With their Ford associations ending at the end of the season, the gloves appear to be off for Robert Hight and Bob Tasca III, former satellite teammates under the Blue Oval banner.

Hight apparently still fuming from Tasca’s decision to leave their alliance of purchasing parts and sharing technology, let the emotions fly during Sunday’s ESPN2 broadcast.

“He left us, we’re really racing Schumacher,” Hight said. “I don’t look at that as a true blue Ford car. That’s just one guy I really want to beat. I tell you what, I would not want to have had to answer to Tom McKernan at Auto Club.”

The relationship between Force and Tasca is one with a storied history dating back to the 1990s when through Bob Tasca Sr., Force joined the Ford fraternity as an exclusive nitro team for the manufacturer. The exclusivity ended only when Bob Tasca III made the move from alcohol racing to nitro.

Last season, rumblings made their way through the nitro pits suggesting Tasca was purchasing parts from Don Schumacher Racing. Towards the end of the 2013 season, the Tasca Ford decals were removed from the JFR cars starting with Hight and moving to the others.

Tasca confirmed in a CompetitionPlus.com article published last July he was purchasing both supercharger and clutch components from DSR.

“I want to be very clear and at the end of the day the media doesn’t need to skew anything but the facts,” Tasca said in the article. “It is all Ford. We changed our blower program and put a Chuck Ford blower on it with a Don Schumacher insert. He has an insert that goes in the blower. We also changed our whole clutch program over. We started going in a different direction with clutch parts and Don makes a lot of the parts we are buying for the clutch. You buy parts from Don (Schumacher), you buy parts from John (Force) or you buy parts from Alan Johnson. Those are three people who sell parts.”

Days after Hight’s comments first aired on ESPN2, Tasca admitted he’d been informed of the comments but hadn’t seen the broadcast.

“I really have a short list of people whose opinions matter to me,” Tasca told CompetitionPlus.com. “And, I checked, and Robert Hight is not on that list. If John Force had something to say, I’d listen to it closely. But Robert Hight, he isn’t on my list of people who matter.”

Tasca does take exception to the notion he’s anything but a loyal Ford racer.

“You don’t have to be a John Force car to be a Ford,” Tasca added. “There’s no one who has been more loyal to Ford in drag racing than my family. Robert can say whatever he wants but the Blue Oval on his car isn’t any bluer on his car than mine. Where I buy parts from is my business.”     

Hight said he stands by his words.

“It’s emotional when you race Tasca,” Hight said in a prepared statement. “We are looking for sponsors and going rounds and winning races. That’s where that emotion came from.”

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