NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

As New England-based Team Tasca rolls into its home turf this weekend for the NHRA New England Nationals presented by bproauto, there’s a palpable sense of relief that they’re coming in as winners of last weekend's NHRA Potomac Nationals, not as the “what the heck is wrong with those guys?” guys.

Coming into Maryland, two-time world champ Austin Prock and the new-look Tasca Funny Car program were still living in the shadow of a rough start since team owner Bob Tasca III hired the team over the winter. A new manufacturer, a new shop, new parts, new infrastructure — it all added up to what Prock described as “deleting our brains and restarting, essentially.”

In his Funny Car career, Prock had never gone more than four races without a win. Coming into Maryland, the frustration streak was at eight, with the low point being a DNQ at their debut in Gainesville. It took them six events to even turn on a win light.

The tide really began to turn two weeks earlier with a semifinal finish in Chicago. On Saturday at Maryland International Raceway, Prock took out Matt Hagan in the Mission #2Fast2Tasty NHRA Challenge final. Sitting in the media center afterward, Prock looked more relieved than triumphant. It had been, as he put it, “a hot minute” since he’d been in a winner’s press room.

“We’ve had a decent car all weekend, good enough to win the Mission race today,” he said. “The race car’s going up and down the racetrack and giving me an opportunity to get comfortable in this Ford, and practice chopping down the Christmas Tree.”

That Saturday win was more than a check, a medal, and some bonus points. It was a proof that the new Tasca/Ford/Prock combination could finally execute under pressure. Prock admitted the drought had worn on him.

“When you’re not winning, you have more time to pinpoint yourself on the things you’re doing wrong,” he said. “I’ve definitely been stressed out this season so far. I always want to be better.”

Twenty-four hours later, Sunday’s national event win would feel like something even bigger: the first true landmark victory of the Tasca Ford/Prock era.

In the post‑race interview, Prock didn’t talk like a guy who’d simply broken a slump, but as someone who had truly turned a corner.

“It means a lot,” he admitted. “It’s like winning your first race all over again. You’re with a new team, all the same faces in different places, but all the work that we put in and everything that we learned, it was like deleting our brains and restarting, essentially.”

The scale of the undertaking has been enormous, not just for what they’ve built but what they plan on building.

“We’re not just building a package to race and compete,” he said. “We’re trying to build a dynasty right now. We’re redoing the shop, we’re building a fab shop, we’re trying to design our own parts. We’re doing so many things on top of trying to come out here and win races.”

On top of all that, the technical mountain was steeper than anyone wanted to admit. New parts. New engine combination. New Ford body. New clutch behavior. Different feel, different view, different everything.

'It's just the subtlety of tuning them: the dropping cylinders, smoking the tires down track, clutch adjustments, all of that stuff," said crew chief Jimmy Prock. "We had to evolve the tune-up; what this thing requires to run like the last car I tuned on required are two totally different things. It isn't the same settings, it ain't the same amount of blower, it ain't the same amount of compression, fuel, timing, everything. So we've just been working our way through all of that, you know, and the last couple weeks it's come around a lot, and we're starting to get into a window we're more familiar with."

Earlier in the weekend, Austin had explained how even the windshield and sightlines in the Ford had forced him to rewire his instincts.

“The body is much different aero‑wise, drives different downtrack, and the windshield is totally different,” he said. “You’re so normalized with one view, and then when that changes, you’re trying to find out what’s normal again.

“It's all been like trying to read a foreign language that you don’t know; that’s the easiest way to explain this. It’s been very, very difficult. There hasn’t been just one thing that’s been hard, it’s all been hard. Dialing in the engine, trying to work on the clutch when the engine’s not right; if the engine’s not perfect; all the efforts that you made on the clutch just don’t matter.”

The mechanical side wasn’t the only battle. Prock admitted that as the car started to come around, he sometimes wasn’t keeping up.

“I felt like I was behind the race car at times this year, where the race car was performing better than I was,” he said, referencing his stumble in Chicago.

“After last week, we didn’t run well enough to win, but I didn’t leave well enough to even put us in contention to win. I wanted to come in here this weekend and prove to myself that I still got it.

“I still have room to work on myself, but I wanted to prove to myself that I still got it, and I feel like I did that.”

This first Tasca/Ford win wasn’t just about a points bump to ninth place or a confidence reboot. It plugged Prock directly into nearly a century of his family’s racing history with Ford.

“My dad, in his office, has a receipt from an engine my great-grandfather bought back in 1928 for his midget car, and it was a receipt from Ford,” he said. “My great-grandfather raced a Ford back in the 1920s, and all of us Procks are still racing today. To add my name to that list is unbelievable.

“This is just the beginning of the new era of the Prock Rocket. We plan on doing this for a very long time with Ford Racing, piggybacking off the Prock name.”

And then there’s the other “first‑win” character: team owner Bob Tasca III, who made the big gamble on the change, sacrificing his seat in the car to put Prock in there, and putting his neck on the chopping block for his bosses at Ford because he had what used to be Ford’s advertising motto in the 1960s and ‘70s: A Better Idea.

“Early on this season, someone asked me, ‘Pretty tough couple races … do you have any regrets?’ And the truth be told, the more I got to know the Prock family, the more excited I was. I didn’t care what the car went, right?” Tasca said.

“I’ve always seen what Jimmy’s done, and Thomas, and Austin, and I just believed that if we could bring them together and give them a long‑term future with Ford Motor Company and our family; this is the next generation for me, and to build that platform with anyone else other than the Prock family was just a risk I was willing to take, and it’s really paid off big.”

From Tasca’s side, the win is also the first proof that the business and engineering bet is sound. He hints at what’s coming next: state‑of‑the‑art chassis fixtures, in‑house parts, and a future where Tasca Racing is not just a customer but a supplier and technical force.

“If you see what’s going on back at the shop, from the most state‑of‑the‑art chassis fixture you’ve ever seen to some of the parts and pieces that we’re working on, it’s going to be not only good for just us, but I’m going to be in the business of selling parts, like I want to sell cars. And there’s no one better to do it with than the Prock family, so a lot more to come with this Tasca Racing team.”

He also lays out how the Ford relationship works in practice: Ford can’t tune a Funny Car for them, but it can supercharge what Jimmy and Thomas Prock already know how to do.

“They can provide us with an incredible amount of resources, but they don’t know how to tune a Funny Car,” he added. “It really comes down to seeing how well Jimmy and Thomas are working with the Ford engineers, and that interaction has been incredible.

“These guys [Ford], they don’t like that the goal is to win a championship — they expect to win the championship. But even in our darkest day, if you would have asked us after the DNQ at Gainesville, ‘Would you have done it all over again?’ we all would have said, ‘Let’s go. Let’s just keep going.’ ”

Their win jumped them into ninth place, just 217 points behind leader Ron Capps. Can they catch him?

“I don't see why we can't,” Austin replied plainly. “I mean, we gapped them by 200 points last year, so why can't we shrink it by 200 points going in the Countdown [to the Championship]?

“We're gonna roll into Epping with a pep in our step. We're coming off a win, and we're gonna have a lot of positive energy, and the Tasca family and friends are gonna be bringing a lot of energy, and hopefully, we can keep this train rolling."