Steve Torrence has a fourth consecutive Top Fuel championship and 51st victory after breaking away from Brittany Force’s challenge in the first round of Sunday’s NHRA Auto Club Finals at Pomona, Calif., escaping scary encounters with Doug Kalitta and Cameron Ferré, then defeating Antron Brown in the final round. 

And now – partly tongue-in-cheek – he’s relishing a new role in the class. 

Tony Schumacher is returning to full-time action in 2022. And although the two have recognized they aren’t the only ones in the sport’s headliner class, they’re eager to go head-to-head. It’s only natural, for the two have had dynastic performances and streaks in the NHRA’s Top Fuel class. 

When Torrence early Sunday became the seventh driver in the sport’s 70-year history to record four consecutive championships and later in the afternoon completed his 11th victory this season, he invited more comparisons. For instance, Torrence is the first in 13 years, since Schumacher in 2008, to win at least half the races on the Camping World Drag Racing Series tour. During Schumacher’s run of six straight titles, he won 77.6 percent of his individual races (312-90). Torrence has won 81.7 percent of the time in the past five years (263-59). Torrence joins Schumacher, the class all-time leader with 85 trophies and eight championships, on the title-streak list along with Don Prudhomme, Kenny Bernstein, Lee Shepherd, Bob Glidden, and John Force. 

Schumacher’s comeback doesn’t mean that Torrence is gunning strictly for him.  It just means he’s a tough customer – Torrence’s favorite kind of opponent  - and someone else he’d like to prove himself against Tony Stewart Racing new team with Leah Pruett, new independent team owner Brown, 2021 rookie sensation Josh Hart, young gun Justin Ashley, and . . . well, everybody else in the line-up. 

But Torrence, with a sly grin, delivered a message Sunday on the 1,000-foot Auto Club Raceway course for the whole class and one after the race to Schumacher.    

“Everybody that knows Tony Schumacher – and Tony’s a good friend of mine – knows he has a really big ego, and he doesn’t like it when you kind of trash-talk him. He said something about it’s not a comeback because he’s been here before. But I’m going to tell him, ‘You left, and I’m the sheriff now.’” 

But Torrence was just having a little well-deserved fun. 

He’s fully aware that victories and championships don’t come easy at all in what he calls a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ sport. But he figured that he and his Capco Contractors team likely have inspired independent racers with their accomplishments. 

“I don't know if that's the reason that those guys are coming in. I think maybe they've taken what we've been able to do as a single-car team, here in the last year more of a two-car team, but just as an independent. You don't have to be part of a three-, four-, multi-car team to be successful. You don't have to build parts in- house to be successful. You can buy stuff off the shelf. You can go put it together right and work on it. I mean, a Top Fuel car, there's some stuff that we do, but most of that stuff is only going to live just a short, very short period of time. So it's not like you're going to spend a lot of time and effort on it like the Pro Stock guys or the bike guys do,” Torrence said. 

“I don't want to take credit for it,” he said. “But I think that that's probably been the model that some of these guys are following . . . just ‘Hey, man, those guys are going and buying parts. They got good guys, and they go race one car full-time and one car part-time, and they're successful.’ 

“So there's definitely guys that are coming for us. I mean, but it’s competition. They're like, the longer you stay at the top, the harder it is to stay there. And there's a lot of good drivers and a lot of good teams that are forming and are out here that are going to be out here full-time: Josh Hart, Justin Ashley, Antron, all these guys,” Torrence said. 

Now that seven-month-old daughter Haven Charli is his winners-circle pictures, his perspective has changed a bit, he said: “All this is important, but being a dad is more important than anything else. 

“It doesn’t change you so much as what you want to do, your drive. It just changes the importance of it,” he said. “Everybody has seen me go out here and make a fool out of myself multiple times, and it’s something I don’t want her to see. I don’t want to be that guy. And I’ve done my best to change that,” he said. “This is a high-intensity, emotion-driven sport. You let the emotions get the better of you and people will let you remember it always. I’ve done all I can to overcome it, and that’s all I can do. 

“But I got her now,” Torrence said. “I want her to say, ‘That was my dad who didn’t do that dumb stuff.’ I want to make her proud, make my wife and the rest of my family proud.” 

He expressed his own pride in his “bad-to-the-bone Capco Boys,” saying they “have taken me to the front year after year. They stood tall when they needed to. I don’t know how we got here, but it’s nothing short of the grace of the Good Lord and my mom and dad who supported my dream all my life.” At just 38 years old, he has survived cancer as a teenager and a heart attack a few years ago that was attributed to his cancer treatment. 

Torrence gave kudos to Brittany Force, his closest challenger. Her only hope Sunday was that Torrence would lose in the opening round and she would win the race. 

Neither happened, and she said after losing in the opening round to Billy Torrence, Steve’s dad, “Overall, it’s been a great season. A lot of teams wish they could be in our position. I will say congratulations to the Capco team and Steve Torrence. They did an amazing job. We’ll be back here shortly, and I can’t wait to chase him down and start all over again.” 

He said winning this race after already clinching the championship was super-meaningful to him. 

“It was big. Last year, we won the championship. We got beat in the final. Same scenario. I'm racing Antron at Vegas, and I go up there and I do something stupid. I'm late on the tree and lose on a holeshot. I did not want to do that today. And it goes back to what my guys told me a few races ago, ‘Go do you. We're proud of what you do and don't try to do anything else.’ And so I went up there and did my job,” he said. “And the outcome fell our way. The car ran good. I've been OK on the Tree all day, been very consistent. 

“You start looking at how many wins you got. Well, that's one win away from where Antron’s at right now with 52. And so you can't help but think of that. You want to kind of get higher up on the ladder. You're only as good as your last race, and that race is over with. So now it's time to go to work again. It's time to get ready for next year, because we have a target on our back and every year it gets bigger,” Torrence said. 

“There's a lot of people taking shots at us, and a lot of people making them stick. And so we got to we got to up our game. We got to bring the A-game every time. And if we don't, we won't be here again,” Torrence said. 

He’ll be back all right, right here at Auto Club Raceway in mid-February – this time setting off the conversation about whether he can pull off a fifth straight championship.