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The
Force Women – Drag Racing’s Next Generation
He's surrounded by women. So what's the problem? What man wouldn't like the ratio John Force has?
The National Hot Rod Association Funny Car icon is husband to Laurie Force; father to John Force Racing Chief Financial Officer Adria Hight, as well as emerging sportsman-level drivers Ashley, Brittany, and Courtney Force; grandfather to year-old Autumn Hight; and boss to Kelly Antonelli and Joan Rice, among others. Maybe the bigger question is whether he has them in his life or they
have him in theirs. a
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Force's family understands completely why years ago his crew used to send him on wild-goose chases (up to California's High Desert, a 100-mile round trip from the Yorba Linda shop for some minor part for the car, for instance). When Ashley Force was waiting to make her first partial passes in her dad's Castrol GTX Start Up Ford Mustang, she called her mother at the hotel and asked for reinforcements: "Can you hurry up and get here fast? He's driving me crazy." Force, pacing like an expectant dad outside a delivery room, hugged Ashley tightly and kissed her on the forehead. She cringed. "She always hated that," he said. "Hated it as a baby." He went back to pacing. "He's been pretty good," Ashley said of her dad's anticipation
that day. "But he's always crazy and running around. He just gets
really excited. At first I thought, 'Do I really want him to be telling
me how to drive a Funny Car?' But who else would be any better? He knows
it like the back of his hand. And my dad will tell me everything I need
to know and be as truthful as possible." "It's not his thing, really," Laurie said of mechanical tasks. a
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Her memory of his first Christmas-tree shopping trip in 1982 was a prime example. "Ashley was born November 29, and I had just gotten home from the hospital," Laurie said. "So he went to get a tree. How hard is that, to pick out a Christmas tree? Our ceiling is eight feet high. He got one nine feet tall. He made a big scrape on the ceiling. I said to cut it. So what does he do? He gives it a flat top. Wouldn't you think you would cut it from the bottom? It was the ugliest-looking tree. We couldn't put an angel on it. It was horrible. It was: Never again!" He doesn't argue. He certainly isn't getting old at 56, but these days, he doesn't always have the energy. In one of his not-uncommon moments of vulnerability, Force said of his driving days, "I know my time's running out. I've got five or six good years left, but they're wearing me down." His wife put it in perspective: "I think he's starting to wind
down a little, but winding down for him is still beyond for anybody
else. Force himself even laughs at his unconventional and undisciplined parenting
style. Saying he knows that "when I came home I drove her nuts,"
he likens his family to the cartoon clan Simpsons. The defining episode
for him is the one in which mom Marge tries to teach the children a
lesson by restricting their fun. Then dad Homer barges in the front
door with a fistful of money and exclaims wildly, "The circus is
in town! The circus is in town! Everybody, let's go!" Said Force,
"That's me -- I'm Homer Simpson, except he's cuter."
When he came home from a road trip on a Sunday night and the girls, elementary-school students then, were asleep in bed, he would insist on waking them up and having a rollicking time. Brittany said she remembers him telling them on more than one Monday morning, when they said they had to go to school, Force would say, "Nope! We're going to Universal Studios! You girls are playing hooky!" She said, "We'd all go nuts!" Laurie said, "Sometimes they'd go to a 'normal' family's house and say the dad came home at 5 and dinner was on the table and the kids had to eat their vegetables -- and they didn't like it. They'd say, 'I'm so glad we're not normal!' " But they recalled times that weren't all that funny. Now and again he would watch scary movies on TV and he would convince them it wasn't frightening. "They were up all night long," Laurie said. "They had nightmares for weeks." They shuddered when they thought about the haunting "Chuckie" doll he once brought home, thinking they would love it. They banished it to his shop. Courtney said she remembered those horror flicks. "We'd pile on your guys' bed, on the end of the bed," she told her mom. a
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Click to visit our sponsor's website "He made us watch the movie all the way through," Brittany
said of the plots with bad guys and creepy creatures, "and we were
like 'No -- no -- I don't want to watch it. I'm too scared.' And he's
like, 'Well, you don't want to go upstairs. He might be up there.' "
"I still think there's a little bit of normalcy in us somehow," she said. "Basically, I took care of raising the kids and John took care of racing the car." Said Courtney, "Mom gets us to school. Dad gets us racing." Somehow Laurie Force managed to sort out the nonsense from the sincerity and saw that her husband was doing his best, in his own way, to participate in family life. He was trying to connect, despite his disconnected lifestyle. In an almost back-handedly sweet way, she said, "He's good. You know, he tries. I'll give him that. He wants to be fair and he tries to be part of the family." She asked her daughters, "Would you have wanted him home more?" Without hesitation, Brittany said, "No. I don't know if I could take any more of him." But she didn't say it in a disrespectful way. She merely implied that his personality could be overwhelming. But Brittany Force was quick to say of her father, "He used to bring home these porcelain dolls. I look at them and I still have them all lined up in my room. I totally remember exactly what they looked like when he gave them to us. He brought them home from New Jersey and Kansas and Indianapolis." Courtney said she remembered fondly that "some weekends in the summer he'd be home. And we always knew we'd have a barbecue, just our family." And it was Brittany Force, then about age 10, who fielded a reporter's
question about her father. Laurie was stumped with the query "What
should people know about John Force?" While her mother bit her
lip and became lost in thought, Brittany whispered in her ear. "Say
that Daddy never, ever, ever gives up." a
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Once in awhile, Force will get an idea in his head and not give up. Years ago, he bought a bright-red Rockwellian popcorn wagon, thinking the family would rally around it and sell popcorn at the track or community gatherings. "I just wanted it," he said, "because I wanted to put my kids in it. The guy had his kids in it, and I saw a family together." It sits in his shop, never used. But drag racing, which almost tore the family apart and at the very
least made it appear dysfunctional, is the vehicle that ironically united
it. Through the years, Force had tried in his inimitable and spontaneous
way to make memorable moments with his daughters. They were memorable,
certainly, much like a hurricane or dizzying roller-coaster ride would
be. "No," Brittany said. "It was him making us nuts." She and her mom and sisters laughed that "I hear you, Girlfriend" laugh. Still, who knew that all his three younger daughters would join Adria in the racing business and even Laurie would earn her Super Comp license? Top Fuel rookie Jack Beckman was her driving instructor -- and Ashley's, Brittany's, and Courtney's -- at Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School. Laurie said not to expect her to drive in competition, but her husband and daughters signed her up for the course as a Christmas gift and she decided to give it a whirl. "They all thought it was pretty funny, and I think they thought I wouldn't do it," she said. "If my daughters are going to be in this, I thought maybe this would give me a little more insight as to what they would have to go through, what their fears and concerns are. And I do understand a little more now. When they say, 'I'm not ready to go race - I want to practice some more,' it all makes sense to me. "I can picture making some runs, but as far as racing and getting into it competitively, I don't think I'm going to head down that road," she said. "I think somebody needs to be the adult in this family, the sane one here." But Ashley is in her third season and has stepped up from the Super Comp class to Top Alcohol Dragster and has tested several times in the Castrol Mustang. When she slipped into the seat of Jerry Darien's Mattel Castrol/Toy Shop A/Fuel Dragster, she won the 2004 South Central Division championship and was the division's Driver of the Year and Rookie of the Year. She also won three national events, including the 50th Mac Tools U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis and the Automobile Club of Southern California Finals at Pomona, California. At that latter event, she and her father became the first dad-daughter combo to share a winners podium. She finished fourth last year in the national point standings. a
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In addition, she has been the centerpiece of a national ad campaign
for Oakley sunglasses and the model for a Barbie-like Ashley Force doll
that Mattel markets. Said Courtney, "When I was little, I always used to watch my dad.
I never knew how I'd get into it. I just thought I'd go to college,
then maybe after college I'd get into it. Then I saw Ashley and how
she did it at the beginning of college, and I was like, 'Well, I might
as well start now.' It looked like fun and Ashley's having a blast doing
it." Brittany said she had decided she might be a teacher. "Then once I got in that car," she said, "I thought, 'This is a lot more fun than being a teacher!' "In her first couple of tries, she said, she was "terrified. I never wanted to hop in it again. You have to get past that. It was [a matter of] getting comfortable, then you can't wait to get back in the car." Her first full pass, at about 150 mph, was not without its share of scariness. "I was screaming the first time," she said. "Oh yeah -- all the way down. Then I said, 'I want to do it again!' So the women in Force's life do understand why he's so in love with drag racing. And in Force's defense, he has had to put up with behavior that has frustrated him, too. Ashley has struggled with handling the 2500-pound Mustang and at Indianapolis, in the second of four launches in the 7,000-horsepower Funny Car, she had her hands full with a dropped cylinder that got the car out of the groove. She hit the left guardrail. "I didn't think I was that close, but I hit it," Ashley said. "I really felt terrible, because it wasn't just any car. It was Dad's No. 1 car. If that wasn't bad enough, when I came out of the roof at the other end, I set off the fire bottles. It was a disaster." Said Laurie, cringing, "I'm sure Austin [crew chief Coil] was thrilled. The car's trying to win a championship and you go and hit the wall. . . . "
But Force took it in stride, calling the incident "just part of learning" and saying, "When I was starting out, I crashed every week. That's part of the game that you can't tell anybody. They've just got to go out there and learn it for themselves. She did great. She got right back in it and made two more runs." He got his turn to be exasperated with them during the fall Las Vegas race. Brittany and Courtney were making their national-event debut but nearly didn't get to compete. They had school until noon, and when they got home, Brittany hadn't finished packing for the drive up to the desert. Once they got on the road, thinking they had plenty of time to get to Las Vegas, Robert Hight called and said they needed to hurry because they had only one more qualifying chance, according to the schedule. Brittany, who had kept her excitement level up with lots of coffee, kept asking Laurie to stop on the trip for bathroom breaks. And when they got closer to the track, Laurie told John that they thought they might swing by the hotel to freshen up. He couldn't believe what he was hearing and was more than a little agitated. As it was, the girls had not one second to spare. They arrived at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, scrambled into their fire suits, and made their qualifying runs. Force might seem to live on the ragged edge, but this was much too close for comfort for even him. Still, he loves the sport, and he loves the women in his life. And
he sometimes has a difficult time getting them in synch. Just as Force says he never will catch up to NASCAR legend Richard
Petty's motorsports standard of 200 victories, he -- probably mercifully
-- won't equal King Solomon's documented gathering of "700 wives,
princesses and 300 concubines," either. However, for sheer numbers
and for love, he's still the leader. |
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© Competitionplus 2005
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