Sometimes, a change can do someone good. Billy Torrence, the founder and CEO of CAPCO Contractors, Inc., is banking on a status change for 2024 to do the trick. 

Torrence is changing his status from a super part-timer on the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series to full-time. He’ll adjust from racing only eight times over the last two seasons to making a full pull in 20-plus seasons for 2024 behind the wheel of a second CAPCO Contractors Top Fuel Toyota.

The elder Torrence will have the opportunity to bridge the win-gap between himself and his son Steve, who has won 54 national events. 

Torrence has finished as high as third in season points (2020) and has three Top 5 finishes on his resume despite the fact that he has never run the full circuit.

His Top Fuel career dates only to 2013, even though he has been racing since the 1980s, primarily in Super Comp and Super Gas. In fact, he was racing locally at East Texas tracks 15 years before he founded CAPCO, the family’s international pipeline construction business.

The NHRA South Central Division Super Comp Champion in 1999, he has a pair of national Super Comp wins to his credit in five final round appearances, the last one winning at Atlanta, Georgia, in 2016.

His pro career actually began as something of an afterthought. When he first climbed into the cockpit of an 11,000-horsepower race car, it was simply to help collect data that could be used by his son’s team in its bid to win a championship.  

Nevertheless, he proved to be a natural thanks in no small part to his experience in sportsman racing and to Steve’s instruction, a reversal of the roles they played when the younger Torrence was beginning his own racing career.

After making 20 Top Fuel starts in three seasons, twice advancing to the semifinals, the demands of business kept him out of the cockpit entirely in 2016 and 2017. He returned in 2018 with a renewed vigor and, in Brainerd, Minn., was able to simultaneously mark two items off his competitive bucket list, qualifying No. 1 on Aug. 19 and beating Antron Brown on a final round holeshot the following day.

He went on to win seven more times in the next three seasons, raising the trophy a career-high four times in 2019, the same year he and Steve made history when they opposed one another in two Top Fuel finals, becoming the first father and son to race one another more than once in the championship round.  

After splitting those first two final round duels, Steve won their two most recent “family feud” finals by margins of less than a tenth of a second.

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