John Force underwent a CT scan of his head, neck, chest, and abdomen and was completely cleared and released from the hospital in less than two hours following his car-destroying engine explosion during Friday qualifying.

He returned to the racetrack late Friday and consulted with his crew, who already was at work, preparing the back-up car for the final two qualifying sessions Saturday. Force anchors the provisional 16-car lineup with a 4.139-second, 265.38-mph performance.  

“I’ve got a young team with Jon Schaffer and Jason McCulloch. I’ve had some hiccups. We struggled at testing, but everyone is working to get it right,” Force said. “That run just showed you the proof that these race cars, my PEAK Chevrolet Camaro, are built to protect the driver. Anytime I can walk away from an explosion, I know these cars at John Force Racing and all our Simpson safety gear are doing their job.

“I’ll be out tomorrow,” he said Friday evening. “The doctor cleared me, and I’m ready to race and entertain these fans. Ready to start winning – that’s what PEAK pays me to do.”

The accident Friday occurred at about 800 feet down the 1,000-feet course, when he was traveling about 265 mph. Announcer Brian Lohnes said the body “came apart like it was a china vase.”

Four days before the Friday incident, Force addressed his 2017 issues, which involved a pivotal evolution in the exhaust headers, and remarked “how much better these headers are because of NHRA’s rules.” The NHRA reset the layback angle of headers from 32 degrees to a minimum of 40 degrees. Accompanying rev limiter adjustments now start retarding the ignition 150 rpm quicker than last year’s setting did.

However, Force said he had wanted all that talk from 2017 – about his crossing the center line and fellow racers criticizing and second-guessing him – “to go away.” He said he has “fixed” the problems and even reassured that his eyesight was “perfect.”

It’s just a tough stretch for the 16-time champion. Friday’s incident appears to be completely unrelated to the headers discussion.

But for the record, Force said last season’s problems came from the fact a driver, in his opinion, has to react much differently than he did before. If a car wriggled out of the groove, they “always recovered,” he said.

“What you could do years ago ain’t the same. You only cross the center line a few times a year. This time four times, probably more than ever in a season. I went back to a couple of drivers who had talked to me about it – [Matt] Hagan, Cruz [Pedregon], [Del] Worsham, [Tim] Wilkerson – and I said, ‘I ain’t arguin’. You ain’t wrong.’ I said, ‘It got over there. And where I’ve always been able to get it back, because of the way these cars are running quicker and faster, and when they get over there, you need more room to get back.’ You get out of it [the throttle] a lot quicker.

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody. So I do listen. I ain’t too old to listen. I ain’t too stubborn to listen. Oh, I’m stubborn, but not when it comes to jeopardizing myself or another racer that I love – all these kids I love, whether they want to believe it or not,” Force said. “I said, ‘Time to re-evaluate it.’  You live in this role continually, and you never get out of it. And one day something’s right there in front of you and it’s obvious something’s wrong. And I fixed it.

“I came back one night, mad: ‘Everybody got on me.’ Not everybody, but a few . . .  what you’re doing and they were upset over it, like ‘Force is going to go until he runs into somebody’ is what they’re thinking. And I was mad.” Wife Laurie told him, “Well, you ought to look at this one picture.”

“Well,” he said, “I looked at the picture, and it was a wake-up call. I was on the gas. It looked like I had driven clear into the other lane on the gas. Well, you know I didn’t. It was the angle of the picture. The point was I was still too far. So what I realized is you do that again you might run into somebody and hurt somebody or crash the car. Is it worth the win? Yeah – everything’s worth the win – but not when it comes to hurtin’ somebody. Let him go ahead and take the win. I don’t like that. That ain’t called driving on the edge. That’s different. That’s called edge extreme, way too far. I was way too far.

“I’ve driven it a million times, and you come over and you go, ‘Oh, man, I can make it!’ And then right there at the end I made it or you’re too far and you recover. But I had a couple of runs where it didn’t recover and it went on over. And sometimes it will go over. It happens to people every day. OK? But in my case, when you’ve got a guy neck-to-neck in the other lane, what you’ve got to re-evaluate is when you used to say you can always save it and now and then you don’t. But when I see a number of runs where I thought I could save it and I couldn’t, I re-evaluated it. And I get off the gas earlier. It’s that simple.  

Force said, “I drive a race car on the edge. I drive to win, every round. But I did cross the center line a few times, and I was addressed by some drivers and I was addressed by NHRA, Graham Light. And I evaluated it. I looked at it.  

“We fight. In the end, we’re racers with families. I don’t dislike anybody. I just keep workin’. And I ain’t never too old to learn. Hagan came to me and said, ‘I respect you for your driving. You’ve won all these championships. But if you want my opinion . . . A lot of people are talking, and they want me to talk, and I don’t want to talk to nobody. I want to talk to you. And I look at guy who’s a champion and I listen to him. So we’re good,” he said. “That was last year’s story. This was something we wanted to go away.”