NHRA Icon John Force: ‘I Fight The Enemy That I Love’

By Susan Wade

As Valentine’s Day and the start of his 45th drag-racing season approach, NHRA Funny Car star John Force might be the modern musical subject of that 1930s jazz classic, My Funny Valentine.

That’s because he made a seemingly contradictory statement about his on-track rivals, signaling a yin-yang yearning for “fun fighting” in the Camping World Drag Racing Series.

“I go to work to fight the enemy that I love,” Force said as he prepares for the Feb. 17-20 Lucas Oil Winternationals at Pomona, Calif. “I fight the enemy that I love, and that’s what I do. They keep me alive.”

He said he’s eager “to go out there and get my ass chewed by [three-time Funny Car champion Matt] Hagan, get insulted by the best there is, and take my kickin’, because it makes me fight and makes that depression go away.

“I’m gifted with depression,” Force said with a laugh. “It makes me go to work. I call it a gift, but I go to work. Get on a treadmill every morning. My wife will say, ‘I can tell when your depression hits you. I can hear the treadmill downstairs.’ Yeah, every day now, every morning. I’ve got to get on it to rid of it.

“Doctor says he can give me a pill for it, and I know that can fix it and take it away. But I also know that in the world I live in, I’ve got to make decisions. And If I went around feelin’ good all the time, I’d make a lot of wrong decisions,” he said. “So I take the balance of being over-the-center depressed, and I go the other direction. Just don’t ever want it to take me too far. If you get too far– You look at Robin Williams, look at these movie stars, what happened to their lives. I’ve studied about depression, and let me tell you, it’s a tough deal. I don’t know for sure if I’ve really got it. Doc says I do. But I fight it every day, and that’s why I go to work every day, seven days a week.”

He said people ask him, “Don’t you get mad at that guy or that gal because of something they said to ya?” His reply is “Huh-uh – because they keep me alive, and I thank ’em for it. They’re the best asset I got, next to my race car and my children. The ones out there that want to beat me up, they’re making me stay alive.

“And that’s why I’ve stayed in this sport so long,” Force said. “You don’t think that 20 years ago I didn’t think about quitting? I thought, ‘How much more can you do? You’ve won all these championships. Does it even matter? No.’”

In the practical sense, he’s doing it for money. But he’s doing it for love – the love of the sport, the love of slamming his Peak Chevy Camaro down a dragstrip quicker than the guy next to him, the love of camaraderie, the love of cars (“because they could take you away from pain . . . the pain of just growing up in poverty”), the love of the fans (“They make me right.”).

“You see after his crash [in October 2007] how hard he worked to get back in there? It just shows how much he loves the sport and why he has had so much success,” his Funny Car teammate and company president Robert Hight said. “He lives it. He dreams about it. This is all he knows, all he wants to know, all he thinks about. . . . And John likes everybody to love him. He works hard at it.”

Ah, but as the bard William Shakespeare penned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the course of true love never did run smooth. So, Force has had to joust, on and off the track, with the classic rivals he loves and admires – and sometimes feared.

The first he encountered is Cruz Pedregon, who still battles it out with him on racetracks coast to coast today. Pedregon interrupted his string of 12 series titles in 13 years (between 1990 and 2002). When Pedregon won the first of his two Funny Car crowns and drove with McDonald’s funding, Force referred to him as “that kid who drives the Hamburger Stand from Hell.” But he learned to appreciate Pedregon, “because he could drive the truck. He could tune. He could promote. He could fist-fight in the parking lot. I really had a lot of respect for him. He came from a racing family.” Just recently he said he wished he could hire him and have him come and drive for John Force Racing.

Then Force’s toughest nemesis was the flinty Florida privateer Al Hofmann, who called him “a dumb truck driver” and “an idiot,” constantly growled, “Force cheats,” and even said he wished he could have met Force’s mother early on “so I could talk her out of having him.” When Force’s car sported a Frankenstein paint scheme, Hofmann told him, “They finally put your picture on the hood.” Their fellow racer Chuck Etchells operated a printing company and Force told him he’d sell him the rights to his likeness if he wanted to make some John Force wallpaper. Hofmann ruined the moment by interjecting, “No – he’s actually putting you on toilet paper.”

“It was always an insult from Hofmann. Never said a nice thing to me in his life,” Force said. “Hofmann was mean, but it was his style to never let you think he was weak.” Ultimately, Force said, “Poor Al. I can’t figure him out. I’ve just got to love him.”

Etchells, for that matter, was one Force said “was a guy who’d tell you right to your face, ‘John, I love you, but you’re really being stupid today.’ I appreciate a man who would tell you. He wouldn’t care if he insulted you. He reminded me of [President Donald] Trump.”

Force got his first victory at Montreal in 1987, defeating fellow finalist Ed “The Ace” McCulloch, a racer Force said “was a fighter. If you messed with him, he’d beat you up.” Gulp. And then throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, he had Whit Bazemore to contend with. Bazemore was brash and confident, never mean like Hofmann was to him but never conceding anything, either. And Del Worsham, who Force remembers sitting on his tailgate at Orange County, was especially troublesome on the track. Force knew that even as a teenager Worsham knew “everything about a race car. He can build a chassis. He can build a car. He can tune it. He can drive it.” Then he became a driver and won both a Top Fuel and Funny Car crown, and, Force said, “He’s kicking our asses out here.”

Worsham went on to team ownership to go along with his tuning expertise, but the beat and the beating keep going on. And who doesn’t remember the shouting and shoving match he had with his former longtime driver Tony Pedregon at the 2009 U.S. Nationals? But he still loves this Pedregon, too.

In this era, the constant challengers are two-time and reigning champion Ron Capps and three-time champ Matt Hagan.

When he and Hagan were locked in a title showdown in 2010, Force said of his buffed-out opponent, “I can’t go out and arm-wrestle with Hagan. I can’t get in a fistfight with Hagan. And you don’t intimidate a cowboy. [Hagan is a cattle farmer.] We all know Hagan has turned into a bodybuilder. He’s beautiful. I work out hard, and I’m not even close. “Damn, I like that kid. I ought to kiss him.” Hagan won’t go that far, but he, like Capps, often has expressed massive respect for Force. Now with Tony Stewart Racing, Hagan has a new path, and Force said, “Hagan’s got his work cut out for him.”

Force and Capps have had their match-ups for nearly three decades. “He has done it all,” Force said. “And he still looks like he did 25 years ago.” And now that Capps is a team owner, like Force, Force might be extra-leery of him. “Let me tell you something: This will make you a tiger. This will make you appreciate every time you go to that starting line, because now you’re paying the bills. He had the best teacher in the world in Don Schumacher, just like when he had Prudhomme. He had two of the best teachers he could ever get. And [crew chiefs] Dean Antonelli and John Medlen, they helped build my team. He’s got the best people in the world with him. He’s got people who know how to take him down that road. I’ve been in a fight, trying to keep my deal and hiring people. I love him to death.”

Going at it with counterpart Don Schumacher in the past few years has been a sight for drag-racing observers, as well. “He gets mad at me, and I get mad at him, too, sometimes. That’s the nature of the beast. But these are the only friends I got. Oh, he loves his fishin’, but he’ll be out there in the fight.”

And that’s what Force is gearing up for this year, a 22-race war, as he goes for his record-extending 17th championship. And those who know him better than anyone, even better than his racing colleagues, know Force only is more motivated by a challenge.

His brother Walker years ago said, “You can knock him down, whip him, stomp on him, but the next day he’ll be knocking on your door.”

And his brother Louie saw that in John Force as a boy. “When I was a kid,” the 16-time champion and 154-time winner said, “there was nothing that made me tougher than someone punching me in the nose. When they did that, my brother Louie would say, ‘The more you get beat up, you’d get up fightin’ and yellin’ and screamin’.’ He said, ‘That’s the only thing you understand.’

“I’m a fighter,” Force said.

But is he? Maybe he’s really a lover.