The emotion in Austin Prock’s voice told the story.
The 2026 season had been tough, and it was challenging before it even began. The ire of former fans who turned on Prock and his family after their move from John Force Racing to Tasca Racing was one thing; an ornery Ford Mustang that occasionally seemed to share their disposition was another.
Then came Gainesville. Prock, who had spent his first two Funny Car seasons making losing look almost foreign, opened his championship defense with a DNQ and followed it with four consecutive first-round losses.
Saturday at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park looked considerably different.
Prock ripped off a 3.859-second run at 331.61 mph in the third qualifying session of the Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals, jumping to the No. 1 position on a rainy, cold and downright miserable Michigan day. After everything that came before it, a yellow No. 1 qualifier hat carried a little more meaning than those days when it was a natural byproduct.
“One thing I have to say about Ford is nobody ever lost faith in us,” Prock said. “Everybody in this whole organization, Tasca Racing, Ford Racing, all of our partners, they were our biggest cheerleaders through our darkest moments, and makes me emotional. They really had our back and just made you keep pushing and keep pushing and trying to believe in yourself that you do know you’re capable of it still. We found that, and having Bob Tasca as a boss cheering us on and giving us all the resources.
“Him and Ford Racing have given us everything that we have needed to succeed and to put numbers up on the board and wear these yellow hats and hold Wallies. It’s because of the things that they’ve allowed us to do that we thought we needed to win. It’s just great partners like that that can make these things become reality.”
Reality looked considerably different six months ago.
Prock entered 2026 after a 2025 season in which he reached 12 final rounds, won nine races and took control of the points in April without relenquishing the top spot. That came after winning the 2024 championship in his rookie Funny Car season.
Losing was going to happen eventually. Nobody expected it to arrive by the truckload.
The DNQ at Gainesville was followed by four straight first-round exits, an almost unimaginable stretch for a driver and team accustomed to being around when the trophy was handed out. The new Tasca Racing combination had pedigree, horsepower and resources, but none of those things came with an exemption from growing pains.
The black hole of doom hasn’t swallowed them.
Prock has reached two finals this season, winning one, and has advanced to six semifinals. Those numbers aren’t what he produced during last year’s steamroller, but they also don’t resemble the team that spent the opening portion of 2026 getting punched in the mouth.
“This Ford Mustang’s really been turning the corner the later half of the season,” Prock said. “So to roll into the countdown, munch up quite a few qualifying points, and then to be number one qualifier rolling into the first countdown race of the year definitely feels good. So, gives us some confidence.
“This place has been tricky. We haven’t seen a track this gripped up, this cool all season long. And on top of it, it’s a new facility that none of us have ever been to, or most of any of us have never been to. So yeah, pretty cool accomplishment for our team.”
Saturday offered a particularly nasty examination.
Temperatures were low, rain hung around and Prock described the experience as essentially “racing in a cloud.” The racetrack had enough grip to create an entirely different problem from the hot, greasy conditions nitro teams usually spend their summers fighting.
Too much grip can bite one in the butt, too.
“Today was unknown territory for pretty much everybody,” Prock said. “We were essentially racing in a cloud. When the track’s 90 degrees, it’s pretty optimal. When you start creeping below that track temperature, your success window shrinks probably by half and it makes it really hard to go past the tree, as you saw the success rate.
“If cars threw up, it was right at the Christmas tree almost or just past it, and the window just gets so small. We were trying some crazy stuff today, things that we never did. We did some things on that last run that we’ve never done, I’ve never done in my career. And to see it go up there and be successful when you kind of roll the dice definitely makes you feel good.”
More important than one spectacular run was what surrounded it. Prock’s Mustang made four consecutive trips down the racetrack, consistently living in the 3.80s while other teams wrestled with the unusual conditions.
For a team that spent the early season trying to find some normalcy, boring consistency suddenly looked pretty darn good.
There was never much question whether Jimmy Prock and this group remembered how to win races. The question was how long it would take them to make an entirely different operation behave like the one they left behind.
Austin Prock insists they still aren’t completely there.
“We know what we’re capable of,” Prock said. “It was just working through those battles to get back on top. And I wouldn’t say we’re quite on top yet, but we’re right there with everybody. And we’re just getting started.
“We keep learning every weekend. We learned from last weekend in Indianapolis and put those ideas onto the track this weekend and saw a lot of success from them. We ran pretty much in the 80s, all four runs going up and down the racetrack, four runs in a row where I don’t know if very many cars did that this weekend in Funny Car.”
Now comes the part of the season where learning curves become expensive.
The Countdown to the Championship doesn’t leave much room for experimentation, and Prock enters it in a position he hasn’t experienced during his first two Funny Car seasons. Instead of protecting something, he’s chasing it.
He seems perfectly comfortable with this arrangement.
Part of that confidence comes from the man making the tuning calls.
Jimmy Prock has been through championship fights before, including digging Robert Hight out of the No. 10 position to win the 2017 Funny Car championship. His son doesn’t need to study the history because he watched much of it happen.
“My dad, in my opinion, and I think a lot of people would agree with me, he’s going to go down as the greatest or one of the greatest, Funny Car crew chiefs ever to live,” Prock said. “I’m so proud of him. I’m proud of this team, proud of my brother, and to get to drive a race car with a race team like that gives me so much confidence.
“We’ve been in these scenarios before racing for these championships the last two years and we’re in a little bit different position, but it just makes us even more hungry because you’re the guy clawing at it trying to get the carrot instead of trying to shield the carrot. It’s just a different mental aptitude that… Going up there and racing, you’re almost fearless and it’s an awesome feeling and I’m looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the season.”
There is another wrinkle to this particular stop.
The Prock family comes from the Lansing, Michigan, area, and judging by Austin’s accounting of the grandstands, the family reunion apparently required reserved seating.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen the grandstands this weekend, but that’s all my family,” Prock said. “We’re all here.”
The rest of Michigan appeared interested, too.
Prock said he arrived at the track before 7 a.m. Saturday while rain was still falling and found rows of fans already waiting for gates that weren’t scheduled to open until 11. For NHRA’s first national event at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park, patience apparently wasn’t a problem.
“These fans are diehards,” Prock said. “I rolled in at 6:45, 7:00 this morning and there was a legitimate probably three rows of 15 cars waiting to get in the gates. The gates opened at 11. You know what I’m saying? We rolled in, we’re like, ‘These guys are nuts. We don’t even need to be here this early. It’s still raining.’
“They were there waiting, chomping at the bit to get in there and get a good parking spot and be the first guy in the pit. That gets you excited, and to see how excited everybody has been, not only at the racetrack, but even outside the racetrack, around the hotel, we are so excited that NHRA is finally here.”
There was a Ford Mustang sitting atop the Funny Car ladder when they finally got their show.
For Prock, the timing couldn’t be much better.
The guy who spent most of the previous two seasons with everyone chasing him now gets to find out what it’s like to do the hunting. Gainesville and those four consecutive first-round losses aren’t erased by a qualifying run in Michigan, nor is one No. 1 qualifier proof the job is finished.
But that 3.859 said something the first few races couldn’t. Austin Prock and his race car look dangerous again.
“If we can take them out, that’s going to really shake this thing up and that’s exactly what we need to do because we need the cars in front of us to go out before we do,” Prock said. “And if we do that and win the race, like I told Josh, we might come out of here the points leader, which would be unbelievable, but I believe our team’s capable of doing that and I believed that all year long and now it’s crunch time and we have that opportunity and those are the moments you live for in NHRA drag racing.”
