Drag Racing Legend Regains Family Man Title
John Force had missed so much of their lives. The recitals. The dance lessons. The cheerleader tryouts.
While his three youngest daughters grew to adulthood, Force spent 20 years at drag strips across the country. He won races, promoted sponsors, and branded himself as, arguably, the greatest drag racer of all time.
He won 13 funny car titles, and his team won 14 in succession. Then came last season. He finished third, behind rival owner Don Schumacher’s tandem of Gary Scelzi and Ron Capps in the closest funny car standings in history.
Yet, there are those along Nitro Alley at Pomona Raceway, site of the 46th National Hot Rod Assn.’s Carquest Auto Parts Winternationals starting today, who say the 2005 season was the most important of Force’s life.
Call it the great distraction, but Force, 56, focused on his family and his empire’s future. In the end, he didn’t win another championship. But he won back a family he never really knew.
“Getting his daughters going, his son-in-law in the car, it cost him a championship,” Capps said flatly. “But he wouldn’t take it back.... He let his car slip a bit, but he did so by [reordering] his priorities, which was getting his family back together and [then] racing. And in the long run, it motivated him.”
Ashley, 23, one of Force’s four daughters, found success and celebrity in her second season, in a top-alcohol dragster and will move to a funny car in 2007. Brittany, 19, and Courtney, 17, made their racing debuts in super comp dragsters, just as Ashley had a year earlier.
Adria, 36, Force’s oldest daughter from a previous marriage, is married to Robert Hight, a Force driver who led the championship much of last season, finished fifth overall, and was NHRA rookie of the year. She also gave Force his first grandchild, Autumn Danielle, in September 2004.
“There was never a time when he didn’t want us around, but we needed the stability of home,” Adria said of childhood.
Said Ashley: “We’d see him on TV, he’d come home, be a tornado through town, not make us go to school, let us eat ice cream in bed, and in a snap be back on the road again. He would be cranky or moody about the race.
“But now that my sisters and I are having the same ups and downs, I think Mom understands him better. I know I understand him better.”
Force says he is closer than ever to his wife of 24 years, Laurie. What pushed them apart seven years ago, drag racing, has pulled them back together.
“To win 13 championships, somebody suffered, and it was the family,” Force said.
Last year was a role reversal. The racing suffered.
“Maybe I got caught up with my kids last year and my wife being on the road,” Force said.
“When the kids are wanting to sit up and watch TV and you should be sleeping by 10 o’clock, I found nights that I stayed up until 1:30 in the morning, having fun with them, laughing, and then the next day I suffered for it on the starting line because I was tired. I knew I didn’t get eight hours’ sleep and I made some mistakes.”
He lost the championship by 32 points. Ten times in 23 races, he was beaten in the first round, including four in a row at one point.
Two more first-round victories, and Force would have been a 14-time champion. He was that close -- in an off year.
And as it was, Force won five times in his GTX Ford Mustang, giving him 119 funny car victories in 29 seasons.
His and his team’s rededication to winning this season’s championship was apparent in recent weeks during preseason testing. After having gone 11 months without a single pass lower than 4.7 seconds, Force peeled off five in a two-week span.
“Force doesn’t come around and joke anymore,” Scelzi said. “He’s dead serious.”
He has been dead serious behind his Cheshire cat grin for decades, but at a personal cost.
“He’s as successful as he is because he lives it every minute,” said Ashley, who has grown to identify with her father through her own racing experiences. “On family vacations, he’s on the phone talking business. It’s sad, but if you want to be on top, you have to give up other stuff. Not that he personally chose racing over us, but we went our way and he went on tour.
“For us to come back together when we started racing, that’s been the big change. Now, we have so much in common. We couldn’t talk to him about cheerleading movements, and we couldn’t talk to him about clutches. But now we’re all on the same page.”
The family and the future weren’t the only distractions. Force also worked up a pilot for a reality TV series called “Driving Force” that will appear in June on A&E.; It deals with John reconnecting with his family. He also focused on new technologies with his car, on an entertainment business, and land development deals in Indianapolis and Orange County. He says he was on overload, but that he also did something champions can’t afford to do.
He got overconfident. He paid attention to Hight and Eric Medlen, the second-year driver who finished fourth. There was Ashley’s burgeoning career, and Courtney and Brittany getting started. “Instead of watching the championship, I was focused on them,” Force said. “I didn’t think I could be beat.
“I was wrong.”