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Like almost everything John Force has done in his life, his announcement last Thursday of his retirement from driving was largely unexpected and unscripted. To hear those around him tell it, he made the decision just minutes before an NHRA press conference at his longtime Yorba Linda, Calif., headquarters, a presser originally meant to address daughter Brittany’s upcoming final event.

But this is the John Force we’ve all come to know and love. We all knew that the likelihood of him ever driving again was extremely low, and we all hoped that he’d make the right decision for his health and for his family, and he did.

There’s no one quite like John Force, and there never will be. As I wrote in our forthcoming NHRA 75th Anniversary book. “If John Force didn’t really exist, no Hollywood screenwriter could ever have invented him.”

Childhood polio survivor. High school quarterback for a team that didn’t win a game in three seasons. A one-time truck driver whose first race cars were so bad he was often asked not to come back to racetracks. A guy whose crew had to share a single hotel room and survived on bologna sandwiches. A perennial bridesmaid who had nine runner-ups before he finally struck paydirt.

But you know all of that, and trying to wedge an amazing 50-year, 16-championship, 157-win career into a single column is out of the question, so I thought instead I’d just muse on the John Force I know and the weird and wacky and wonderful things he’s brought to my world.

John Who?

My first brush with John Force came in early 1976. Me and my late best buddy C. Van Tune, gearheads and aspiring photographers, faked our way onto the starting line on New Year's Day 1976 for the Nitro Bowl at Irwindale Raceway to shoot photos. Force hadn’t even run his first NHRA national event yet, and his Brute Force Monza looked like every other low-dollar Funny Car team. No one — especially him — could have foreseen what was to come.

The Night Stalker

The Monza wasn’t Force’s first Funny Car. His regrettable first choice was an ex-Jack Chrisman Mustang that was a rear-engine, chain-driven monstrosity. I put on my detective’s cap way back in 2011 — in the midst of a series of stories about rear-engine floppers — and after talking to Force, other members of his family, photographers, and more, I traced the lineage of the car from Chrisman to Force. You can read all about it here: Stalking the Night Stalker.

The Christmas story

One of the endearing stories about Force that we’ve ever featured on NHRA.com was a memorable Christmas story that Force shared with my NHRA.com reporting colleague of the time, Rob Geiger, in 2002, in which the 16-time champ told the sentimental story about begging for and receiving a toy logging truck for Christmas 1955. The story is still available in its original form on an old version of NHRA.com. Read it here: A John Force Christmas: The champ remembers his best Christmas ever

Montreal, Part 1

I’m proud to say that I was there in Montreal in 1987 when Force finally got “married” after nine bridesmaids and hoisted this sign, with his daughter, Adria, and Austin Coil and the future Lisa Coil. It was a Monday finish, and the TV crew had largely left, but that did little to contain their relief. One down, 156 more to come.

Montreal, Part 2

Five years later, I was camped out shooting photos at the top end at Saniar Dragstrip in the back of one of the Safety Safari trucks when Force came blazing on down — literally — and I captured this image, which ended up as the cover of a book we produced featuring some of Force’s great quotes. I remember initially being disappointed that I’d shot the best image of the sequence with “fire diver” Jere Grice’s head in it, but the late, great Leslie Lovett told me that it added so much to the photo and spoke volumes about Force, who that year had already ridden out the “I saw Elvis at 1,000 feet” fire in Memphis, Tenn., and would end the season ramming the guardwall in Dallas and flipping upside down in Pomona.

The fire-fighting flopper

Between the “Elvis” fire/crash and the Montreal fire, Force — as he has been known to do from time to time — over-reacted and commissioned crew chief Austin Coil and crew to build him a Funny Car to keep him safe, and I remember getting special permission to make an unscheduled flight to watch its debut in Noble, Okla., at a Division 4 points meet.

After noting that his car had pivoted on the oil pan in the Memphis fire after the tires had blown, he had six-inch billet aluminum wheels welded to the bottom of the chassis to keep ‘er rolling straight. He had small aluminum wings in front of the butterfly steering wheel, precursors to today’s “doghouses.” It had a ginormous parachute-deployment button on the inner roof instead of the traditional smaller handles. He had a button to trigger the fire bottles instead of the traditional extra handle on the brake handle that forced a driver to momentarily stop pulling on the lever to activate.

And, of course, the pièce de résistance, a full-blown, 007-worthy, body-ejection system to cast off the burning shell if things got really ugly. Triggered by another button, it would unlatch the front catch that held the nose of the body to the chassis, then a pair of large cylinders would lift the nose of the body a foot off the chassis, where the wind could catch it and flip it off the car. The body was tethered to the chassis with a 20-foot steel aircraft cable.

You can read all about it here, but few saw it in action because it made the car ungawdly heavy, and the systems weren’t on the car in Montreal.

Dallas 1992

I also had a front-row seat to one of Force’s wildest moments on the track, his final-round battle with Cruz Pedregon at the 1992 Chief Nationals at Texas Motorplex.

I was perched, as I usually was back in the day, on the finish-line TV camera stand high above the track. I had a fresh roll of film (remember those?) loaded and buried my finger in the motordrive button as I watched madness unfold in front of me. As I wrote in this remembrance 25 years later, it looked like Force had lost his mind as he banked his Castrol Olds off the ‘Plex’s guardwall not once, but twice, trying to stay ahead of Pedregon, who was about to steal his championship.
 

Dallas 2007

Thirty-five years later, it was a whole different outcome for Force as he and Kenny Bernstein’s cars got together at the finish line, brutally injuring Force. Just as it was for us all last April when Force crashed in Richmond, it really took our breath away.

I wasn’t there when it happened, but it sounded so terrible and scary, and in an instant, as I waited long into that night for medical updates, I poured out my heart about what Force meant to me and to all of us in this column, Hurry Back, Superman.

That was Sept. 23, and seven weeks later, after being released from the Dallas-area hospital, Force, still in a cast and using a walker, came to Pomona Raceway for the NHRA Staff Drags on Nov. 15, where he made his first “pass” since the accident in his Lincoln Mark LT pickup truck.

We were sure glad to see him and heartened by his drive to make it back to the track, which he remarkably did the following year.

The personal touch

Force showing up to see his pals at the Staff Drags and the Las Vegas trip showed his deep connection to NHRA National Dragster. As an aspiring racer, he always dreamed of being on our pages and, of course, made it hundreds of times and on dozens of covers, and I was honored that many times he turned to me for help with a particular sponsor or PR problem, or just needed to bounce something off of someone outside of his sphere of influence.

If he missed me on a call in the day, he would leave long, rambling voicemails at night — often being cut off when the maximum recording time had been reached — but I was always there to listen and advise as best I could, and he was always there and accommodating if I needed something.

My first grandson, Jaden, was born on May 4 — Force’s birthday — which I’m pretty sure that my daughter, Kim, a big Force fan, worked hard to make happen with a long labor. Later that year in Indy, Force posed for the above photo, which I sent to them.

In 2016, my mom — a HUGE John Force fan — had a mild stroke while I was at the NHRA Summernationals. She got through it pretty good, but brightened immediately when Force called her to check on her.

Thanks, John.

He was always game

When the NHRA community rallied around Darrell Gwynn after his career-ending accident on Easter Sunday, 1990, one of the great things that year was a charity softball game between all-stars from NHRA and NASCAR at Reading Municipal before the NHRA Keystone Nationals in September.

Force didn’t start the game but took over as catcher for Jerry Gwynn late in the game, and Force got run over twice at home in the top of the eighth, by Davey Allison and Chad Little, but got his revenge in the bottom of the inning, powering a homer to left center, just one of three hit during the game (the others were by NHRA’s Dan Pastorini and NASCAR’s Michael Waltrip) in a game where NHRA won in dramatic fashion in the ninth, 21-20. You can read my recap of the night here.

Vegas or bus(t)

A few years later, Force celebrated his 1996 world championship — his fifth in six years and a season in which he scored a then-record 13 wins — by loading up his pals from National Dragster into his private Prevost motor coach for a trip to Las Vegas. 

The photo at right, shot that morning outside the National Dragster offices in Glendora, Calif., graced the cover of our 1996 Fan Guide. (Force, thankfully, did not drive the bus.)

It was Force at his best, relaxed and kicked back, spinning stories on the drive over. We stopped at then-Top Fuel racer Roger Primm's casino on the California-Nevada border and rode its Desparado coaster (one of the world's tallest and fastest roller coasters) before continuing to Sin City. 

Force generously gave us each $50 to have fun in the casino, which we did, and then he treated us to a nice dinner.

This is one of my great keepsakes from that weekend, a souvenir photograph of Force and me riding the Manhattan Express roller coaster at the New York New York casino that was taken Jan. 9, 1997. The photo was taken in the midst of the coaster's 144-foot plunge. You gotta admit, Force looks a little more concerned than me, especially for a guy who makes his living at speed.

Laurie sez …

As much as we all like to think we know and understand John Force, it’s his wife, Laurie, who has the precise image, and I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed about her husband for a 2010 special edition of National Dragster called “Most Intriguing People.”

She had always fascinated me, having been there for the birth and highs and lows of his racing career, and she shared it all, from having to raise the girls pretty much on her own to, at one point, kicking him out of the house and everything in between. To his credit, Force just told me to print whatever she said.

“I knew nothing about drag racing, so he took me to Orange County [Int’l Raceway], and it looked pretty exciting,” she recalled. “I think it was the Fox Hunt [race], and there were bands playing, and at the end of the race, everyone ran out onto the track. There were streakers. It was pretty bizarre and wild. He told me that he always thought he’d want to have a Funny Car one day. It all seemed so exciting, but I didn’t know how good he’d be or how it would work … and at the start, actually, it didn’t work very well. I remember the first race he took me to when he was racing, his car caught on fire.”

She discussed everything about their lives, their marriage, their daughters, the crashes … everything. It’s still one of my all-time favorite interviews.

It closed like this: “It’s been quite a roller-coaster ride, but I don’t think I would change anything.”

I’m sure that John Force feels the same way.

The Un-Factor

As I was writing the opening paragraph for this story, looking for another “un” word to go with unexpected, I searched across all of the “un” words in the dictionary, and so many of them fit him.

John Force: unadulterated, unashamed, unassailable (win totals), unbeatable, unbelievable, unbreakable, uncompromising, unconventional, undaunted, unmatched, unparalleled, unrivaled, unshakeable, unstoppable, unearthly, unrelenting, and, of course, unforgettable.

Thanks again, John. We look forward to making many, many more memories with you in our world, which would never be the same without you having been part of it. You are the GOAT.

Phil Burgess can be reached at pburgess@nhra.com

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