Stop us if you have heard this before – Brittany Force is dominant in qualifying.

That was once again the case at the Four Wide Las Vegas Nationals on Friday.

Force clocked a 3.697-second lap at 335.73 mph in Q2 to take the provisional No. 1 qualifying spot at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

“It feels good to get back on track and currently be No. 1, to run like that, such a big improvement from Q1, going from a .74 to a .69 is huge for the team,” Force said. “And when I crossed the finish line, it felt like a killer run. Got on the radio, and I could actually hear someone for once say,’ .69.’ So, we all congratulated each other on the run. That’s very exciting to do. The great thing is we get two more before going into race day.”

In the ten years Brittany Force has been racing Top Fuel, she has proved two things without a doubt – she can win world championships as she did in 2017 and 2022, and she can qualify No. 1 at national events.
 
Force was already the No. 1 qualifier at the season-opening Gatornationals and the No. 1 qualifier ten times last season. She has been the No. 1 qualifier 43 times in her Top Fuel career.

Force lost in the second round of both the Gators and Arizona Nationals. She then was upended in the semifinals by her teammate Austin Prock at the Winternationals in Pomona, Calif., the most recent race on the national circuit.

She is chasing her 17th career Top Fuel national event victory this weekend.

“I think it’s come around much quicker,” said Force about the tune-up her crew chief David Grubnic is chasing. “We did a lot of offseason testing, new things that were putting in this mix, and we knew it was going to take us a little while until we found our footing and got back on track. And so again, we knew that going into the season, and it’s coming around much quicker than we thought, which is good news. But in the long run, it’ll set us up better, especially going into the end of the season and the Countdown.”

Force acknowledged competing in the Four-Wide format is definitely different.

“Honestly, I think it’s so chaotic up there because you’re thinking about everything you have to focus on, and you have to make sure what lane you’re in, that you're looking at the right bulb and finding that amber,” she said. “So, I don’t know. I don’t what it is. It’s tough up there to really calm down and try to focus on everything that’s going on because every run you go up there, something is a little off, something’s a little different, and you got to clear that out of your mind and just stay focused.

“It’s a lot. It’s still, pulling up there, you have this anxiety because it’s something different. It’s not your normal routine and I feel like, again, all the chaos helps you focus down even more than you normally would because you, there’s too much, there’s just so much going on up there, and you really got to find your focus. 
 

Force arrived in Las Vegas with plenty of good vibes about the venue.

Brittany Force and the Monster Energy / Flav-R-Pac Chevrolet dragster team have luck on their side at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
They swept the two tour events at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway a year ago. Force and the Monster-Energy team became just the fifth pro team to win four-wide races on both coasts and the first John Force Racing driver to do so. She also became the first JFR driver to win the spring race at Vegas since it went four-wide in 2018. She is the 10th driver to sweep the spring and fall events at LVMS but just the third to do so in Top Fuel, along with Steve Torrence and Larry Dixon.

“Our performance last season was great,” Force said. “We won here twice in April and then at the Four-Wide and then at the end of the season in October. So, we’ve been very successful here. I made some killer runs at this racetrack and won both events. So that’s huge to us. Coming into this event, you already feel like you have that behind you to carry into this weekend. 

A third championship would go a long way toward cementing a legacy of her own. 

“When we won that championship in 2017, you want to do it again to prove that, was it luck? Was it we just happened to get hot at the right time, or did we really all win it together? I had tons of people always tell me, ‘Oh, you got lucky, you got lucky,’” Force said. “So, to be able to do it a second time around that tells you it’s not luck. It’s this whole team, and I had a separate team back then. We finished strong; we actually struggled at the beginning of the season. We went from seven all the way to one right when we needed to. So, we were really strong in the Countdown.

“This time around, it was actually the opposite. We were strong all season long, struggled in the Countdown, and regained it here in Vegas and in Pomona. So, you know, learn what works for you really is what it is. It’s going into the final few races of a Countdown when a championship is on the line. It’s definitely nerve-wracking. And my question always is, ‘How are you going to react to it? Are you going to respond right? Are you going to get too hyped up over it that you completely screw your driving up?’ And I did it well in 2017. We struggled in 2021, and then in ’22, we figured it out. We all kind of collectively came together, figured it out, and won the thing.

“The competition is tough, and it gets tougher each year. We are so crunched together. It’s not like there’s this big gap from one to eight. I mean, we’re all so tight running in the field together with the very similar ETs, and that makes it really tough.”