Both Steve Torrence and his Capco Top Fuel Dragster sported a new look in the new year.

The car will keep its striking red and white wrap during the 2014 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season. Torrence said he will shave his bushy beard before the Winternationals opens Feb. 6 at Pomona, Calif.

“I hunt all of the off-season. I’m avid in the outdoors. You can’t be a true outdoorsman and look manly without a beard,” the Kilgore, Texas, native said during a break in pre-season testing this week at Jupiter, Fla.

 
Both Steve Torrence and his Capco Top Fuel Dragster sported a new look in the new year.

The car will keep its striking red and white wrap during the 2014 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season. Torrence said he will shave his bushy beard before the Winternationals opens Feb. 6 at Pomona, Calif.

“I hunt all of the off-season. I’m avid in the outdoors. You can’t be a true outdoorsman and look manly without a beard,” the Kilgore, Texas, native said during a break in pre-season testing this week at Jupiter, Fla.

Torrence has toted his hunting rifle this winter from Spokane, Wash., to South Texas, but he’s ready to put it in the rack and criss-cross the country with his dragster in an effort to improve from last year’s 10th-place finish in the Top Fuel class.

He won at Bristol and was runner-up at the U.S. Nationals. He was top qualifier at Denver. His 320.67-mph average in 41 passes was sixth-best in a stout class, and his .069-second reaction-time average was among the top 10.

So his successes were a bit sporadic, and that’s one thing Torrence said he wants to correct this season.

“Our main issue last year was consistency, because the car ran really good at times” he said. “We need to make a few minor tweaks to that and bring that consistency in. We were No. 1 at Denver and ran really good at Indy during the race and the Traxxas Shootout.

“So that has shown promise. We just haven’t got it to do it and repeat,” Torrence said. “That’s what we’re working on here [in Florida], for sure, and trying to make a few tweaks and changes to our set-up.”

One of the biggest story lines coming from the Torrence camp in 2013, starting with the pre-season test session, was Torrence’s father, Billy Torrence, driving the team’s spare car. Steve Torrence said that data-sharing project helped some, didn’t necessarily hurt, but above all provided an invaluable father-son experience. And without offering specifics, he said the second car will come out again this campaign.

“For sure it helped at Indy,” Steve Torrence said. “After that . . . It wasn’t that it was a distraction. I didn’t think it hurt us. I just think instead of putting all our attention on the one [car], we divided that a little bit and probably didn’t benefit ourselves from it.”

In the end, Torrence said, “None of that really mattered. I got to race with my dad at the pinnacle of the sport. And I wouldn’t have traded that for anything. That was worth every bit of it. To me, if I lost the first round every time – which we did [four times in the Countdown, along with a DNQ at Reading] – I still had a blast racing with my dad. It was getting to go and do that as a family. We haven’t gotten to do that in a long time [not since their sportsman days].”

Torrence said he has added a couple of new crew members during the winter and that they are meshing exceptionally well at the Brownsburg, Ind.-based shop.

“We rolled Donnie Bender and Bobby Lagana over from our second car, and their main focus is this one,” he said with a nod to his Capco/Torrence Racing Dragster.

“We’ll bring the second car out at some point during the year. But right now we’re concentrating on getting this car to run really, really well – and consistently,” he said.

The new color scheme on the car was a collaboration between himself and marketing expert Mark Scheierman. Said Torrence, “I do it on paper, and Mark turns it into digital and prints it out. And the guys in Indy do a great job of wrapping the car and doing the trailers.”

The change was just a whim.

“We’re trying to throw something different out. The last couple of years, we’ve had all black cars,” Torrence said, hinting that he looked at Formula One and IndyCar Series bodies for inspiration. “I wanted to do something that was contrasting. We need to do a little changing up, so red and white are our colors this year.

“We wanted to keep a real clean, classy look,” He said. “It’s very simple, very clean.”

It’s unlike the rough-hewn look he sports on his face at the moment.

“The beard’s not going to make it to Pomona,” Torrence said. “We’ll get rid of it before then.”

Yes, Steve Torrence is ready for a smooth, clean start to racing in 2014.

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