If he hadn’t already won an NHRA Mello Yello Funny Car world championship, or had to endure a frustrating and winless 2014 season, or wasn’t by nature a positive and upbeat individual, “Fast Jack” Beckman might be upset about losing this year’s title to Del Worsham, but he isn’t. Beckman won’t let a missed opportunity spoil his offseason, and he’s already looking ahead to the 2016 opener in Pomona, less than two months away.
“Are you kidding me? Anyone who doesn’t think we had a great season is kidding themselves,” said Beckman. “As for the championship, I try not to think about it. I don’t dwell on how close we came. It’s frustrating that we didn’t close the deal just because we had such a great year. We won seven races and reset the [elapsed time national] record four times, and when you do that, you start to think that the only way it has a happy ending is if you win the championship, but I’m 49. I’ve survived cancer, and I have a healthy family. I get the bigger picture, which is that I’m a pretty fortunate individual.”
Losing the championship to Worsham on the final day of the season is one of the few missteps in an otherwise storybook season for Beckman and the Infinite Hero team. Coming off a horrendous 2014 season in which he didn’t win a race and missed the Countdown to the Championship, Beckman entered this season brimming with confidence because he knew that he had a full season with new crew chief Jimmy Prock as well as John Medlen and Chris Cunningham. The start of the 2015 season brought with it heightened expectations, so Beckman wasn’t the least bit deterred when it began with an embarrassing DNQ at the season-opening race in Pomona.
“We had Jimmy Prock at the last two races of 2014, and we didn’t win a round,” Beckman recalled. “Then we went to the first two races of this season and didn’t win a round with a DNQ in Pomona. In spite of all that, I knew we were going to have a great season. After Pomona, I couldn’t wait to get to the next race in Phoenix because I knew that as soon as Jimmy got enough data from the hybrid combination we were running, we’d be a factor. Looking back to last January, once I knew that we’d have Prock, Medlen, and Cunningham on our car, it was almost impossible not to be optimistic.”
Beckman scored early wins at the first Charlotte event and in Topeka and Norwalk, but he really hit his stride at midseason. In Sonoma, Beckman made one of the most shocking runs of this or any other season when he drove to a 3.921 to lead qualifying by a wide margin. At the time, Cruz Pedregon held the quickest time slip in the class with a 3.95 run from the 2014 season. A week later in Seattle, Beckman nudged his own record to a 3.91. What followed was an epic summer when Beckman and almost everyone else in the Funny Car class began to destroy the record books for the remainder of the season. The catalyst for the dramatic improvement ultimately proved to be a set of headers that were angled to direct the force of the exhaust rearward rather than upward. According to Beckman, the new headers not only helped to propel the car forward, but also to eliminate some of the initial downforce that had a tendency to distort the rear tires on the launch.
“We actually tried the headers for the first time during qualifying in Denver, but the car dropped a cylinder, and we took them off,” said Beckman. “On Sunday, we won the first round but smoked the tires. We had to race [Matt] Hagan in the second round, and Jimmy just said, ‘The heck with it; we’re going to go for it.’ We put the headers back on, and they’ve been on ever since. What we found is that the downforce from the exhaust was crushing the slicks into the ground, and when we used the new headers, the car acted like it was 2,000 pounds lighter. It just blasted off the starting line for the first 60 feet.
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“To be honest, Cruz and Tim Wilkerson had been running a similar design that we noticed earlier in the year,” Beckman said. “Based on what we know now, I’d say that’s the reason Cruz was crushing everyone the last two years, but I think we all had too much pride to think that a set of headers would make that much difference. Obviously, you can’t hide something like a set of headers, so the other teams caught on pretty quickly, so we didn’t maintain our advantage for as long as we’d have liked. In hindsight, Jimmy actually admitted that he probably should have waited until Indy to make the change, but we had no way of knowing that it was going to work that well or how long it would take to figure out.”
While the Funny Car class as a whole improved dramatically, Beckman and the Infinite Hero team still had the car to beat. Beckman locked up the No. 1 seed for the playoffs with a win in Indy but had dropped to fourth following a couple of early losses during Countdown events in Charlotte and St. Louis. Even a win in Reading, a runner-up in Dallas, and the bonus points gained after setting two more national elapsed time records weren’t enough for Beckman to flag down eventual champ Worsham.
“As far as Funny Cars go, I think this was the best season in maybe the last 20 years,” said Beckman. “That’s especially true for our team. We had the kind of season that only guys like [Kenny] Bernstein, [Don] Prudhomme, and [John] Force have had. By the end of the season, everyone could run low 3.9s — even some of the part-time teams, some of the guys who race on a budget. That’s the beauty of Funny Car racing. Nitro is a fair fuel. It doesn’t know or care how much money you have when it hits the spark plug.
“The other thing that I’m proud of is my relationship with Jimmy and honestly, all three guys who tune this car,” Beckman said. “Jimmy and I talk at least once a week, and he supports me. He’s a brilliant guy, but he’s also very quiet, but once you get to know him better, you realize that he’s incredibly funny and is also loved by the people around him. He’s passionate and has strong opinions, but even when we do something wonderful, he doesn’t gloat about it.”
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With seven wins in nine finals, it’s no surprise that Beckman is counting the days until the 2016 season opener in Pomona, especially after team sponsor Terry Chandler agreed to fund the Don Schumacher Racing entry for another season and continue the support of the Infinite Hero Foundation. The program is a perfect fit for Beckman, who is a former Air Force sergeant.
“I can’t say enough about Terry Chandler; the world could use about 10 more of her,” said Beckman. “It’s very rare to find someone who is so unselfish and so motivated to help others. Most people I don’t think realize that she devotes a lot of her time to this. It’s not just money. Between our Infinite Hero team and Tommy [Johnson Jr.’s] Make-A-Wish team, it’s like she has 20 sons out here because she treats us all like family.
“I’m glad that we’re good for at least one more season, but I want to keep going,” Beckman said. “I want to keep driving until I’m just not ready to do it anymore. I’d love to be one of those guys who can retire on my own terms. Don Prudhomme and Kenny Bernstein did it, but not too many others have that luxury. I still have no less desire to win than I did when I was racing my street-legal El Camino. It’s the same as it was 25 years ago; I just want to beat the person in the other lane.”
