The firestorm started around him, and that’s something Thomas Prock won’t deny.
The son of championship tuner Jimmy Prock and brother of championship driver Austin Prock had quietly become one of the hottest offseason commodities in drag racing. While fans debated lineup changes and social media spent months deciding who deserved what, another conversation was taking place that very few people could hear. Other teams wanted Thomas Prock. Nobody outside the pits saw that one coming.
Keeping the Prock family together suddenly wasn’t just about family. It was about keeping one of the sport’s brightest young technical minds from walking out the door.
Thomas never expected to become that guy. He wasn’t the face on the hero card or the one standing in front of television cameras after a victory. If anything, he preferred living where most engineers do, somewhere between a laptop, a machine shop, and standing beside a racecar. That’s where he always felt most at home.
Then the phone started ringing.
“I was approached with a few opportunities last fall, and it really got my wheels turning on maybe there’s something else out there for me to do,” Prock said. “And honestly, it was a really special moment for me that people were actually looking at me as somebody they’d like to employ, and that personally meant a lot to me. It’s like you just feel respected, and all I really want to do is just be respected out here and feel like I belong here.”
That answer tells you almost everything you need to know about Thomas Prock. He never mentions money or talks about titles. There isn’t even a hint about becoming a crew chief somewhere else. For him, respect was the key, and it’s something other teams will hand you because of your last name.
If it came solely because of his last name, Thomas would’ve had it years ago.
Instead, he earned it the way most crew guys do. Long hours solving problems, designing parts and making somebody else’s race car better until competitors started asking questions.
Ask Thomas if he has ever felt like the forgotten member of the Prock family, and the question almost catches him off guard.
“No, not really. I’ve always just kept to my own more or less and it’s just my personality. So I enjoy just being quiet and out of the spotlight. Out of sight, out of mind works just fine for me.”
There wasn’t an ounce of resentment in his answer.
Jimmy Prock built a career becoming one of the toughest crew chiefs in drag racing. Austin became one of the sport’s biggest stars behind the wheel. Thomas never seemed interested in competing for the same spotlight because he wasn’t chasing the same reward.
“I don’t like a lot of attention necessarily,” Prock said. “Other than our performance on the racetrack, that’s the only thing I really care about.”
In a sport full of personalities, Thomas Prock became known for making race cars better instead of making himself the story.
Drag racing has a point A to B mentality, but Prock’s route took a few twists and turns/
He earned a mechanical engineering degree from IUPUI before joining John Force Racing in 2017 as a design engineer and CNC programmer. The work wasn’t glamorous, but it demanded precision because every drawing, every measurement, and every machined component eventually found its way onto a race car carrying somebody else’s name.
Two years later, another opportunity landed in front of him.
It was NASCAR that came calling for the NHRA-born youth, Stewart-Haas Racing in particular. For a young engineer, it was the kind of offer you don’t dismiss without thinking long and hard. NASCAR operated on a different scale with different resources and different ways of attacking problems. It promised a chance to grow, and Prock decided he would regret turning it down more than accepting it.
For a while, he believed NASCAR would be his destiny in an NHRA-centric household.
“I really did,” Prock admitted. “I’d wanted to drag race my whole life. I don’t really ever remember a time where I didn’t want to be involved in drag racing. I took a litle break and went to NASCAR and it was just an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. It’s like you get a call like that and you got to take it.
“And for a minute there, I honestly thought I could see myself with a large future there. But again, just that pull of drag racing came back, and I got a good opportunity to come work with my dad at Forces, and I wanted to take that, and now we’re right here.”
NASCAR taught him planning and process. Drag racing let him find out by the next qualifying session whether an idea actually worked.
He returned to John Force Racing with a broader engineering background and another perspective on solving problems.
It also meant working every day alongside the man who had taught him most of what he already knew.
For Jimmy and Thomas Prock, the groundwork had already been laid years before they ever stood behind the same race car.
“We work well together, and it’s been years in the making of us maybe running one of these cars together,” Prock said. “I’m talking back to like about 2020 or so, me and him started talking a lot about the way the cars work, and I was helping him with projects on the side in Charlotte, and after a few years it kind of seemed like maybe we could do it together.”
“When my brother’s dragster started back up at Forces, and Chris got the opportunity to go run that, he gave me the opportunity to fill that position, and it’s been a blessing, a dream come true for me, and we’ve been really successful together, and we’re yin and yang. Our personalities are a little different. We look at things differently, but it works well, and we usually come up with a good answer together.”
Thomas knows he doesn’t have all the answers, and because of that, he’d rather build something and test it, letting the results settle the argument.
“Yeah, it’s cool. I’m an engineer by trade, so I build us tools and design parts and things, and it’s really neat to see how interested he is in all of that stuff, and he’s really helped improve my craft. He can critique it because he knows what we need out here, and I’m more of a, I don’t want to say innovator, but a designer type brain, so I like to brainstorm things up and ideas, and when he’s excited about them, it makes me really excited.”
Some feel this is where the next generation of crew chiefs is changing, and it’s quite possible Prock will lead that charge. His dad learned with a wrench and a notebook, and while he appreciates the approach, he also adds to the equation a measure of computer modeling, design software and manufacturing experience that didn’t exist when his father was building his career.
Jimmy can look at a race car and recognize what it wants, and more often than not, Thomas can often help explain why. At the end of the day, they’re trying to make the race car better.
Sooner or later, somebody asks whether he’s destined to become the next great Prock tuner.
“It’s really cool feeling when you hear that question. A lot of pressure comes with all that. Obviously, my dad’s career has been amazing. I don’t know that I could ever be him, but I’m going to do my best. Obviously, he’s taught me everything I know about these cars. So it’s cool to just carry it all on, and I feel at home when I’m at the drag strip. So obviously I grew up out here. So all this is just comfortable for me.”
Thomas isn’t trying to become Jimmy Prock.
In fact, he’s seen it all, from the triumphs to the failures and the unrelenting internet criticism. He doesn’t stand in defense of the family but believes Austin has carried more than his share of the public debate.
“Austin’s taken a lot of grief over all this, and I don’t think that he necessarily deserves it. Unfortunately, that’s just the nature of the sport and how media interacts, not necessarily media, but just the social media side of things and how people interact, and everybody’s got a right to their opinion, and so do we.”
Owning a team doesn’t interest him.
“I like this environment that we’re in now. It’s smaller. It’s more of you get more of that, feel like you’re just a bigger part of something. I do enjoy it, but owning it seems like a lot of stress, and I’m already going to have gray hair soon, tuning one of these things.”
