Ashley Force was a communications major at Cal State Fullerton, but she simply might have inherited her entertaining wit from dear ole Dad, 14-time Funny Car champion and instinct-propelled, empire-builder John Force.
With her arm around him Sunday before their historical meeting in the Summit Racing Equipment Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway, both of them a bit edgy with the significance of the moment and the intermittent rain that had kept the day off-balance, she was the glib one and he the reflective one.
“At John Force Racing,” she quipped, “we always do everything dramatically. My first race he bumped me out, then I got back in. I beat him, then he beat me. We are a strange family.” Then, playfully but respectfully, she squeezed him and said, “Hopefully, I’m going to kick this ole man’s butt.”
She was going for her first Funny Car victory, at age 25 hoping to be the first woman to accomplish the feat.
But she would have to do it at the expense of her father’s 1,000th career round win in his 500th race — maybe more importantly, in his first big shot at being John Force, marquee racer and formidable champion, again after 217 grueling days recovering from his vicious racing accident last September near Dallas. He knew he hadn’t regained his strength, but he was sure his heart for racing wars beat as strongly as ever.
After all, he had said earlier in the week, “To go after 500, hey, all I’ve got to do is show up, I guess I get it. Now, 1,000, that’s something. I’d like to do that in front of my children to show them the old man has still got it, at least for a while.
“I come in my building, I see all these trophies. None of it’s no good to me if I can’t win again,” he said.
“You know, I’ve got a big ole ego. I want to go to Atlanta and I want to win me a drag race, even if it takes beating this girl — you know what I’m saying? — my own child. I want to get back in the game. I want to be part of it. I love it. I was taken out for six months, and it broke my heart when the doctor said, ‘You may never drive again.’ It guts a man.”
Supercharged to be competitive, he said, “I ain’t gone rounds, if you haven’t noticed lately.” And he told his daughter Sunday afternoon, “If you want to win, you got to whup me. That’s the way it is.”
John Force was trying to make some sense of the complicated tug-o-war churning inside him. He clearly wanted Ashley to know he was proud of her, but at the same time wanted to rekindle that winning feeling that his accident stole from him. Ashley Force just wanted to record that first victory.  
But he had waited 75 races, at first driving a rickety car his brother Walker swore was held together with bailing wire and duct tape, flipping upside down, escaping fireballs. Was it fair that she might win in just her 27th start? Did she appreciate the fact that she could do that because he was the one who led the way for the class, inspiring everyone with his rags-to-racing-riches story and behaving almost like a mother hen when it came to safety, technological progress, personnel selection and media attention?
Oh, how he wanted to win that race.
But he didn’t. He paced in the shadows after he lost traction, perhaps to allow her biggest moment yet in the spotlight. Perhaps he did so to understand the strangeness that this opponent who beat him in the final round is the little girl he used to bring home souvenir dolls from some race far away from her Yorba Linda, Calif., suburban comfort zone.
What he shared was this:
“It’s good for her. As a father, I’m proud of her. She did her job. She didn’t do anything stupid on the starting line. But really, my focus was in my lane. I would have liked to have had that…but it’s also important in her career, because wins — it took me a lot of years to win and it’s good for her that she gets that win and gets it out of the way.”