. Preceding him was a picture of him in a cowboy hat standing next to a car parked next to Mickey Thompson’s. He had never raced against Thompson, but nobody needed to know that.

“You know, down there, they’re 20 years behind us,” he says. “They think everyone from America is John Wayne.”

He didn’t even have a competitor’s license when he set an Australian national record at 200 mph. But Force was hooked on a feeling.

He returned home and became whatever is the antithesis of an overnight sensation. He slept in his brother Walker’s garage, worked on his car, raced it, slept in one room of a Motel 6 with the whole crew and towed the car to the next strip.

“He’s lucky because he’s reached the point where some people like to see him lose,” said driver Tony Pedegron. “It’s like that in any sport. But I remember going to the races as a teenager and I remember when he had made it to the finals 12 times and lost them all. I know he used to be a truck driver. I know the struggle. You just have to respect that and what he’s done for this sport.”

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Force may be able to walk unnoticed into any restaurant in his hometown--which obviously irks him no end--but his ego gets a full-blown turbo-charge every time he pops up at a drag strip, where his down-to-earth style, self-deprecating sense of humor and stamina with a felt pen have made him a folk hero.

“We had a 100,000 people out at Pomona and 99,000 were at my ropes,” Force said. “I signed from 8 in the morning into the night and I was exhausted. They ask me how I can do what I do with the dragster. That [stuff] is easy. That part’s like sex. It only takes five seconds.”

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After Cruz Pedegron and the McDonald’s racing team won five of the final six races of the 1992 season to steal the Winston championship from Force--who had been so far ahead in the standings his team had gone into a research-and-development mode--Force said he had lost his title to “a kid driving a hamburger stand on wheels.”

Two years later, he hired Cruz’s younger brother, Tony, to drive a second car prepped by the Force team.

“Tony’s a very good driver, a pretty darn good race-car mechanic and he works well with the media, which is very important to John,” said co-crew chief Bernie Fedderly, another defector from Cruz Pedegron’s team. “But did he also do it to gnaw on Cruz a little? Probably.”

If it had that effect, the Pedegrons aren’t letting on.

“Even by Cruz’s view of it, and he’s been on the other end of it for a long time, there isn’t a better team in drag racing,” Tony Pedegron said.

Driving the second Force car, which is a full-time research-and-development project, Tony met his brother at the season’s final race with second place in the standings on the line.

“The pressure had been constant all year,” Tony said, “because Cruz and all the other guys sure as hell didn’t want to get beat by John’s R-and-D car. Cruz and I had switched second and third place five times and then it came down to that one race.”

Tony ran a 4.98. His brother blew a clutch, smoked the tires and never had a chance.

“Before that race, my whole family was standing in the staging area and John told my mom something that really hits home now,” Tony said. “He said, ‘You really can’t lose. They both got jobs.’ ”

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Walker Force is writing a biography about his brother. John is already thinking about the film version.

“We’re going to make a movie about me,” he says. “My brother wants to call it ‘Force Gump.’ Starts out with me as a little kid with polio. I want Kurt Russell to play me.

“Did I tell you about the time I met Kurt Russell? I walked right by him, he’s only 5-3 you know, then I couldn’t remember his name. So I called him Capt. Ron.

“He shook my hand and said, ‘Man, you are a space case.’ ”

Now if he only had that watch that works on the moon.