Jack Beckman never imagined he would be chosen as replacement driver for injured legend John Force.
Yet that’s what happened in the second half of the 2024 season, and all Beckman did was win two of three final-round appearances.
Now, in 2025, Beckman is showing why he is still one of the best nitro Funny Car drivers in the NHRA.
Beckman made history for the John Force Racing organization, notching its 300th nitro Funny Car triumph Sunday at the Lucas Oil Winternationals. Beckman achieved the milestone by defeating Daniel Wilkerson in the finals In-N-Out Burger Pomona (Calif.) Dragstrip. Beckman clocked a 4.015-second elapsed time at 302.28 mph to defeat the tire-smoking Wilkerson who came across the finish line at 8.292.
Beckman, the 2012 NHRA Funny Car champion during his stint with Don Schumacher Racing, has now won 36 Wallys in nitro action. Sunday’s win was his second consecutive win in Pomona as he also captured the title at the 2024 NHRA Finals at the facility.
“So, this is back-to-back Winternationals wins for me,” Beckman said. “Well, one was back in 2020, then I took four years off and came back here. It’s kind of an odd way to do it, but the last four times I’ve been to Pomona, I’ve left with the trophy, then back-to-back for Force Racing and the PEAK car.
“I really thought Austin Prock, my teammate, was going to get win No. 300 in Funny Car for John at Phoenix (last weekend). I mean, that car has been amazing, and it’s just been an odd start to the year for them and we’ve been incredibly consistent,” he said.
“Gainesville was ultra tricky track conditions after the rain peeled everything up. Phoenix, we had the best car. We put a motor in that was down on power in the semifinals and we came here, and I think we owned the place. We didn’t qualify No. 1 or 2 or 3, we qualified fourth, but we got qualifying points every single run. Every round of eliminations, we were first or second quickest out there. I thought we just kept making a statement and (a) part fell off a couple hundred feet out in the final round when the car shook the tires and knocked them loose. That’s why as a driver, you’ve got to be ready to give one back to the team because they’ve done that for me all weekend long, and it felt good to be able to pedal the thing and drive around Dan and take it down there and not have the car blow up. And pretty cool when they hand you a trophy and your car is still intact.”
Beckman was named as the replacement driver for John Force on July 30, 2024. Force continues to recover from a traumatic brain injury he suffered in a crash a little more than a month earlier near Richmond, Va.
On Sunday, Beckman defeated Jeff Diehl, Chad Green, Matt Hagan and then Wilkerson. With the win, Beckman moved into the season points lead, 49 points in front of Paul Lee.
“I thought about (winning a second world championship) in the offseason, and I think anybody that says they don’t count points, they’re either bad at math or they’re lying to you,” Beckman said. “We all count points, but there’s no point in getting ahead of ourselves. And the Countdown formats have made it very, very different. A lot of the crew chiefs have kind of changed the way they run the cars. It’s not like baseball or football where the regular season only gives you a record to make the playoffs because they give these away every single race and it means a lot. But there’s some crew chiefs that would sacrifice a couple of these in the middle of the year to get a program that’ll get them to the Countdown.”
Beckman was quick to praise the tuners – Daniel Hood, Tim Fabrisi and Chris Cunningham – on the JFR entry.
“I think we’ve got the best of both worlds over there … with Tim Fabrisi and Danny Hood and Chris Cunningham. I think we got enough inventory of parts. I think when we do run out of a disc and have to phase a new one in, I don’t think it’s going to be a very big bump in the road. I think we’ll use qualifying runs for that. In other words, if we’ve got a disc that we’re going to have for 14 more runs and we go to Vegas and we get in solid on Friday, we might throw the next on deck one in there for Saturday for a couple runs, then go back to our original clutch pack. Then the next race after we’re in test to the point where we’ve got enough good data that should be seamless once we do that. I think we can run for the trophy every race and contend for the championship.”
Some outside of the NHRA circle might believe Beckman and Prock, the reigning NHRA Funny Car champ, are running the same tune-up but that is not the case.
“Jimmy (Prock, Austin’s father and crew chief) has always marched to his own drummer, and Jimmy could go out there and set low ET of the world and show up with a new camshaft the next weekend,” Beckman said. “It’s just his philosophy on racing. And Chris and he have worked together quite a bit. Danny had his background that he brought in here. Tim Fabrisi had his background, and they run things differently, but they bounce ideas off of each other. So, Jimmy’s not a test car. Jimmy just continues to do Jimmy and Chris is Chris. Chris went off into the dragster wars for a couple of years and was really successful tuning for Austin there.
“I think that made him and Jimmy even tighter. See, they were tuners together on my car back at DSR. But I think tuning cars in two different categories and bouncing ideas back and forth made them both maybe a half a notch better than that. So, Jimmy is going to continue to try to set low ET every time he goes out there but look at that PEAK car. We’re top three virtually every single time we go down the racetrack.”
Plus, a true historian of drag racing knows there’s nothing predictable about cars running on nitromethane.
“The weird thing is in the final round you say, ‘Well, what should we have done differently?’ And if you look at the tire tracks, the car looked fine until it didn’t look fine,” Beckman said. “A lot of times you’ll see it wallow in the tire, and you say, ‘Well, it was weak.’ Or sometimes you’ll see this track is getting skinny like, ‘Ahhh, we had it too hopped up.’ It looked perfect until it didn’t look perfect. And that’s the nature of throwing 11,000 horsepower at concrete and asphalt. Every once in a while, something goes wrong out there.”
Beckman did take a moment to discuss what it was like driving for a powerhouse team at Don Schumacher Racing and then getting the chance to drive for the legendary JFR organization.
“Well, the similarity is both of them give you everything you need to win,” Beckman said. “Don hated excuses. Don’t say, ‘I don’t know,’ and don’t give me an excuse. Go out there and win. And it was very much a business there. We had eight nitro teams at one time, but for quite a few years we had seven, and they were run as seven completely individual nitro teams. But you were absolutely allowed and encouraged to share data. John Force race cars, our car and Austin’s aren’t the same parts, but we’re highly encouraged to spend a lot of time together. And remember, the only way you could have cars run identical out there is if the same crew chief tuned both and cut the clutch inventory in half and you had twins driving the cars. Other than that, it’s always going to be different in some way, shape, or form. But Force is a little bit more like a family – and some days that’s way better and some days it’s a little tougher.”
Beckman’s most memorable latest weekend in Pomona also included him winning the Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty NHRA Challenge Saturday for the first time.
“So, the average fan would say, ‘Well, look at the car.’ John’s car wrecked. That car was not salvageable. The car I hopped into last year had never been down the racetrack. People say, ‘Well, you had good data.’ John and I weigh 20 pounds different, and we drive very differently,” Beckman said. “It was quicker for the first 60 feet with John driving than it was for me. And Cunningham said, ‘Don’t change the way you drive, how you manipulate the clutch to keep heat out of it.’ He says, ‘We’re going to bring the clutch up to you.’
“So, by no means did they just plug me in, and the car ran the same as it did with John. They adapted to what I was doing for driving, and you saw how that resulted last year. And now this is a brand-new race car. Last year’s car is upstairs as a ready-to-run spare. This car had never gone down the track before Bradenton (Florida, before the NHRA season started) and look what they did here.
“What they’re doing is I’ve driven some phenomenal race cars over the years. I have never driven a car with the run-completion percentage that this thing has. And this is a new car. It picked up exactly where last year’s car left off.”
