FORCE’S LATEST ‘SHAKE UP’ PAYING DIVIDENDS
SEATTLE, WA – John Force hasn’t stayed on top of his game the last quarter century by being unwilling to change.
However, the 15-time champion’s most recent moves were extreme, even by his standards, and yet, entering this week’s 26th annual O’Reilly Northwest Nationals, Force once more is beginning to look like a chess master after swapping crew chiefs, crews and race cars with teammate and son-in-law Robert Hight.
“Sometimes, you just have to shake things up,” explained the Hall of Fame inductee (Motorsports Hall of Fame of American in 2008 and International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2012). “You gotta get the right people in the right place.”
As a result, Mike Neff, who won the NHRA championship with Force in 2010 and started the season with the 135-time tour winner, now is making the performance decisions for Hight on the Auto Club Ford.
Conversely, Jimmy Prock, who took Hight to the championship in 2009, now is turning the wrenches for Force on the Castrol GTX Ford Mustang.
Both drivers have benefitted from the move. Runner-up last week at Sonoma, Calif., in just his second race with Prock, Force has moved up to fourth place in Mello Yello points. After posting the quickest time during eliminations last week (4.018 seconds) in a critical duel with Bob Tasca III, Hight is back in the Top 10.
“We’re getting paid to win a championship,” Force said of the shuffle. “Prock and Neff have different crew chief styles (but) they’re both world championship crew chiefs. I believe I made the right call and I’m going to stick with it.
“We’ve got a good ol’ hot rod,” Force continued. “Jimmy Prock swings for the fence with the ‘Prock Rocket.’ He doesn’t mess around. I wasn’t on my game last week like I should have been, but I’ll fix that. The good thing is we can go right back to racing this week at Seattle.”
Force’s enthusiasm on the eve of his return to Pacific Raceways, a track on which he first raced in the 1970s, is understandable. After all, he’s won a record seven times at the northwestern most track in the series and last year went to the semifinals before losing to daughter, Courtney, who went on to win the race in the Traxxas Ford.
Shuffling the crew chiefs isn’t the only change Force has made this year in an attempt to reclaim a championship that has been his, as either driver or car owner, 17 of the last 23 seasons.
He also had to change his driving style after Neff pointed out a negative aspect of the heavy training regimen he adopted during his recovery from injuries suffered in September, 2007, in a crash at Dallas, Texas.
“He said since I’ve been living in the gym, building myself up, I was way over steering the car,” Force admitted. “He said I was taking it right out of the groove. So we started watching the videos and that’s exactly what was happening. He really helped me just calm down and get back to doing my job.”
The result? Force has gone to the finals four times in the last six races with two different cars, two different crews and two different crew chiefs. More important, at age 64 he has established himself, once more, as a legitimate threat to win the title.
“They were ready to print up T-shirts that said ‘John Force: Extinct,’” he said of this year’s slow start in which he advanced beyond the second round just once in the first nine races, “but I ain’t dead yet. I can still drive these hot rods I’ll know when it’s time (to get out of the car) and it ain’t time, yet.”
