John Force’s trend this season has been to make one solid run and then struggle throughout qualifying. During Friday’s rain-shortened qualifying at the NHRA Kansas Nationals, he got his good run out of the way.

Force posted a mark of 4.021 seconds at 318.84 miles per hour to snag both ends of the Heartland Park-Topeka track records.

Qualifying was limited to one session as rain set in just 15 minutes shy of the scheduled Q-2 start time.

“I am glad we got one run,” said Force. “We’ve struggled this year since Pomona. In Phoenix, the car just wasn’t consistent. Jimmy Prock and the team are really working hard. It seems like for the last few races we’ve only got one qualifying run in to make the show. We had a good race track, with good conditions. I’m happy with that.”

A nine-time Topeka winner, Force said his tuner Jimmy Prock has a naturally aggressive mentality.

“We’ve got Jimmy Prock in therapy,” Force said with a smile. “He loves to swing for the fence. The other day I called him Babe. He responded, ‘Babe?’

“He’s like Babe Ruth, always swinging for the fence. That’s what he does. The car just hasn’t been there for us. We actually had a malfunction last week in Atlanta. I knew it on the burnout. I couldn’t hardly hold the clutch. It was over early. It was kind of fun pedaling it and pedaling it. I could have gone to the end of the track doing that. But if I had oiled it, they would have gotten mad.”

Force said there was no intent to be as aggressive as the numbers appeared to be.

“There was no intention to be that aggressive out of the box,” said Force. “Jimmy Prock makes a lot of power but we are either fast or almost not in. Jimmy’s working on it; that’s what he does. If you look back at the last few races, we’ve only had a few good runs. We screwed up in Houston and almost didn’t come back. Is he trying to run that fast today? No. He saw Courtney run an .07 and knew it was out there, and with our car, if you try to run like an .08, it runs faster. That is something we have discussed. We need to start looking at the numbers different. If the conditions says it will run an .07 we had better back it to a .10. Then it might run an .07. He told me he backed it up and it ran faster.

“We’ve got to learn the strategy with this power curve. It’s like a woman - if they don’t want to dance, nothing you can do about it. But today, she danced.”

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