As he prepares for the season-opening Circle K NHRA Winternationals in Pomona, reigning NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series Funny Car champ John Force took part in a recent NHRA media teleconference to talk about his championships and his constant search for new ways to promote himself and the NHRA. Force won his 16th Funny Car world championship last season with four wins, five runner-up finishes, and six No. 1 qualifying positions.
Q: You know more than anybody how hard it is to repeat as champion going forward. What have you told your crew guys to make sure that they stay hungry going into this 2014 season?
Force: We evaluate over the winter. If we’ve lost any people, especially key people, clutch men, engine builders, we evaluate the crew chiefs, if anybody’s leaving, we go through a lot just to make sure that we’re stable in our approach. Then the approach is give everybody a couple of weeks to rest. Let’s not talk racing, even though Robert [Hight] and I, we’ve been on the road all over the country, and we’re beat up and tired. We just got back from testing a week, like everybody, but we were gone two weeks. We live on the road. That’s what we do. There’s not much downtime, a little downtime at Christmas. But the mindset is the same. If you don’t focus, if you take winning for granted, you go back to the same process and mindset you had last year, and go after it. Only difference is now, because of the economy and where we’re looking at the future of chasing Corporate America, we’ve got to find some major sponsorship, and that’s why we’ve been living on the road, working with Just Marketing, and trying to replace sponsorships that are going to be leaving.
Q. Do you feel that fellow champions always go into the next season, any season, with a special attitude and confidence like that lifts them up to the top again?
Force: I still set my goals after Don “the Snake” Prudhomme, and he doesn’t even race anymore. I do it because that keeps you motivated. Every day you get out of bed, every meal you eat. You know, I put on some weight over the winter, and I dropped 10 pounds in the last four weeks trying to get back to where I was. I got a little lazy. Still in the gym but not where I needed to be. So you do want to set goals. I set my goals to continue to win. Hardest thing for me is I have drivers like Robert Hight with Auto Club, and my girls, Courtney and Brittany, with Traxxas, they want to win, too. But if I’m going to sell myself, I’ve got to continue to win to dominate. At my age, I’m no spring chicken. If I’m going to stay in the fight with these guys, and that’s what I do. So God bless him, if he said he was chasing me, I thought that’s what he said. I don’t think he is. I think he’s got enough guys to chase over there.
Q. Where does last year’s championship rate in difficulty to achieve vs. all that came before it?
Force: The first one was the toughest; when you win your first championship because you don’t know how to do it, and you learn. But this last championship we were struggling. We brought in the chassis years ago for safety. They were heavy. We still were able to win with Robert in ’09. But we couldn’t stay up with them. We made some changes, the new chassis came at the right time. It started with me in the Countdown, and Jimmy [Prock] got hot. And you know, Austin Coil, who I believe is still the greatest of all time, look how many championships he had. Frank Hawley, me, you know what I mean? Add them all up, and nobody’s even close to Austin Coil. But at the end of the day when you look at it, they’re all hard to win. But Jimmy Prock got hot at the right time. Working with the brain trust with Mike Neff, with Dean Antonelli, the whole bunch of guys. John Medlen and Ron Douglas, all the guys, and they got together, focused on the car, and we all learned from each other. I don’t know how Schumacher runs his operation. Doesn’t matter. He wins, too, but so do we. But to us it’s really camaraderie. Working together. The studies from the engineers at Ford, our motor programs that we build in house. We got hot, and it worked. Lucky. Luck’s a big part of it in the Countdown. I used to have the championship locked up before we even got there. By the time we left, it was done. At Indy one year I won it with a bunch of races left to go. Countdown gives everybody a chance, and it puts fans in the seats, like Langdon said. Lot of people don’t like it, some do. I don’t make the rules. I just figure out how to win based on the rules they’ve got out there.
 |
Q. What is the single thing you think was in you that says, “I’m not interested in retiring, I just want to keep on racing?”
Force: I thought about Bernstein and Prudhomme. I’ve talked to them and why they did what they did. Kenny Bernstein had his reasons. I don’t know their reasons. They won’t tell me. But I respect those guys so much because they’re the ones that really like [Don] Garlits and Shirley [Muldowney], they opened the doors. “The Snake” and “the Mongoose,” hell, they’ve got a movie about them. You look at Kenny Bernstein, and he’s the one that went to the Budweiser bottlers, and that’s why I went to the Coca-Cola bottlers. To get a deal with Wendy’s, I learned from the guys that were the best. Why they did what they did. I’d love to have them here today, we’re losing too many of our stars. You know, it’s sad. We’ve got to get Brandon Bernstein back to keep that name in here. Great driver, great talent; we’ve got to get him back. He’s out because of a lack of a ride. Things happen. Nobody likes the multicar teams in the beginning. It gave them too much of an advantage. Now that they look at Don Schumacher Racing and us, if they didn’t have us, we’d be an eight-car field. NHRA would have to go from 16 car to 18 car. I love this sport with a passion. Different from NASCAR and IndyCar, don’t have to drive around for three hours.
And you know one of those football players said that Jimmie Johnson wasn’t an athlete. I don’t know who the player was. Don’t really care. But he’s wrong in my opinion. He’s wrong because you’ve got to be in shape, and I know because when I was young and running down the road, I could party all night and go out there with three hours of sleep and drive the race car. But now I’ve got to have my eight hours every day. I’ve got to be in the gym. I was in the gym at 6 a.m. every other day. I’m in the gym where there is no way I can compete and win a championship. It wouldn’t have happened. We are athletes. At my age, I do it. A guy said if you quit racing, what would you do? I’d go get a race car and go racing because I used to drive a truck. I worked all week, did my 40-, 50-hour week; when I was done, I got in my race car and went to the racetrack. Cars are all I know. I love them. I’ve got a romance with the highway, trucks, and cars. It’s just what I do. I have no reason to quit. Health may take me some day, and I’m going to race as long as I can do the job, and when I can’t do the job, I’m going to figure out how to get in the race car, test them, and at least learn how to make them safer. The sport that made me financially stable in life that I could send my kids to college and I can retire right now, I owe the sport of NHRA. I owe the fans, and I owe it to protect these kids. I lived through a crash. I witnessed it. I saw firsthand what happens to a race car. For me to walk away, I ain’t saying I’m a smart guy, but I can get with these engineers, manufacturers and talk to them and tell them what I know what happened, and they can figure out, along with my team, how to build a better race car, and that’s what we do.
Q. I wanted to touch on your racing against Brittany in Florida. What was that like?
Force: I was going to make a single, and my daughter was going to make a single. I said this is Saturday night racing. How can you make a single in the final? Let me race my kid? They even said, can you do that? Yeah, she stays in her lane; I stay in mine. So we went up there and put on a race. But, man, it was cool. I saw the video. We both left about the same time. My car did run 4.01. I was low of the day. Robert ran 4.00. I think [Del] Worsham was second with a 4.01, and Robert was a 4.01. He was third. Courtney had run 4.06. But I got to race my kid. Boy, she was bubbling over because she always watches me race Courtney in the Funny Car at the races, and she may never get an opportunity. So it was a chance for us. The crew chiefs said we don’t care. We’re going to run our car to learn. We made a good number. She got 150 feet and smoked the tires. Todd Smith has joined Dean Antonelli running that car, so the dragster was struggling. Anyway, it was a ball. The fans loved it. The people on the starting line said they went crazy because you never see it. Always proud to race my daughter. She got out at the other end all giggly and laughing, “I finally got to race dad.” So it meant something to me personally.
 |
Q. You mentioned Bernstein being out there and you having to chase sponsors all over the place. How concerned are you about the future of your sport?
Force: Well, I’ve been sick for months, OK? But sick is what motivates me. The fear of not getting to drive a race car or my daughter not getting to race. I’ve always said if somebody’s got to sit out 2015, it will be me. My daughter, I’ve set her on fire; I’ve crashed her. I’m not going to tell Brittany she can’t race that dragster. I may have to move her into a Funny Car. That’s why we switched around the crew chiefs last year. Jimmy was struggling when I went over there. I didn’t think the car was going to get hot. I did it to team up with Jimmy in case I had to go to Top Fuel. Like I said before, to drive a race car, I don’t care if it’s Pro Stock, Pro Bike, I don’t care what it is, a fuel dragster, I want to be able to race and be with my family and be with the fans.
If Corporate America says here’s where we want to go, I find a way to go there. I moved Jimmy in case we had to go to Top Fuel. He was one of the guys that had run Top Fuel a few years ago and had a lot of experience. So put Robert over with Mike Neff. I hired Just Marketing. We’re even working with other agencies. We’re chasing manufacturers, we’re entertaining them. We’re looking at not just trying to find a major sponsor that will buy a whole team. NASCAR has rewritten how it’s done … and I’m following it. That’s why I’m bringing back the TV show. I want to offer a little more TV than just what ESPN’s got. I’ve got my traveling Road Show that will go around the country. I’ve got my own show car program that goes around to the national events, my midway. It took a hundred years to get to where we are today.
NHRA is my home. It’s where I want to race. I know they work hard. They can only do so much, and the rest of us got to work. And buddy, I’ve been on the road. I took a few days off at Christmas, but Robert and I have been living on the road and meeting with people. We’re not going to fail. I will not fail because I’ve got nowhere to go. This is what I love, and I won’t fail my kids. I put them in this business. NHRA has a great product, and we’ll fight our way out of this hole.
Q. Are you saying that if you don’t have a corporate sponsor next year for yourself, you would sit out so that Brittany could run a Funny Car?
Force: Or a dragster. Look, John Force Racing, the problem you have is if you lose a major sponsor, you can drop a team. You don’t lose nothing. A little G&A for overhead. But when you lose two sponsors, you’ve got to replace two cars and let two teams fall, then you lose the manufacturer. That hurts because I’ve got shops at Indy with a hundred employees. So we’re working hard. We’re having meetings. I’ve got to bring a manufacturer back. But I’ve got to look can I ever get my funding back where it was? I was a $24 million program, $24 million. I can’t count on the world to come save me. Right now my guys in the room next door are budgeting. I said very simple, if my budget has been cut 45 percent, let’s pretend I don’t get any of it back. Go back to when my budget was at that amount of money, how did I make it? Well, they went back to that budget, and I had less than half of the employees that I’ve got now. That was 15 years, 16 years ago I had a budget like that. So if I don’t get it all back, I go out of business, and I will not go out of business. I have too much invested. Just purchased all of Prudhomme’s land in Indy. Thank God I have renters. I’m growing.
You’ve got to spend to make money, but you can’t spend it foolishly and spend it all and go broke. I don’t gamble. Everything I do is around racing. I have opportunities to go other places. I am addressing, if I take my motor program, and I sell to Funny Car teams, and I sell to dragster teams, that’s a no brainer. I can stay in business. But then they all come back and beat me with my technology. So I have to be careful who I sell to. I look at IndyCar and NASCAR, is there anywhere I can do any business over there to float my machine at Indy? I own the buildings; I own the equipment. I did it by doing shows and entertaining to get it up to where it is. If I’m going to race NHRA, and that’s who I race for, then I’ve got to do a lot of work to make it happen. Then throw in a TV show, it’s a heart attack in the making. But I’ve got no choice. It’s where I’m going.
