You might say that Chris King wears a lot of different hats … uh, er, make that helmets.
Most days, he dons a helmet in real life as a lieutenant in the Chicago Fire Department, where he’s served as a first responder for more than 18 years (plus 12 years before that with his hometown department in Racine, Wis.).
Other days, he’s been known to wear a helmet while acting as a fireman on the popular “Chicago Fire” TV show on NBC and other shows.
And when he’s not busy with those two occupations, King likes to “relax” by donning a different kind of helmet while rocketing down a drag strip at over 300 mph in his nitro Funny Car.
A part-time racer in the NHRA, King will make his 2026 season debut this weekend at the Gerber Collision & Glass Route 66 NHRA Nationals at Route 66 Raceway in the Chicago suburb of Joliet, Ill., hoping to break his personal-best run (4.079 seconds at 302.21 mph, set two years ago at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis).
King, who recently turned 50, is an adrenaline junkie. When he’s not racing into burning buildings or saving lives, the Chicago resident likes challenging himself, his race car and the driver in the other lane. This weekend’s race will be the first of what he hopes will be several on this year’s dance card.
“We try to do five to six races a year,” he said. “If we can, we’ll add a couple more, but all of my crew, including my crew chief, have full-time jobs. Getting off and having a consistent crew is a very big challenge for us, but we try to do five or six. We’ve got Joliet and we’re going to try to hit Norwalk, Indy, Michigan, and then possibly Dallas.
“And we may add one or two IHRA races if the schedule and the funding are available.”
But right now, the only thing he’s focusing on is this weekend’s race and making the 16-car eliminations field.
“The minute I got out of the car last fall in our last race of the season in Dallas, I was itching to get right back into it because we found something in the tune-up that we had been missing and the car ran really, really well,” King said. “So it’s been a very long offseason for me and I’ve been dying to get back to the track and get in the car and just improve on what we did in Dallas.”
King had hoped to start his 2026 schedule in the season-opening Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla., but parts shortages and delivery delays pushed back his timeline to this weekend.
“Parts delays with ordering and back orders kind of put us behind schedule and we weren’t able to get the car ready,” King said. “It’s been a long time coming and I am super excited to get back in the car and can’t wait to be out there and hit the gas again this weekend.”
King has been a drag racing fan his entire life. At around the same time he got started with the CFD as a firefighter, he spent 15 years working as a crew member on a friend’s Alcohol Funny Car, waiting and hoping for the day that he’d finally be able to climb behind the wheel himself.
“I always had that itch to drive, but I never had the financial capabilities or the connections to do it,” King said. “So I worked my rear end off, trying to break that barrier to become a driver. And it finally paid off with a lot of persistence and hard work.”
King began his driving career at the same place many drag racers do: Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School in Gainesville. From there, King started with nostalgia Nitro Funny Cars, then NHRA Top Alcohol Funny Cars, before stepping up in class to the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series in the Nitro Funny Car ranks.
“I raced an Alcohol Funny Car for about two years, very, very part time due to funding,” King said. “I found I was just kind of a natural behind the wheel, but I always wanted to run nitro. So I just worked and made connections and got hooked up with Paul Richards Racing. They asked a lot of questions to a lot of people and everybody talked very highly of me. So Paul and Dave Richards gave me the opportunity to license in their Funny Car in 2017 down in Charlotte. That’s pretty much what set up the gears in motion for me.
“After I got my (nitro) license, it took a couple of years before I was actually able to compete in a car, just trying to get the right resources, the funding and the right opportunity.”
King initially drove as a rent-a-ride driver for a team. After about a year and a half, he bought the operation and he’s been establishing himself as the fastest fireman in the country since then.
“I had a bunch of loans and overcommitted myself, but I bought my own fuel team and expanded it to what we have today,” King said. “By doing that, it allows me to race how I want to race. I’m not on somebody else’s decisions and program wasting my money. I can focus all my money, attention and efforts into my program and try to better myself and Chris King Racing.”
King still hopes one day to make the big jump to a full-time ride in the Funny Car ranks. For now, he’s happy and enjoying himself in a part-time capacity, but if a big team approached King to drive for them, he’d be interested, considering it another step in the evolution of his drag racing career.
“I would love to drive for somebody because being the car owner is very stressful and very frustrating and time-consuming, but it’s the only way I get to do what I want to do now,” King said.
Racing this weekend in his own backyard, King will have a good-sized cheering contingent of family, friends and fellow firefighters on hand. He also has invited several of his acting buddies from “Chicago Fire” to come and hang out and is optimistic they’ll also attend.
“This is a big race for us,” King said. “Competition Products and Howards Cams are based out of Wisconsin, so they usually send a big group of guys and their own department sponsors. Tons of friends and family come in and a lot of firemen from the fire department come out and cheer us on.”
One of the neatest parts of King’s program is wherever he races — be it at Route 66, Dallas, Indianapolis or other venues — he always invites first responders, particularly fellow firefighters and EMTs, to sign his car in a show of mutual support.
“We have tons of people at our ropes at every race that are first responders,” King said. “Anybody who tells me that they’re a first responder, their name is on my car. They take pictures by it and think it’s the neatest thing. Sometimes it’s daughters or sons of people who have passed away in the line of duty, and they put their loved one’s name on there, they get emotional, and think it’s the coolest thing in the world.”
King knows he’s a little fish in a big pond. While veterans like Ron Capps, Cruz Pedregon, Matt Hagan, J.R. Todd, Jack Beckman, Austin Prock and Alexis DeJoria have multi-million dollar programs and budgets, King needs to watch every penny and has to do more with less.
Still, he wouldn’t trade what he’s doing for anything in the world.
“It’s just the complete David versus Goliath story where the chips and the odds are greatly stacked against you, but I’m not backing down because I know what I can do if the opportunity ever presents itself,” King said confidently. “I know I can drive. The problem is my budget restricts my car performance because I don’t have the best parts. I don’t have the newest, biggest, baddest people working for me. I have to do what I can with what I have.”
While the big teams have all but guaranteed starting spots in this weekend’s race, King’s goals are a bit more reasonable and down to earth.
“My whole goal is just to qualify,” he said. “If my car goes down the track successfully and consistently, that’s a win for us. Because that’s what this sport is all about. You can have the fastest car and lose first round because you made a mistake. So our goal as a small underfunded team is to be consistent. We want to go out there, represent first responders, represent our sponsors and most of all, just put on a good show for the fans.
“And if we go a round or two, that’s a bonus.”
In addition to firefighting and racing, King has made several appearances on “Chicago Fire,” having done several episodes earlier in the show’s 14-year run.
“When ‘Chicago Fire’ was announced, they did a big open casting call and a lot of firemen showed up,” King said. “I was an instructor at the fire academy, so I got to work with the actors before the show even started, kind of getting them up to snuff with how to be a fireman and how to portray what we do for a living.
“A bunch of us went to casting calls and auditioned and did things. We ended up being stand-ins and background actors, and I worked the TV show for the first four seasons doing various things on different levels. We also got to do some crossover shows when we did ‘Chicago PD’ and ‘Chicago Med,’ where they had the fire guys involved in that, too. I got to do some cool things, be part of some episodes.
“It was neat to meet those people, and they’re all great people. The actors are very humble, and they are great to us and support the fire department at charity events and gatherings whenever they can.”
One of King’s favorite stories about his time as a firefighter was getting to know Lady Gaga (who he respectfully calls by her given first name of Stephanie). She was living with Chicago Fire star Taylor Kinney at the time.
“Stephanie lived right next to Engine 13’s quarters in a high-rise condo apartment in downtown Chicago,” King said. “Stephanie liked to cook and she would bring over Italian meals that she made for the firehouse. She was completely opposite of what her image and character are. Performing, Lady Gaga has an off-the-wall crazy persona. But Stephanie is like a normal person, and she’s a great cook.”
King knew he wanted to be a fireman from an early age.
“I’m a second-generation fireman,” King said. “I grew up watching my dad be a fireman and hanging out in a firehouse, visiting him while he was at work, and I just always had a love and passion for it. I wouldn’t know what else to do with my life. There’s no way I could sit Monday through Friday in an office doing the same thing over and over. My personality is just that would kill me. What I like about my job is obviously the abundant time off so I can go racing, but every day I go to work, it’s something different, it’s never the same. You never know what you’re getting into, every call is different, every fire is different, and you’re in, I don’t want to say life-and-death situations, but unfortunately you are.
“There’s times where you’re in situations where you’re like, ‘Oh hell, this might be it.’ Or something bad happens where you have a near fatal accident and you get away by the skin of your teeth. It’s very much a huge adrenaline rush being a fireman, but it’s very satisfying knowing that you directly have an effect on someone’s life one way or another. Your actions and your decisions and your interventions made a difference in somebody’s life, even though you take it for granted, it’s just your job. But it’s kind of nice knowing that you had a hand in helping somebody on one of their worst days.”
King says there’s a lot of similarity between being a firefighter and driving a Funny Car.
“I would say 100% there’s a correlation to racing cars,” he said. “Every time you get in the nitro car, it’s a beast, and you never know what it’s going to do to you. The second you get complacent and think you’re in charge, the car slaps you and shows you you’re not. You have to be prepared for the unexpected, have to be comfortable in a very chaotic situation and have the ability to think clearly and make good, rational, quick split decisions to prevent you from crashing or doing something stupid to somebody else’s car.
“I greatly agree that there’s a huge connection between what I do as a fireman and as a race car driver that helps me prepare and stay calm and be able to handle the stresses and situations when they pop up.”
Veteran Funny Car owner and former driver Jim Dunn has been a key inspiration to King, as Dunn was previously a firefighter himself earlier in his career, and has spent much of his time as an owner and driver in similar circumstances — particularly when it comes to funding — as King faces now.
“Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about, going out there and showing the crowd that an underdog, somebody with no name, no famous father and no money, if you work hard enough and make the right decisions, you can do this too,” King said. “Everybody thinks racing professionally in the NHRA is unattainable. It’s not. You just have to work your ass off to do it.
“And you have to have thick skin too. There’s been a lot of times where I’m like, ‘To hell with it, I’m done. I’m quitting, it’s not worth it, I’m done.’ So many frustrations, so many times where you just wanna throw your hands up in the air and say, ‘Why am I wasting my time?’ But then you get in the car and you make a good pass and you’re like, that’s why.
“The feeling you have at the top of the track when you pop the hatch open and slide out from a good run, there’s nothing that replaces it.
“I like to tell people that guys like me who come from nothing never believe that they can make it and do the things that John Force has done or Ron Capps or things like that. But just put your heart and just persistence and work hard to follow your dreams, live every day like it’s your last. That’s the way I look at things, why I do what I do. I live life to the fullest because in my line of work, I may not come home when I go to work. I don’t want to be 80 years old looking back and saying, ‘Man, I wish I would have tried racing cars’ or I wish I would have done this or that. I try to do anything I can.
“You put your head down, grind, work what you can do. And all those people that tell you you’re an idiot and you’re never going to make it, prove them wrong.”
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