Force trading cards fueling collectors

John Force is off to one of the hottest starts of his National Hot Rod Assn. career.
Ashley Force Hood has been described as one of the hottest drivers in motorsports.
Card collectors can get a piece of the Force phenomenon in the 2009 Press Pass Legends cards set.
Two cards in particular are at the top of the Beckett Racing’s Hot List. The No. 1 card is of John Force, autographed and valued between $100 and $175. The No. 6 card is the Force family, signed by John, Ashley, Brittany and Courtney Force, and valued between $300 and $600.
“All racing collectors can appreciate the greatness of John Force and what he means to auto racing,” Tim Trout, editor of Beckett Racing. “With only a couple certified autograph cards to date, this is his best one since it could be found in packs of the very popular 2009 Press Pass Legends. Legends is a product dominated by NASCAR drivers, which speaks volumes about the popularity of John Force.”
Trout continued to say that the Force cards could gain as much popularity and value as the 2000 Maxxim Signatures card that features Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s autographs.

Photo: The Force family card from 2009 Press Pass Legends set is valued between $300 and $600 by Beckett Racing magazine.

John Force reborn in NHRA's 50th Winternationals

After winning the 50th NHRA Winternationals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona, John Force told a story about how his wife Laurie asked Castrol, one of Force’s sponsors on his funny car, for a six-year extension.
The representatives from Castrol told her they didn’t think Force would live another six years.
The 60-year-old Force ended one of the longest winless droughts of his career by taking the Winternationals on Sunday. He did not win a race in 2009. His last win came in 2008 at Heartland Park Topeka in Kansas.
Force remembers winning that race in Kansas as being a bit of a fluke. It was his first win since his catastrophic crash in Texas the previous year. He broke his legs and had to go through months of surgeries and therapy to recover. He will admit that he hasn’t quite fully recovered from that accident. He readily admits his body will never be the same as it was before the accident.
“I’ll never be a centerfold, but I ain’t too bad,” Force quipped as he reflected on his latest win.
Age and a disregard for convention has carried Force this far. Winning the 50th Winternationals in Pomona meant more to him than winning in Kansas.
“Change has worked for us,” Force said. “My legs were broken. They said I might not walk again. Just to come out of that hospital and win again, that meant a lot.”
The past two years have been a mixture of discouragement, disappointment and pain for Force. He said the strength in his legs was sapped. He couldn’t keep his throttle leg still when he rolled into the starting lane. Some days he would sit in his gym and cry because he didn’t feel like he was making any progress in his recovery.
He didn’t give up though. He questioned his efforts, but he never stopped working. While winning in Pomona has historic significance, it also carries a degree of personal satisfaction.
Force met his daughter, Ashley Force Hood, in the second round at Pomona. One of the parachutes on her car unpacked before the race and there was a slight delay as her team tried to repack it. Force, who was going through his pre-race routine in the other lane, didn’t know his daughter was having problems. Her team got the parachute packed in time for the race, but it wasn’t much of a race. Force won easily and advanced to the semifinals. Even if her daughter’s parachute worked perfectly, Force was going to be hard to beat.
“The hardest was going against Ashley,” Force said. “I said I love you baby, but I may not ever get another chance. I gotta go. I gotta give you all I got.”
For the first time in a long time, Force was able to give it all he had. Some were wondering if Force was nearing the end of his career. Force says he even started questioning how long he might race.
“It wasn’t so much the winning, but coming back from the cellar, and I was in the cellar,” Force said. “When you’ve won all those championships, you just think that winning was easy. Then it got real tough and we just couldn’t do anything.”
Make no mistake, Force is coming to the end of his career. But it looks like he is not one to go quietly into that good-night. He still talks a mile a minute, drives even faster. If the Winternationals are any indication, Force will be giving every driver in NHRA funny cars all he’s got all year long.

Is it time for John Force to put it in park?

John Force is in the twilight of his career. But he says he won’t retire from drag racing before his team bus retires from the road.
Make no mistake, his bus is on its last wheel. It leaks oil, the refrigerator door handle is broken, the generator under the toilet doesn’t always work and Force isn’t even sure how to fix it if he could find it.
But when a reporter suggested it's time for Force to pass the torch, he took offense. Force said it was the first time he was mad at the media. Force is a pretty excitable fellow. It’s hard to tell when he’s mad because most of his interviews and conversations are dominated with shouting bursts about everything from his partnership with Castrol to his drag racing daughters.
After Force posted the top qualifying time at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona on Friday, he came into the press box to talk about his run and his season.
“The credit goes to the brain-trust Austin Coil and Bernie Fedderly. John Medlen came over to work on our car. We had Dean Antonelli and Ron Douglas help Jimmy Prock and then Jimmy came over and helped us,” Force said. “What we created was a group that worked together. They got me out of my embarrassing situation.”
He couldn’t help but laugh at himself. The only times he’s been in the press box to talk to the media this year has been when Ashley Force Hood, his daughter, or Robert Hight, his newly crowned funny car champion driver, set a top qualifying time or won a race.
Force Hood and Hight have done their share of winning this year. Hight added a 16th NHRA championship to Force’s collection as a driver and owner. Force has won 14 of those NHRA championships as a driver.
But the wins are few and far between these days for Force. Even though he captured the top qualifying time for a day, he called his 2009 season one of his worst. Statistically speaking, it was one of the worst seasons of his career. For the first time in 22 years, he did not win a race.
“Right now there is a lot of focus just trying to get me back in the game,” Force said. “Castrol pays good money. This is the second worst season I have had since I started.”
His worst season is actually one of two. He ran only five races and won only one round in 1980. He ran five races, did not qualify for two of them and won only two rounds in 1981. Both were equally bad.
He made the Countdown to One playoffs in 2009, but he was hardly a factor, a distant ninth place in the final standings.
Force says he is working on a deal that would keep him in his funny car for another five years. The 60-year-old driver says he has no intention of retiring anytime soon.
There’s no doubt his team puts together quality cars for its drivers. Mike Neff, the fourth driver at John Force Racing, broke through with the first win of his NHRA career Sunday at Auto Club Raceway Pomona. Hight and Force Hood are testaments to how good the John Force Racing cars can run.
How well John Force can run is another question.

Photo: Ashley Force Hood won two races and finished second in the NHRA funny car standings in 2009. Her dad, John Force, did not win a race for the first time in 22 years.

NHRA Bristol preview

John Force has not been in a final round for 23 races. It is the longest drought of final round appearances in his career. He is heading to Bristol Dragway in Tennessee, a track where he has two wins and has been a finalist in three of the past five years.
“We need to hurt some feelings,” said Force, a 126-time tour winner, “and I don’t mean our own. It’s a long season, but we need to start showing that we can still compete.
“What did Waylon say in that song?,” Force asked, an obvious reference to the late country-and-western singer, Waylon Jennings.

“We may be used, but we ain’t used up. Yeah, that’s it. We ain't used up. We've still got something for ’em.”

Ashley Force Hood, the highest-ranking driver for John Force Racing in the NHRA funny car standings, tied fo fourth place, has raced at Bristol twice in her pro career. She lost to Melanie Troxel in the second round at Bristol last year. Troxel went on to win the Bristol event.
She is coming off a first-round loss at Gateway International Raceway in Illinois two weeks ago.
“It always seems like when you have a bad race, you’re off the next weekend,” she said. “It’s better to go right back to work and not dwell on it.”
Force Hood lost to Tony Pedregon at Gateway and is looking for her second win of the season. She won the funny car portion of the NHRA races at Houston Raceway Park.
“It was just one of those weekends,” Ashley said of her loss to Pedregon in the
O'Reilly Midwest Nationals. “Every run I felt like I was making mistakes (even though) the car went down the track every time.
“Whatever happened, we’ve just got to forget about it. I think we can get right back where we need to be. I’ve learned that you’re going to have some rough weekends.
Hopefully, we got ours out of the way.”

Jack Beckman says even though he’s 135 points behind teammate Ron Capps for the lead in the NHRA funny car standings, he’s well ahead of where he was a year ago.
Beckman, a driver from North Hills and a driver for Don Shcumacher Racing, was in 11th at this time a year ago, sitting outside the top 10 and a spot in the Countdown to One playoffs.
“We’re actually just past the quarter-way point of this season and we’re sitting in fourth place,” said Beckman who won at Atlanta Dragway in April. “We're ahead of where we were at this time last year.”
Not that it’s an explanation to Beckman’s impressive start to the season, but he said the change from a quarter-mile to 1000 feet in racing distance might be affecting the cars. Perhaps his team has been able to adapt to the new distance better than most of the other teams in the funny car division.
“Something else that I think is interesting,” added Beckman, “is that until we get to Denver I believe this is the first time we're racing at all these tracks this year to 1000 feet. It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference other than the fact that the crew chiefs have found a way to shorten the fuse up a little bit on the cars. Instead of eating themselves up at 1250 feet, some of them are eating themselves up at 950 feet.
“We have not stepped on our car in that way and we’re not going to do that until we’ve used up a couple of our four allotted test sessions and figure out what can make the car faster in the earlier part of the run. And, in fact, we’re kind of taking a step backwards. We have been testing some things during qualifying runs. We’re going to go back more to the combo that we ran in the 1000-foot era last year, with which we arguably have been the most successful funny car to 1000 feet, and make sure that this 2009 chassis responds to that. Once we’re satisfied, we’re going to build on it with a lot of test sessions.”