For more than 40 years, John Force has delivered some of drag racing’s most unforgettable stories — wild, emotional, unfiltered and often larger than life.
CompetitionPlusTV captured many of those moments on camera, long before the sport understood how important those memories would become.
This multi-part series brings those raw conversations back to the surface. Each installment uses Force’s own words — his recollections, his family tales, his humor, his pain — to explore the moments he says shaped him into the sport’s winningest driver.
These stories are not transcriptions, but journalism built from the heart of Force’s quotes. This is the world as he remembers it, and as he insists it must be told.
John Force grew up believing life was good, even when life was giving him very little. The future NHRA champion spent nights under a tarp in the back of a dump truck, moving up and down the West Coast as his family worked berry fields and farms to survive. What others might now describe as harsh poverty, Force remembers as adventure because he believed his family made the best of whatever they had.
He recalled cooking on the grill on the side of the road and falling asleep with the hum of trucks passing in the distance. “I didn’t know I was a poor child,” Force said. “Living in a back of a dump truck with a tarp over it… we were migrant workers.”
He said the life molded him before he ever understood what it meant to be molded by anything. He didn’t see the struggle in it, because struggle was the only life he knew, and the presence of his siblings meant he never felt alone.
Force described meals cooked wherever the truck stopped and mornings that began with the family covering another stretch of highway. Shoes were shared, clothing was reused and nothing was wasted. “Clothing was passed down,” he said. “That was a way of life.”
Those hand-me-downs weren’t only material goods, he said, but lessons. Each sibling taught him something, whether discipline, courage, organization or how to swing when talking failed. He said those lessons mattered as much as anything he ever learned at a racetrack.
In the middle of that hard life, Force carried something else — a sliver of mythology that gave him an identity beyond poverty. He grew up hearing that the family name was originally French, “La Force,” shortened over generations into the name he would make world famous. “They always said our name was French, La Force… I believed that,” he said. “It made me feel like I came from something strong.”
Whether the lineage was true or embellished, he embraced it because it gave him a sense of history that poverty couldn’t erase. He believed toughness wasn’t just expected; it was inherited.
That belief mattered because Force struggled physically from a young age. Polio left his leg weak, his gait slower and his confidence shaken, even as he tried to outrun the world around him. His siblings protected him, but they also pushed him to be tougher, faster and louder than his limitations.
The affection from his siblings could be rough, but it was unwavering. He recalled Louie building him toys from scraps, including a wooden “log truck” that stayed in Force’s memory long enough for him to recreate it decades later for his grandchildren. Louie built one again by hand, continuing a simple family tradition that stretched across three generations.
Force remembered one of his brothers teaching him how to fight, while another taught him how to play ball or stay in school. His sister, Cindy, taught him to stay organized and focused even when their surroundings were chaotic. “They all taught me something,” Force said. “Anybody picked on me was sorry.”
Still, he admitted that most fights started because of him. His mouth often got ahead of his judgment, and kids who didn’t understand his bluster answered with fists. “I was slow,” he said. “I fought with a lot of people but probably because I was a big mouth.”
Fear was a constant, especially when he knew a fight was waiting after school. The sickness in his stomach became as predictable as the bell ringing at the end of the day, and he said he would spend hours dreading the moment.
One day, his brother Walker refused to let him live in fear any longer. Walker found him throwing up in the parking lot, unable to steady himself because he knew a classmate planned to fight him. “Walker said, ‘Why are you standing here puking in the parking lot?’” Force recalled.
Force told him he was scared and knew he couldn’t win, but Walker said the real problem was letting fear ruin an entire day. Walker told him to meet trouble the instant it arrived to keep it from growing stronger than he was.
“The next time somebody comes up to you and says they want to beat you up after school,” Walker told him, “fight right there.”
The next day, Force acted on the advice. When a classmate threatened him, Force swung in the hallway before he had time to think about consequences or pain. Fear and adrenaline combined, and his body reacted the only way it knew how in moments of terror.
“And I threw up all over him,” Force said.
The fight ended instantly. The boy walked away and never returned for another round because the shock of the moment dissolved whatever victory he thought he wanted. “He probably figured he terrorized me so much he didn’t want to mess with me no more,” Force said.
That was the day Force learned the power of confronting fear before it gathers momentum. He said it shaped how he approached every round of racing, every big-money final and every championship run. He believed stress only grows when you wait for it.
Sports gave him another outlet for that toughness. Polio made running difficult, and coaches didn’t know what to do with a kid who couldn’t move the way the others could. Force refused to accept their limitations for him.
He hitchhiked 30 miles through snow to reach Pop Warner football in Crescent City, sometimes sleeping in town because he had no transportation back. “I wanted it that bad,” Force said. “I wanted to wear that helmet. I wanted to wear the shoulder pads.”
He played aggressively, making up for speed with intensity. He bit ball carriers to bring them down, not out of anger but determination to stop them by any means necessary. “He didn’t want to run my way no more,” Force said.
Leadership came naturally even when athletic ability didn’t. Coaches let him motivate teams because he talked, pushed and demanded more from his teammates than he demanded from himself.
Force said his high school football career ended abruptly when a teammate clipped him from behind, injuring his weakened leg. The younger players wanted their shot, and taking him out gave them that opportunity. “They wanted me out because they wanted to finish the last game without me,” Force said.
He didn’t resent them because he knew the hunger to replace someone older or more established. He later recognized that same drive in young racers looking for their break.
Force said his household reinforced the toughness he developed outside it. His father was stern, blunt and quick to use discipline by standards that would not be accepted today. “What do you want? The belt or the coat hanger?” Force remembered him asking.
He always chose the belt. He said the welts faded, but the lessons stuck harder than the pain.
Force never described his father with bitterness. He said the man was honest, proud in his own way and fiercely protective. His mother balanced that hardness with warmth and constant reassurance.
In their small trailer, cold nights pushed Force into bed between his parents for warmth. Crowded or not, that space felt safe. “They took care of me and raised me,” Force said.
He still returns emotionally to those places — Redwood Creek, berry fields and roadside camps — where his family lived when things were hardest. “I cry like a baby because I remember it all,” he said.
Despite all the toughness his father tried to instill in him, Force believed for years that his father never followed his racing career closely. The man never asked about races and never congratulated him on championships, and Force assumed racing simply didn’t matter to him.
That belief changed after his father died.
Force opened a steel military box his father had left behind. Inside were scrapbooks, clippings, letters and everything Force had ever mailed home or written about in racing. “Never knew it until I got here,” Force said. “He left me this box… and these books all about me.”
His father had quietly kept every piece of his son’s success. He had followed him closely, silently, faithfully, and Force had never known.
One story captured that hidden devotion. After Force won the Big Bud Shootout, his first major payday, his father rode a 450 Honda motorcycle to buy a newspaper reporting the victory. A witness later told Force that his father crashed down a ravine on the freeway and emerged bloody but determined to continue.
The man tried to help him, but his father refused medical attention. “I got to go get this newspaper,” he said. “My kid won Indy.”
Force still pauses when telling the story because it reveals a truth he missed for years. The same man who once told him he’d never be a Jungle Jim or a McEwen had never stopped rooting for him.
“Best man I ever knew,” Force said. “He’d die for his kid. And I’ll die for mine.”
