Jack Beckman should have known when his flight landed at Richmond International Airport that this weekend’s NHRA Virginia Nationals wasn’t going to be just another event.
“A big jet plane with 140 people and a tire blew out,” Beckman said. “Fortunately, it was a rear tire, and it didn’t seem to have any adverse effects. But you hope that the pilot has enough training that he can react to a situation like that and respond accordingly.”
Three weekends ago, Beckman didn’t have a blowout on the PEAK-sponsored Camaro Funny Car he drives, but he did take quite the ride.
Tireshake caused Beckman’s ride to take a sharp left and into the retaining wall. He walked away from the accident, realizing it could have been much worse than it was.
Just like the airline pilot couldn’t have predicted a blown tire upon landing, Beckman said nitro cars are very unpredictable but demand that their drivers be ready for the unexpected.
“It’s no different for race car drivers or other athletes,’ Beckman said, taking his usual philosophical approach. “When A happens to B, when B happens to C, and most of these things, there isn’t time to process that and make a conscious decision. You just have had to have practiced it in your mind over and over again and be ready for it. And the thing about a nitro car is you can never truly be ready for whatever it can throw at you because there’s really an infinite number of possibilities.”
After all, if the unpredictability of a nitro car can bite the most prolific and seasoned nitro driver in all of the sport like it did John Force on June 23, 2024, then Beckman doesn’t expect a free pass either.
On the day Force suffered the devastating crash, Beckman was as far away drag racing as he could get. Sunday was an off day from his 9-5 as an elevator repairman.
“I didn’t see the race that day,” Beckman admitted. “My friend texted me and said John had had a crash. They didn’t know. And then I went online and saw the footage of it. When I saw him out of the car and conscious, I thought, ‘That’s Superman. And he’s been through plenty of stuff like this; he’ll be just fine.”
“I didn’t know that the worst was yet to come on that.”
Force was transported to a local Richmond, where the then 75-year-old was moved from neurological intensive care into acute neuro care at the hospital, where he was transported by air ambulance on June 23. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and other injuries, including a fractured sternum, in the crash during the first round of Funny Car eliminations.
Beckman’s Epping accident was just as unexpected as Force’s, but to him, it’s worlds apart.
“You know, they’re very, very different incidents,” Beckman explained. “John’s, he had a valvetrain failure; the thing blew up, jammed the steering, and then you saw what happened, and he was at speed. Mine, I think, made contact with the wall at 72 miles an hour, which looks pedestrian when you’re used to watching these cars run 330, but nobody would ever be comfortable going the freeway and swerving over and going head-on into the wall at that speed.
“When it happened, I had my hands full trying to react to it and process what had even happened. And then, after it happened, you’re just thankful that it could have been worse. I didn’t hit the car in the other lane. I got out of the car under my own power. Then, you just start looking for, can you find a smoking gun? Which we never did.”
Beckman’s next run came in Bristol, and he’s been in the game long enough to know that once a driver has an accident, they must process it quickly and put it behind them even more quickly.
“You have to believe that you’re not going to get hurt in the race car,” Beckman said. “I don’t mean like you would hop in the car with three broken pipes and drive it with a t-shirt on and no helmet. That would just be ridiculous. So my philosophy anyway, I protect myself to the best level that I’m able to and still perform. And then, you just have to go out there and go through the steps in sequence, and if something goes wrong, you better have some steps.
“You try not to dwell on it because I think it could eat you up. And where I’m thankful is that I get to fly back home and go to work fixing elevators, which helps me focus my mind on something else. And then it’s not until I’m on an airplane heading to the next race that I go back to practicing my driver duties. But you certainly don’t want to dwell on it too long. You wouldn’t want to wreck the last run of the season at the Pomona Finals and then have two months to dwell on that. I mean, ideally, you want to get right back in the car the next day if they can repair everything because I think your mind can do a lot of unproductive things.”
While Beckman is on a mission for this weekend’s NHRA Virginia to deliver for John Force, he’s looking to get his first win at the track located outside of Richmond, Virginia. If he can pull it off, the euphoria of turning a completely negative last memory at the facility into a move toward closure will mean so much more than a victory.
“I keep myself in pretty good shape,” Beckman said. “John’s got me by a decade and a half, and when I crawl out of one of these cars on a hot, nasty track, and I’m sweating, and go back to the pits, and I’m talking to John, I just marvel at, how did the guy at 75 do what he did.
“Obviously he wasn’t ready to retire, but if that’s the last time he straps in a race car, when he got done driving, he was second in the points, had a couple wins that season and was a serious contender for the championship. I don’t know how a man does it for 50 years at the level that he’s done it, but there’s only one John Force.”
Beckman, as he sees it, when God made Force, there was no mold to break. He’s convinced there will never be another John Force.
“He’s just one of those people that was so driven and so passionate that he didn’t know what no meant, and he just kept going until people started telling him, ‘yes.”
“He’s actually still doing it, but from a different perspective now because it’s still hard to fill in the funding that it takes to run the cars at this level. He has a three-car team, a shop to support, and 75 people on payroll, and John cares. He cares about everybody who works at JFR. He could quit at any time and retire comfortably. He doesn’t want to do that to his people.”
To win on Sunday, for Beckman, would provide a priceless moment.
“I don’t know if John Force will ever get in a race car again,” he said. “I don’t know. I was going to use the word closure. I’m not sure how fitting that is because maybe he drives another race, makes an exhibition run, or does a burnout or something. I don’t know. But I think it would be a nice closure to, hey, he went out on a winning run, but he went out against his wishes, and can he come back to the track and watch his car go to the winner’s circle, and then stand with us and hold that trophy again? I would hope that would mean more to John than anybody else.”
