As the old Vince Lombardi quote goes, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.”
Brittany Force embodies that spirit perfectly.
After a challenging summer that put both Force and her two-time championship-winning Top Fuel team to the ultimate test, she proved once again why she’s not one to back down.
Hanging on to the final spot in the Countdown to the Championship entering the final race of the regular season and riding a nearly two-year winless streak, Force rolled into Friday’s qualifying rounds at the Toyota NHRA U.S. Nationals at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway and demonstrated the relentless determination that Lombardi so famously championed.
Force placed her Chevrolet Accessories dragster at the top of the qualifying order during the session with a tremendous 3.740-second lap at 334.32 mph, earning precious bonus points and positioning herself to remain in contention for the NHRA playoffs, which begin in two weeks at Maple Grove Raceway in Pennsylvania.
“This is an amazing start for this Chevrolet team,” Force said. “We are sitting 10th in points and I haven’t been in a position like this in a long time, especially coming from a David Grubnic championship team. We never thought we would be here, but we had a hard season last year, same as this season. We didn’t qualify for one of the events. We sat out at Norwalk to be with my family. And we come into the U.S. Nationals 10th in points.
“It is a tough position to be in, so we are really going to have to fight this weekend. We need to stay in there for Chevrolet, Monster,and all of our sponsors. That 74 down the strip in our first qualifying run puts us currently No. 1. That is four bonus points, which is everything we could ask for. Our first goal of the weekend is accomplished.”
Force held off a hard-charging Antron Brown, the two-time defending winner of this race who placed his machine second with a 3.759 at 330.63 mph. Billy Torrence was third with a 3.792 at 331.45 mph, while Shawn Reed (3.795) and Sweden’s Ida Zetterström (3.801) rounded out the top five qualifiers from Friday.
If her time holds, it will be Force’s second No. 1 qualifier of the season and the 48th of her career.
Despite the weight of a winless season hanging over the heads of the 2022 world champions, Force remains confident that her team will return to championship contention once again.
“We haven’t lost our motivation,” Force reiterated. “We’ve been fighting just to improve and be better. We’ve been fighting to qualify top five and go rounds on race day. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened for us.
“Every weekend we thought, ‘This is going to be our weekend.’ That has never left this team. To go from such a high to a really challenging two seasons is tough, but that is just the way it works. The most you will ever learn is in the mistakes that you make. We will come back, and this is a great start to that.”
Compounding the challenges of an already demanding weekend, Force is competing alone at this year’s U.S. Nationals for the first time in her career. With her family focused on caring for her father and team boss, John Force, who is recovering at home from a crash in June, she doesn’t have her usual support system with her.
“It is the first U.S. Nationals that I haven’t had my whole family around me,” Force said. “It just feels weird to be out here and not have my dad and my mom and my sisters, but it is all for good reasons supporting my dad. For me, it is about focusing on one day at a time, one round at a time. That is exactly what we did today.”
Despite the distractions, Force remains confident that she can put those challenges aside and focus on competing for the sport’s biggest prize Monday, but knows that it will require a total team effort.
“We seem to do pretty well under pressure,” Force added. “We want to fight for a championship, so we have to be our best every single time we go down that racetrack this weekend. And that is not just me as a driver in the seat, but every crew guy on this team, crew chiefs, all of us.”
