Like Her Favorite Racer, Taylor Capps Is Right On Track
Funny Car Driver Ron Capps Watches Daughter's Debut
By Susan Wade
Photos by Ron Lewis

In the same weekend that NHRA Pro Stock rookie Erica Enders flipped on her lid during testing at Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida, one of her biggest admirers was flipping her lid about her first chance to drive a Junior Dragster.

Taylor Capps, eight-year-old daughter of Funny Car star Ron Capps, made three passes Dec. 18 on the one-tenth-mile track set up in the parking lot at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium for the NHRA Division 7 season finale.

"I thought it was a dream, but it wasn't," she said after her experience in the Paul Hodges-owned car in which son Matt Hodges had won a championship. She said she felt "good" about being behind the wheel of a scaled-down dragster that reaches speeds in the 50-mph range.

"She did awesome," her father declared. "She staged perfect, and her reaction time was awesome. She did everything very methodically. She was a little nervous, and you could see she let off [the gas] some. We told her just to have fun and go down there.

"She made two trial runs, then they were supposed to do the first round of eliminations. But it was windy and there was debris and they had a problem with the clock. So they disallowed the points and everybody just raced for fun," he said.

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Like her favorite racer, Taylor Capps had a bit of a startle.

"She had a mishap on her last run," her dad said. On the turnout, she hit the wall. Just like Enders, she was uninjured.

"It was a pretty good whack," he said. "It was scary for me. But it was cool, because kids came up to her, including several past champions, and said, 'We had the same thing happen to us when we started.' She compared it to the movie. In the movie, there's a crash scene, and it's in slow motion. She said that's what it was like for her."

"I was in a safe car," Taylor Capps said, unruffled about the mistake. She even said when she returns to school following Christmas break, she going to tell her classmates, "I crashed."

Her father, who was right beside her throughout the day, said the incident taught him that these Junior Dragsters are safe and reminded him that so, too, are the Funny Cars in which he competes. He said after accidents of his own, he has told chassis builder Murf McKinney thank-you for the safety features he incorporates.  

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The "oops" aside, Taylor Capps and her family said the outing was reassuring. "Everybody welcomed us with open arms," Ron said. They received several offers of help and guidance and even cars from which to choose. Capps said he felt bad about not being able to take up everybody on their offers.    

"She's all excited," Capps said, adding that the older of his two children is planning to start racing in 2005 at Phoenix. The event coincides with NHRA's pro test sessions.

That is a plus, said Ron Capps, whose mother, Betty, and father, John, both drove competitively and shared their passion for racing with him. "It's something we can do together." For the weekends that he will be crisscrossing the country, competing in the NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series Funny Car class, Taylor will be under the watchful eye of not only mom Shelley but also of some Southern California friends who are veterans of the Junior Dragster scene.

But Ron and Taylor Capps already have spent time doing something that has strengthened the father-daughter bond and will help both of their drag-racing careers. They have practiced their reaction times on the family's own Christmas Tree starting device.

He said ever since she saw the Disney film "Right On Track," Taylor was hooked on the sport. She immediately adopted Enders as her hero and wanted to spend time with the practice tree - when she wasn’t watching the movie.

"She has watched it over and over and over," Capps said. "But we practice the tree together. It's really neat, because this is what I do for a living, and so many times I'm away from home. But now we can do this together."

His fond childhood memories include nights when the family would go to races together and he could watch drag-racing pioneers such as Don Prudhomme and Don Garlits back their rigs up to their motel room doors and work on their hot rods by the porch lights that dotted the mom-and-pop operations. Every weekend during racing season, his family was at the track. Otherwise, they were home in San Luis Obispo, Calif., in the garage as he and brother Jon, an aspiring driver, helped with small tasks while John Capps fixed his car. "Sometimes it was freezing," Ron Capps said, "and we'd turn on the dryer to keep the garage warm."

Those are the warm memories he hopes to pass on to his children. And, with an assist from Enders, he's laying that foundation.  

Taylor Capps had hoped to make her debut earlier at Barona Dragstrip in El Cajon, Calif., but that program was rained out.

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Taylor's three-year-old brother, Caden, watched eagerly at Qualcomm Stadium, along with Shelley Capps and both sets of grandparents. "He knows all the names of the [NHRA pro] drivers," Capps said of his son. "He's ready to go."

Sponsoring the Qualcomm Stadium event was Team Possibilities, an organization whose motto is RACE -- Responsibility, Accountability, Commitment, and Education. The group pledges to teach motorsports families and young people to behave and work as a team.

Capps said he was impressed with that and NHRA's Junior Dragster program. It wasn't available when he was a youngster, and he cut his racing teeth on go-karts.

But Taylor Capps' situation parallels her father's in one way. They're each starting with a new team. His sponsorship is set, but he said he is in the process of finalizing sponsorship for her effort after several persons approached him about it.

"She wants to get her own sponsors," Ron Capps said.

With her entrepreneurial spirit and confident manner, she -- like Enders -- appears to be right on track.   

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