There is only one John Force. His stats are incredible, his demeanor even more. The race fans either love him or hate him and by an overwhelming margin, they love him.

He's bold and loud - more entertaining than a comedian at the top of their game. Forrest Gump once said, "Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you are going to get." The same could be said for drag racing's most prolific professional drag racer.

Force has over 1,000 round wins, over 150 national event victories and 17 world championships to his credit. Yes, 17 because many drag racing journalists overlook his 1985 American Drag Racing Association title.

Force made the calculated gamble to park his team amid the 2020 pandemic-ravaged drag racing team and returned in 2021. This season he's back to where he was pre-Covid in terms of team and racing financial strength.

CompetitionPlus.com's Bobby Bennett, who has collaborated with Force on multiple thought-provoking videos, sat down with Force to catch up on the state of the Force union.

BOBBY BENNETT: A few years ago, you made this statement, "Kids have no fear till you set them on fire a couple of times."

JOHN FORCE: Well, and I'm not just talking about my kids. I'm talking about Austin Prock, the new kid coming back with this racing. They don't know; I've always said the monster's out there. And it's funny when I look at a period of time; the monster was in the next lane; it was Kenny Bernstein driving for Monster Energy. And we ran, whoever ran into who, I don't know. My s*** blew up.

Let me tell you, that fear takes over but see, kids don't feel that. I don't know why; it's just not bred into you what can happen. I ain't talking about every kid in the world, but I know that when it does light up, let me tell you, there's another part of you that comes alive to survive. Kids have that luxury until it happens.

They learn. Some quit, some walk away, and I ain't talking about just motorsports; I'm talking about if a guy gets a beanball to the head playing baseball, you know what I'm saying?

I may not be answering this the way you want, but that's what I meant. Kids are fearless, and that's why you love them.

Sooner or later, they'll meet the danger, and they'll either face it or they won't. It's a tough deal, but with these cars, we build them safe. Our crew chiefs are the people that maintain them try to protect us.

They protect us, and I really believe in my race car. I find myself getting in my own Chevrolet pickup, and I'm going down the road, and my phone rings and I go to pick it up, and I go, 'Don't do it. Don't pick it up sooner or later; something's going to happen. You're going to run into the back of that taco truck, okay." Have you seen that commercial?"

Where the guy goes into the back, him and his wife, 'What do you want to eat? And they go, Tacos." 

And it's like, are you me? That's the most brilliant thing I ever saw. Because it got my attention. I was ready to buy that car, and all they wanted was tacos. So, that is how it works."

 

 

 

 

BB: For lack of a better word, John Force is a survivor.

JF: We've had some runs along the road where we've lost some great drivers. Some great friends, people that I loved, and it happens. But you're going to find that in anything you do in life.

BB: When the pandemic hit, it was pretty bleak across racing. Did you ever lose sight that one day you'd get the band back together?

JF: No, because I don't allow myself, and I struggle with depression. I have to get on a treadmill in the morning; just run until it goes away. Doctors have told me, 'I'll give you a pill right now; you'll be fixed tomorrow."

Except for with that pill, I fear that it'll give me a false reality. Do you know what I'm saying? That everything's okay. I don't want to know everything's okay. But I don't want to know everything's terrible either. And I fight every day for that balance. That's where a treadmill comes in. That's where coffee comes in, or, you know what I'm saying?

I'm really happy that my word is important to me, and I got this Frank Tiegs with Montana Brand, which made it possible for me to keep my word to this kid, Austin Prock, and his family, and because I know how bad he wants to race. All these young kids, how bad they want to race.

I'm older, and I want to race the same way, and that's what I'm doing. So, I'm lucky people like Peak and their brands and Chevrolet, Auto Club that give me a chance, Cornwell.

That's the way I've always been in life. It's like watching the news anymore. You watch the news, and every channel is negative. There's nothing good that happens. Every now and then, somebody does something good, and it makes the news.

And it's like, "God!" And I can't live in that [negative] world because it takes me down. You know what I'm saying?

And, yet you got to have reality. You got to watch it sometimes. So I break up the news where I don't watch it continually where it brainwashes me.

BB - It's good to be able to separate the fact from the fiction, positive and negative.

JF - It's like, if I read your stuff and there will be things in there about the nature of the beast, what's really going on, and I go, "He's right on. It's true."

But I go, 'Okay, I got that."

But I go the other direction and say, 'Okay, how can I help to turn him around? What can I do to try to make it better"?

A reporter was talking about things that were bad in the motorsports world. And, when I came on, I said, 'Hey, I hear you loud and clear, and you ain't wrong, but I'm charging right down that road. Guns are blazing."

Because sooner or later, I'm going to lose. The electric car maybe will take over the combustion engine someday maybe. I thought there was going to be flying cars years ago. But I got nowhere else to go, so I got to be positive, or I'd be on a treadmill all day long. 

BB - There are times you have had a flying car, and I mean all four wheels off the ground.

JF: I still love the racing. I love being out there. Even with guys that bad-mouth me, I just can't wait to see them. You know what I mean?

I mean, I'm sitting in the movie theater, and my wife says to me, 'You are crazy. And I said, "Why?" She said, "The only thing you talked about in that movie, American Underdog with Kurt Warner. She said that when he walked off the field at the end, in his Ram uniform and he won the Super Bowl, he put his two fingers over his head.

Then I said, that's where Hagen got the signs to Jesus in Heaven to God." She goes, 'Oh, the movie just came out, John. He didn't get it from him. Some people just point to the heavens."

But she said, 'Your whole world, you're watching a football movie, and it all goes to racing."

 

 

BB - You said you didn't want any pills to give you a false reality, but what do you take to give you the reality a 70-something-year-old man can run toe-to-toe with these younger drivers?

JF - Well, first of all, you can call up Robert [Hight]. None of them want to hang with me anymore, okay? Because I'm a dinosaur, I live in a different world, but I can still drive that race car. And that's what keeps me alive. You know what I'm saying? And everyone has a reason. The race car is the only thing that ever made me anything. Because when I grew up in that little trailer cart and my brothers and sister were all standing there looking at me. I said I got to get away from this, and I ran out the door and I on my own Cushman motorcycle, and I went down the street till the cop pulled me over and wrote me a ticket and said, 'You don't even have a license. What are you doing?"

I said, "I'm running away from that trailer house."

And after a while, that's what you did. A car was a way, a motorcycle and then a car, and then an 18 Wheeler. Got me going across the country, or I could sleep in it because I couldn't afford a hotel room. Let me tell you, in the early days, my heroes like Don Prudhomme, I slept in the truck all night, and I went into the bar and stood by the bar like I was hanging out with him. I didn't have money to buy a beer. And I was running a race car, right? Yet I would go out and sleep in the truck all night.

Okay, in the Holiday Inn parking lot while they were all in the hotels. I know where I came from, and I never forget that. And it was just trying to get out of that trailer house in Bell Gardens; you know what I'm saying? I made it, and I ain't going back.

So, it's treadmills from me to the end. The only thing that scared me, you know what I read the other day? There was a famous quarterback, and I think it was Johnny Unitas. I don't know why that sticks in my head. But I read about it because I was studying about older people that get on treadmills. Am I overworking my body? Am I wearing it out faster? Am I doing the wrong thing?

But the pandemic scared me where I wanted to stay healthy and try not to get COVID, and I haven't got it yet, but I've had my shots and everything. But in the middle of it, they said he was running on a treadmill, and I go, "Wouldn't this be something, that I'm running on a treadmill trying to stay alive when I have a heart attack?" Where am I going with this? Nowhere.

BB - Why are you so afraid to retire?

JF - Because number one, I've been trained if you work that you get to eat, you get to pay your bills. When you quit working, because you think you got money in the bank that, that money ever dries up, well then you're dead. Though, I keep taking money and reinvesting it, putting more money back in. Hell, I'm doing everything I can. I'm selling off some of, not my race cars, but I've sold off some of my car collection because I need room upstairs to put in shows to make money, to make this place.

I own my buildings, but you still got to pay taxes and maintain them. And I need to be able to, the ones that I don't rent out, then I need to have the other ones make money. And that's why my guys say, 'It takes us a day to move the cars; half of them won't start, and then we start them, we take them downstairs, then you put on a show for a day, and then you got to spend a day moving everything back. So you lose three days." So I said sell them then.

It breaks my heart sometimes; there are certain cars I won't ever sell, I'll take to my grave but, just because I won't give them up. But some cars that I bought just because I had money, I'm getting rid of them to make room to do shows and make money. And, I got the best guy in the world, my president, Robert Hight. Robert went to school; he was an accountant. And what makes him good is I have an accountant that worked works for me, Johnny Lou, but Johnny Lou doesn't know race car parts, and Robert can sit and build a budget and say, "Here's what it takes us to survive, and here's how many runs we can make. Here's how many times we can blow up parts, and we'd figure out a way how to survive. If everything goes bad."

Let me tell you this, there's a real science for surviving, and whether you realize it or not, you're doing it right now, yourself, to stay alive.

Bringing in sponsors, bringing in deals, and I get excited. But there might be a road down the road that I might be looking, not having another car, but one day I'm going to have to get out of the seat, so.

The one thing about driving a race car is you're never too old, as long as you want to.

BB - Do you have anything left on your bucket list that you haven't achieved yet?

JF - Yeah. I want to win another championship. I thought I'd be at 20 by now; something went wrong here; I'm struggling, okay? I had a good race car last year, and I ought to read the rulebooks because I didn't realize driving over centerlines would cost me so many points, but in one race, I lost like 10 points, which took me out of the lead. I never got the lead back. And now, I know the rules, but sometimes, I get caught up in it, and this is ... Of all the things, as much as I love racing, I should know all the rules.

No, I have nothing on my bucket list. I ain't going to fly around the country or try to be buried at the North Pole, or go to, Egypt. Nah, there's places right here in America I want to see. One thing that I've thought about, I get caught up. I saw a show the other night about NASCAR, and they were showing all the old tracks that are gone now, and there's bushes and weeds.

Now, these are tracks were really old, before the new state-of-the-art tracks. What I'm saying is, it'd be fun for me to get my Chevrolet truck and go around the country and look at all these tracks because I could just walk on the concrete or the asphalt, and I could just walk down it and look at the stands and visualize how the crowds were. When my heroes like Raymond Beatle and Mongoose raced there. Prudhomme, that was something. And I've done that a number of times to old tracks.

I've gone back; I've seen some stuff on TV where they showed some old tracks. Basically, it ain't there. That's interesting to me because that's history, some of them I was part of, and some of them I wasn't. But, yeah. That matters to me.