John Force posed after his first-round victory in Sunday’s O’Reilly Midwest Nationals at Gateway Int’l Raceway with four fat Goodyear slicks cleverly arranged to spell out “1,000.”
The Funny Car icon and 14-time champion had just recorded his unprecedented 1,000th elimination round-win in National Hot Rod Ass’n competition. After a week that lauded daughter Ashley for beating him at Atlanta and becoming the first woman to win a Funny Car final, he reveled in his 59th birthday cheer in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch. He received a crystal trophy commemorating his achievement, kissed wife Laurie, kissed Senior Vice President of Racing Operations Graham Light, and turned his attention back to a race that saw his rookie driver, Mike Neff, reach the finals.
John Force Racing cranked out the stats of his 30-year career, including such esoteric tidbits as “Force has won 111 rounds against drivers with surnames beginning with the letter B” and “263 of Force’s 1,000 round-wins have come without facial hair.”
Perhaps the fun of this moment, though, came in Force’s remarks the week before, when he was preparing for his 500th race, at Atlanta, and Top Fuel dominator Tony Schumacher was set to notch his 250th.
Said Force then, “Well, he ain’t going to catch me til I drop dead, because I’m going to drive this old thing until I drop. I’ve just fallen in love with it all over again.”
Schumacher paid his respects, then joined in the kidding: “He told the media that unless he croaked that I was never going to catch him. He said he’s never going to quit. Well, unless he wants to run his Funny Car on Geritol, he may not have a choice.”
Force has proven that he does have a choice. As he lay in a hospital bed in Dallas last fall, battered badly by a racing accident that inspired sweeping safety measures, Force made the decision to race again.
Many wagged their heads that he wasn’t ready. Some feared he would hurt himself worse. But John Force knew John Force better than anyone, and he worked like a man possessed to regain his strength. His stubbornness carried him through days of painful and grueling physical therapy that made him cry and made him angry. But he never lost sight of his goal: to be back in a Funny Car.
So hmmm…Fast-forward to 2038…
John Force is amazing everybody.
Imagine — 89 years old…28 championships…and reaching that 2,000 round-win plateau. Finally he did it, but he had to beat granddaughter Autumn Hight, oldest child of 10-time champion Robert Hight, to do it.
He and daughter Ashley always have raced together, it seems, for at age 55, she just captured round win No. 1,000, beating young Bob Tasca VII.
“It seems like yesterday I was getting congratulations for winning the 1,000th round-win,” Force said. “That was way back when gas was only about $4 a gallon at the pump. Boy, we didn’t know how great we had it then! And everybody had those flat-screen TVs. And cell phones — how big and bulky they were! And we hadn’t even colonized Mars back then. Forgive me — I’m an old man, reminiscing…
“It’s just so different now,” Force said. “We didn’t know what we were going to do when nitro got outlawed 20 years ago. But who knew these ole hot rods would run on hydrogen power laced with a compost mixture of potato peels, grass clippings and stale beer?
“Now I’ll shut up,” Force said. “I see Caden Capps is standing here, waiting to talk.” Capps, Senior VicePresident of Racing Operations once NHRA and IHRA merged and purchased a financially struggling NASCAR operation, started to take the microphone and congratulate Force. But Force had something else left to say.
“Just one more thing. Caden Capps, I beat your old man — Ron Capps — to get that 1,000th round-win, back there in St. Louis in 2008. Never will forget it. He left on me, but I ran him down.”