Somewhere in Virginia on the night of June 4, 1995, soon-to-be 7-year-old Courtney Force was celebrating.
Her father, John Force, had hours earlier beaten K.C. “Hollywood” Spurlock to win the Funny Car final of the inaugural Virginia is for Lovers Nationals in Richmond, just one more of Force’s now-141 career wins.
To top it off, Courtney had her father all to herself. Having missed a recent father-daughter dance because of the NHRA schedule, Force was making it up to her, taking her with him on the road while her two sisters and mother were back home in Yorba Linda, Calif.
They were . . .
“OK, tell the truth.”
The story, being told 19 years later by a 26-year-old Courtney, is interrupted by John, now 65. The two sit at a dais in the media center at zMax Dragway in Concord, N.C., site of the Carolina Nationals.
“Tell the truth. Where we ended up that night,” John says from behind dark sunglasses. “I shouldn't tell this, but go ahead.”
After laughter subsides, the microphone Courtney holds barely registers her response.
“You really want me to tell?”
More laughter. Courtney, a five-time winner on the NHRA circuit and daughter to the most successful driver in drag racing history, turns back to her captive audience.
“We were in a bar.”
At a bar somewhere in Virginia, a soon-to-be 7-year-old Courtney danced, though it’s disputed whether it was by the jukebox or on the bar itself.
From that jukebox the sounds of “The Sign” by Ace of Base emerged, on repeat, courtesy of the quarters John kept feeding Courtney.
“. . . I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign . . .”
***
While John was celebrating, he was also doing what he could to make up for lost time.
“I got a new life, you would hardly recognize me, I'm so glad . . .”
This is the life that Force has lived for 35 years, since his first year in NHRA in 1979 and through his 16 championships, 10 coming consecutively from 1993 to 2002. It’s also the life that kept him on the road during the childhood of his daughters, Adria (from his first marriage), Ashley, Brittany and Courtney.
Courtney, the youngest, was born on June 20, 1988, the day after John’s second career win in the Budweiser Spring Nationals in Columbus, Ohio. John missed a flight home, and his wife, Laurie, had to drive herself to the hospital.
“Part of the job is someone wants to go racing,” Force says while sitting at a table in the John Force Racing pit area at zMax Dragway, wearing dark sunglasses, a white hat and his green and black Castrol firesuit. “When you have to run every week on airplanes, the Dallas airport becomes your home. It's where you get your boots shined, your coffee and a haircut. When you get home it's a turnaround.”
With 24 races a year, there were many missed events at home in those years. There were birthdays and holidays with airport-bought gifts, including a travel-sized hair dryer that Courtney still hasn’t forgotten.
There was also a lot of Force doing what he could do to make it up to his girls, much more than taking them to bars to celebrate wins. That included non-Laurie sanctioned visits to Disneyland on school days.
“Dad missed a lot of family vacations, so any birthday party or anything he usually missed, but he was always on his way home,” Courtney says. “He'd get home from the race at like 1 o'clock in the morning.”
But now as adults, forging their own careers on the path John trailblazed for them, Courtney and Brittany are getting a lesson in what it was like for their father, who raced in national events and small-time “match races,” earning as much money as he could for his growing family.
“All the stress, everything he went through when we were kids, now we understand it because now we're all going through it,” Courtney says. “The busy schedules and not being able to make it back home. Now it definitely opens our eyes.”
* * *
Elon Werner stood in the parking lot of St-Hubert’s Chicken in Montreal. At his feet was Force, knocking out a set of 50 pushups, 10 at a time, counting out loud as he went.
The 65-year-old wasn’t trying to show off. He was trying to figure out if he was dying.
It was the second weekend of September. Force had just finished two days of serving as the grand marshal of the 15th annual Festidrag, and it was time to eat. But after arriving at the restaurant, Force called over Werner, his PR man of seven years.
“I'm having this pain right here in my left side. I think I'm having a heart attack,” Werner remembers Force saying. “I'm going to do some pushups, and if I'm having a heart attack, you're going to need to call a doctor, but if not, I think I'll be OK.”
Force handed Werner his jacket and sunglasses and dropped to the ground.
“I'm just standing there, waiting for my boss to either die in front of me or to just get up,” Werner says.
Force hit 50 and popped back up.
“It feels better, I guess it's just I'm worrying about this race for this guy, and I had a couple of cups of coffee. I think I'm going to be OK,” Force told Werner. “That's a trick my Uncle Beavs told me. I think he had heart problems and he would just run a city block and come back.”
It wasn’t a heart attack. According to the doctor Force visited, it was the result of those two cups of coffee and a sore muscle in his chest.
“When you're coffeed up or on an adrenaline rush, you feel it,” Force says.
As he recalls this, he still feels beat up.
Force has been going non-stop for six weeks. The stretch before his trip to Montreal included a series of races culminating in the U.S. Nationals on Labor Day weekend.
That trip was yet another ball the driver has had to juggle — with the biggest one preventing him from being entirely focused on the track for six months.
For the first time in decades, John Force has been looking for sponsorship.
When John sat with Courtney in that press conference, the first topic asked of the elder Force was the “800-pound gorilla in the room,” as a reporter phrased it.
The gorilla, if it were real and had a name, would be called Castrol. It’s the name that’s been on his firesuit, his cars, his memorabilia and his trademark white hat since 1986.
After a nearly three-decade relationship, which first began with a meager deal for $5,000 plus oil, Castrol announced last year it would be ending its relationship with John Force Racing, a relationship that for the past two years also included Brittany’s Top Fuel team.
To make matters worse, Ford, the make of car that Force races, announced it would be leaving the NHRA.
“He likes to stick to routine and now that that's changing, having to get rid of a car, having to wear a different team shirt, a different hat, that's going to be strange for him,” Brittany says.
Earlier in the week, an article had been published quoting the elder Force as saying that if the proper sponsorship didn’t come together, he would possibly retire and let his daughters further establish their careers.
“I lost a good six months,” Force says. “I put a value on myself where I thought I ought to be financially because of who I am and we did a re-evaluation since we left here last year. We put some deals together already, we've already signed some contracts … I'm in a fight right now, but what I have to have is an A, B and C plan. I've had that my whole life.”
Force was emotional when he said that. Emotional from beating teammate and son-in-law Robert Hight in the Traxxus Shootout to win $100,000. Emotional because after 35 years, he’s still leading the points and he’s still “in the game.”
“I don't want to give up being in the game, it's what I love,” Force says. “All I'm saying is, (in a) worst(-case) scenario, then my kids will race. Brittany will race. She's evolved. I've set her on fire, I've crashed her, now I'm going to say, ‘After all the dreams we've had all these years of training you and teaching you, I'm sorry I don't have enough money, Brittany, and I'm going to race and I'm going to let you sit out.’
“I would never do that to my child. Would any of you?”
Brittany has yet to win a race in her first two years in Top Fuel but is in the “Countdown to the Championship.”
Courtney, however, is making history in her third year in Funny Car. She has won five of her eight events in 2014 alone, including consecutive wins at Dallas and St. Louis in the weeks following the Charlotte event.
While the sport has finally brought the Forces together, it’s once again put John in a position of having to make up lost ground, this time as a business owner. Force has spent the last six months making constant phone calls, taking meetings and organizing art for sponsor proposals.
“It’s not like it was back in the days when we were in our 20s and we could go full-blown and if we can’t get anything we can scrape by and it'll be OK,” says Laurie, his wife of 33 years. “Now he has four teams, and there's a lot of people, employees that we have that he needs to consider, so it's a lot more of a stress than it ever has been in the past.”
In recent months he’s had to let go of at least 10 employees, and more big decisions are ahead.
Despite the sponsorship uncertainty, it’s not John’s career that’s at risk. He’ll be the first to admit he never has to work another day of his life.
“I guess you could say I’m very well-to-do,” Force says.
Rather, it’s the future of his children, and theirs, as well as the future of his company, that he’s working for now.
But if anyone can make it through troubled times, it’ll be Force, says NHRA president Tom Compton.
“He's a self-made man. If I was going to give a motivational speech about careers and how to succeed, I'd give John Force as an example,” Compton says, citing Force’s childhood in which he grew up in a trailer park with his parents, Harold and Betty Ruth Force, and five siblings. “John can see the forest through the trees, he sees the big picture.”
Says Force: “We've had to look at the fluff. We had to be honest. We'll never get to where we used to be. It's like Ford said: 'It took 100 years to get here and the world fell apart and it'll take us another 100 years to get back.' I should have heard that. But I didn't hear that.”
* * *
“I've paid my dues, time after time. I've done my sentence . . ."
For Force, that trip to Montreal, where his career turned around, was a much-needed “wakeup call.”
“I was treated like royalty,” he says. Indeed, Force stood on the starting line at Sanair Dragway, with bleachers full of fans cheering when he was introduced by a French-speaking host.
Those cheers, along with the smell of Nitro, are a drug to Force. It’s the drug that was coursing through the driver in that same spot in 1987, when Force ended nine years of being a called a “leaker” (for putting down oil on the track) and a “bridesmaid.” He ended nine years of letting thoughts about money and screwing up get to him. With Ed "Ace" McCulloch, a winner of multiple U.S. Nationals in the opposing lane, Force made a decision.
“I'll just have some fun.”
That’s all Force ever wanted to do, from when he was a teenager with a motorcycle and no license, to his first trip down a drag strip in his mom's Buick Wildcat during his junior year at Bell Gardens High in California and when he competed in his first professional race in 1974.
“(When) I was here and I won back in the ’80s, I didn’t have nothing,” Force says. “I had to beg for a cup of coffee.”
That was in the days before Castrol and the money that came with winning 10 championships in a row. Back before Brittany Force’s memories of her father’s team rolling into the winner’s circle to the sound of “We Are the Champions” blur together.
Back when it was all hands on deck to get the car ready for a run, even Laurie, who would find herself counting how many racecars were at a race to determine if she thought they would get in or not.
“What did I know about anything on the car? Nothing. His brother and his friend. Whoever was free, we were the team,” Laurie says.
This was around the time Laurie would take her daughters up into the grandstands of drag strips, armed with earphones, sunglasses and those little red boxes of animal crackers, bought on the way to the track.
“We always crossed our fingers, that was always our thing,” Brittany remembers. “‘He'll win as long as we cross our fingers.’”
These were also Force’s “leaker” days of driving a Funny Car sponsored by Coca-Cola and worked on by Larry Frazier.
One such weekend the team was racing in Indianapolis, and it was a scorcher. To keep the kids cool, Laurie and John bought a little plastic swimming pool at K-Mart and placed it under the front of the trailer.
In perhaps a lapse of judgment, Force filled up the pool with water from the trailer, the same water he would need to put in his Funny Car engine.
The pool filled, it was time for the second Funny Car session of the day.
“It’s time to roll,” Force recalls. “Funny Cars have already started, and I'm always in the first pair because I was a leaker.”
Then Frazier discovered the lack of water.
“I quit. We come to Indy, we're going to race and you put all of the money in the babies’ swimming pool,” Force remembers Frazier saying. “We can't even race because everything is about those kids.”
Back at the press conference, 25 years, 18 team championships and 141 career wins later, John turns to Courtney.
“It was. Everything was about you.”
* * *
John Force doesn’t plan on leaving.
In fact, his plan is to “stay right here where I belong, and keep it going. Until I drop.”
While Force is in it for fun and family, there’s another reason he continues to strap himself into a rocket every weekend 35 years after his first NHRA race.
He does it to fulfill an obligation to the sport that took him from his family, only to bring them back together.
Compton is adamant Force owes the sport nothing.
“The NHRA and John Force are one and the same. We're together, a team. You probably can't say John Force without NHRA and NHRA without John Force. We're one,” says Compton. “He understands what we have to do and he understands if it works for everyone, the tracks, the sponsors, the fans and John Force Racing, that's what has to happen. It can’t just work for John Force Racing and not for anyone else. Not everyone gets that.”
But Force does believe there’s an obligation.
“It ain't about me,” Force says. “But it's about these fans who have supported me. They bought my products. They made me the biggest seller of products in this sport, and I owe them, not to go away.”
It’s an obligation to the people standing just outside his roped-off pit area, waiting for a chance to express their support, gratitude, love or any other emotion Force has provoked in them for three decades, four seconds at a time.
They’re the fans whose support helped send Courtney and Brittany to college at Cal-State Fullerton, where they worked toward degrees in communications and teaching, respectively, from Monday thru Thursday, while racing the other three days of the week.
He owes it to the teenager in a green shirt who wasn’t even alive during Force’s heyday, holding a diecast version of the car sitting 20 feet away. He owes it to the middle-aged woman carrying a John Force Racing gift bag and wearing a ball cap with the driver’s signature printed on it. He also owes it to Mike Comerford, who discovered the intensity of NHRA racing eight years ago.
“I got into drag racing in 2006 by watching him lose the championship by 30 feet,” says Comerford, a native of Huntersville, N.C. “My adrenaline was just pumped. I mean I love NASCAR, but I get more of an adrenaline rush with drag racing. John Force just does it. He's the man.”
If Comerford had his way, Force would end his career in the most graceful way possible — with a bang.
“Win a championship, maybe win up to 20 championships,” Comerford says while holding a bottle of Castrol he hopes will soon bear Force’s signature. “… Hopefully, you know what, after No. 20, (he’ll say) ‘I'm done’ and be a car owner and sit back and enjoy retirement.”
When Force is asked what’s on his bucket list that’s not related to racing or pursuing championships, he gives a rare pause — seven seconds long — before answering that he wants to have one more talk with Eric Medlen, the JFR driver who died from injuries sustained in a testing accident in March 2007.
“I need to sit with him and say, ‘Hey, here’s what went wrong.’ I crashed a few months later, I should have died. Broke my arms and legs. Just a miracle,” Force says. “That's why I got into the Eric Medlen Project. We build our own cars, our own safety. Took millions of dollars out of my own savings to do it.”
As for what’s on the list that’s related to racing? After the growing pains of the ’80s and ’90s, with airport-bought gifts and Ace of Base-filled bars, there’s not a way for him to answer without including his family.
“My bucket list is to watch my drivers, Robert, Brittany and Courtney, excel. That's one. My bucket list is to see my daughter Ashley come back and race in a Funny Car again,” Force says. “She could be a champion. She's been there and done it.”
While Force says he also needs the cheer of the crowd, a stimulant still more powerful to him than caffeine, he still needs to get the other aspect of his life right, where he once got it wrong.
“Drag racing took me away from my kids. Now it’s getting me back to them. That’s why I love NHRA,” Force says. “I need more time with my grandchildren, Autumn, Jacob and Noah. They're growing up just like my girls did. I already screwed it up once. I don't want to screw it up again.”
“. . . Life is demanding without understanding . . ."