BRITTANY HAS LEARNED THE PEAKS AND VALLEYS OF FUEL RACING

Top Fuel world champion Brittany Force learned a valuable lesson early in her career.

Drag racing can be chock full of the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows.

"I think we figured that out pretty quickly," Force said. "My rookie season we didn’t win. We were looking for our first win, and it took until 2016 for my first win. So it took us years until we finally brought home our first win. We had a great season, and then last season we went ahead and won the championship and came back this year and had one of the toughest years I’ve probably ever had.

"Starting in Pomona with the wreck, and not bringing home our first win until Houston, and we haven’t won one since. So there’s the ups, the downs, but I’ll take some of these bad days if it means bringing home a championship like we did last year."

It's not as if Ms. Force had the opportunity to see many struggles early in life, as her famous father John Force, seemed to win still when he lost.

"Sixteen championships is insane and back to back championships, I don’t know how anybody does that," Force said. "But he was just on top. He had the greatest team, the greatest crew chief, and they just dominated for years. I’d like to see him back in there with the championship. I’d like to see that again. It’s been a few years since 2013 I think was his last championship. But he still has it in him, and he’ll be back."

If only Force had been born about a decade earlier she would have seen the measures her dad took just to stay afloat in the shark-infested waters of nitro racing in the early- 1980s.

"When I was a kid, he was always winning, or he was on fire upside down, but he’d jump out of his car and throw his hands up in the air," Force said. "So to me he kind of looked like Superman, he never got hurt."

Then she saw up-front and personal in October 2007 when her Superman ran head-on into kryptonite.

Robert Hight climbed behind the wheel of his race car a little over a week after surgery to repair a broken collarbone suffered three days earlier when the engine in his Camaro exploded during the final round of the NHRA Midwest Nationals. https://t.co/1Lfc2Iob1C
— Competition Plus (@competitionplus) October 10, 2018

"It really hit home when he ended up in the hospital, in rehab and watching him fight through that," Force explained. "Coming out here this year watching him struggle, I mean weekend after weekend his car, the explosions he had, in the hospital every weekend. That was hard not just for him, his team, his sponsors, but all of John Force Racing.

"He’s pretty dang tough to be able to battle through all that and get back out here and get back in his race car and do what he loves. It definitely was not easy watching him do that, but he’s one of the strongest people I know."

If misery loves company, at the start of the season, a season where she was supposed to defend her title. Force and her dad appeared to be in competition for who could out-calamity the other.

"We were both in the hospital that same weekend," Force said. "The doctors got confused because they said, ‘No, I just released Force.’ And they were like, ‘Well now his daughter’s coming in,"

"So the doctors were confused about who was who and knew it was a race car driver named Force and thought they’d just released him, but that was my Dad the night before, and then I came in the next day. It was a hell of a start to our season, but we battled back from it and if anything, the bad days teach you how to fight for it more, they pull your team together, they make you stronger, and ultimately they make you better."

Force believes when a driver slips out of a routine of success, and the ball bounces the wrong way more times than not, it's easy to feel cursed.

"I think sometimes we all think that we have a string of bad luck that we’re trying to get rid of," Force said. "I know my guys are now becoming very superstitious and trying to change everything that they did last weekend to try something new. Just silly, superstitious things. Yeah, it affects us all. But there’s still two races left, and we’re going to go for winning as many as we can. "

Did Force say superstitious?

"I think that’s just a driver thing," she said. "I’ve made it known so well in my pit area that now it’s rubbed off on my team a little bit. On race day, it’s got to be the same thing every single round. I carry Monster with me that I put in before the first round, and if we go rounds, it stays in there all day. I drink from it. I don’t care if it’s 100 degrees out, I’m drinking a hot Monster, but my guys know that what goes in the tow car stays in there until the end of the day."

Force refuses to let the early-season blues become the new normal, and after a strong showing at the NHRA Carolina Nationals where she qualified No. 1 and reached the finals, she's feeling positive.

"It will eventually [get back to normal]," Force said. "As soon as we get back in that winner’s circle, we’ll be good. That will fix everything."

That’s another lesson Force learned early in life; winning cures all ills.

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