‘Cruz’ Control

As he washes a life-size model of his green racing car in the driveway of his home, champion race-car driver Cruz Pedregon tells the story of what happened 26 years ago.

He was 9. He had just bet his father he could turn around an 18-wheel truck. Keys in hand, Pedregon plopped himself on top of two pillows to obtain a better grip on the steering wheel of the family truck.

But halfway down a block in downtown Los Angeles, Pedregon was pulled over by a police officer.

“If he had any doubts that I was small, when he opened the door and those pillows fell out, he knew,” Pedregon said.

While miffed at the $100 citation he and his father each received, Pedregon is fond of telling this story to illustrate he was destined to drive--and how it was he, not his drag-racer father, who pushed Pedregon into the driving business.

One of Pedregon’s wishes is that his father--who died when Pedregon was 18--had lived to see some of his accomplishments.

Eight years after he started his professional racing career, Pedregon is having a banner year behind the wheel of a funny car--a hooded style of dragster first built in the mid-1960s and named for its odd appearance.

Although he was plagued by losses and fiery collisions in 1997, Pedregon last month became the first driver in National Hot Rod Assn. history to reach a speed of more than 318 mph in a funny car.

While that record Pedregon set during the Fram Nationals in Atlanta has since been broken by John Force--who has dominated the racing scene during the ‘90s--Pedregon still holds the record for the fastest elapsed time in funny-car history. He set the record by covering the quarter-mile stretch in 4.81 seconds at a March race in Houston.

“It’s not surprising that he’s had the record,” said David Ferroni), a National Hot Rod Assn. spokesman. “He’s had them before and he’ll have them again. He’s one of the greatest drivers in the business right now.”

Forces to Be Reckoned With

Pedregon has set records and won 17 funny-car events in his career. He and Force are the only drivers this decade to win funny-car championships.

His primary motivation is to fulfill his father’s unfulfilled dreams. “This is what my dad could have and should have done,” he said.

During the late 1960s, his father was a legendary Southern California drag racer. Frank Sr. raced a top-fuel dragster, a needle-nosed car. Promoters booked him because crowds loved to see the fire blaze off his rear tires, and Frank Sr. became known as “Flaming Frank.”

“He had a passion for it,” said Tony, Pedregon’s younger brother.

“But you’ve got to support your family, and back in the ‘60s and even the ‘70s, racing wasn’t the business it is now. And had it been, my father would have been a John Force.”

In the 1970s, Frank Sr. put aside racing and opened a trucking company in Gardena, where he fixed, bought and sold trucks. His sons also helped. Cruz recalled the years working side by side with his father.

By his freshman year of high school, he dropped out to work with his father. While he regrets that move, he said the trade-off was being with his dad. He woke up seven days a week at 6 a.m.

“If he had to wait for us in the driveway and we weren’t there in five minutes, he’d leave and you would have to figure out a way to get there,” Pedregon said.

One stormy day, while flying his private plane to meet a prospective truck client in Mexico, Frank Sr. lost control of the plane, crashed and died.

All three of Frank Sr.’s sons have gone on to be professional funny-car racers who sometimes compete against one another.

Pedregon entered the National Hot Rod Assn. in 1992 as a rookie and won a national championship. Tony, 33, entered in 1994, and Frank Jr., 35, just entered this season after several years racing other types of dragsters.

As a funny-car driver, Tony works for his brother’s archrival, John Force. One of the reasons Force hired Tony was to help him beat the only opponent who has been able to wrestle away a championship: Tony’s brother Cruz.

“Who knows how to stop Cruz better than his brother,” Tony recalled Force saying. During the same weekend that Pedregon set the record for elapsed time, Tony also beat his brother during the semifinals in Houston.

“I get a little emotional when I beat Cruz,” Tony said. “I feel sad. It’s hard for me to celebrate when I beat him. The last time I gave him a hug.”

Frank Sr. always taught the brothers to stick together and remember how important it is to help the family out, Pedregon recalled. He remembered how his father would “boink” the heads of the brothers together after they had been in a fight and make them hug.

While wiping off the drops of water that cling to his model green car, the one with the painted red flames that lick the bottom, Pedregon returns to the topic of his father after almost every sentence he utters about racing.

“The most valuable lesson my father instilled was the importance of family and giving back,” Pedregon said. He attributes this to why the brothers have all stayed so close together. His wife, Sharon, reports that the brothers speak almost every other day, running up astronomical phone bills. “When we’re together, we’ll still act like we’re 15 years old and we’ll giggle,” Pedregon said.

Bad Turns On, Off the Speedway

While Pedregon broke two records this year, he experienced a rather humbling year in 1997. It was a year that included the lowest number of victories as well as a spectacular crash.

There was one particular week--which Ferroni calls the “week from hell.”

Pedregon failed to qualify during one race in Topeka, Kan., “which is major for a star like him not to qualify,” Ferroni said. Then the next day he was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy.

Then, six days later, he suffered minor burns during a final round in Memphis, when the top of Pedregon’s engine blew out, missed his head by several inches, and created a fiery crash that resulted in minor burns for Pedregon.

Yet “he was pretty much upbeat, never down, never questioned why, he just said, ‘It comes with the territory,’ ” recalled Ferroni. “He kept saying, ‘It will keep getting better.’ ”

And things did change in March, when Pedregon set a record for elapsed time, and in April, when he set a speed record.

“The sound of the engine, it had the feeling like it could go on forever,” Pedregon recalled about that driving experience. “Everything was just in sync that particular run, the weather, the track, the car. I steered it right.”

His victory, however, was also for his father.

“I felt like my dad had unfinished business,” Pedregon said.