FORCE HAS RIVALS WHERE HE WANTS THEM
DALLAS, TX – After stumbling in last week’s playoff opener in Charlotte, John Force has his Funny Car rivals right where he wants 
them as the Countdown to the Mello Yello Championship moves to Billy Meyer’s Texas Motorplex for the Friday start of the 28th annual AAA Texas Fall Nationals.
The 64-year-old drag racing icon, who over a 36-year career has made a habit of defying even the longest odds, was beaten in the second round of last week’s Carlyle Tools Carolina Nationals and, as a result, is in position this week to make even more history in an NHRA series in which he has been an A-List player for almost 30 years.
Force’s newest challenge is to become the first Funny Car driver in the NHRA’s Countdown Era to win the championship after failing to reach the semifinals in the first playoff event.
Not surprisingly, the 135-time tour winner believes he has just the race car with which to do it, a 10,000 horsepower Castrol GTX Ford Mustang capable of zero-to-320 mile-an-hour acceleration in less than four seconds.
Since he had crew chiefs Jimmy Prock and Mike Neff swap drivers six races ago, Force’s Ford has been one of the top performers in what has become the most competitive pro category in the sport.
The rub is that the Force-Prock collaboration has yet to produce a victory, a shortcoming that can be traced to the driver’s uncharacteristic inconsistency while adapting to a new car, a new crew and a new routine.
Nevertheless, the charismatic one-time truck driver appears to be regaining his rhythm – and a bit of his swagger – just in time to make a run at an unprecedented 16th series title.
To make that bit of history his own, however, he’ll have to start beating points leader Matt Hagan, to whom he lost in Charlotte and whom he now trails by almost 100 Full Throttle points.
“Hagan’s got a good hot rod,” Force said of the man he bested to win the title back in 2010, “but so do I. Everyone that pulls up there has a good car so it’s back on the drivers (to make the difference). Hagan’s in the gym all the time. Well, so am I. To keep up with these kids, I guess I’m gonna have to live in there.”
Force is encouraged this week because the tour is back in Texas where he has a history of success. In fact, in no other state except his native California has the 2008 inductee into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America won more races than he has in the Lone Star State.
He’s won seven times at the Motorplex, seven more times at Houston Raceway Park, but it’s on the all-concrete course at Meyer’s Dallas track that he feels most comfortable, ironic insomuch as he has crashed there three times, most seriously in 2007 when he was flown out of the track with life-threatening injuries.
Before that crash, Force banged the guardwall three times in an unsuccessful bid to catch Cruz Pedregon in the final round of the 1992 Fall Nationals and, in 1997, his car was rammed from behind as it decelerated beyond the finish line by the car of Ray Higley.
If he is impact-ful this weekend, though, the 15-time Auto Racing All-American hopes it is only in a figurative context as he tries to add yet another chapter to his voluminous racing legacy.
