Terrifying explosion turns drag race car into fireball
John Force is a legend in drag racing. For nearly 50 years, since he first stepped into the driver’s seat of the “Night Stalker” funny car super-modified Ford Mustang, Force has been cussing out the Grim Reaper and scaring Death away doing one of the most dangerous things a person can do as an occupation.
In qualifying Friday for the Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals in Pomona, California, the 68-year-old Force’s car turned into the Bluesmobile at 300 miles an hour:
“Ka-BOOM for John Force, he just destroyed a Peak Chevrolet,” the announcer said, with absolutely none of the alarm the average person would have to watching a car driven by a human being explode like it was something dropped from a military plane during a war.
The announcer was so nonplussed because it was an actual “move along, nothing to see here” moment. Nitromethane fuel burning all around him, driving the environmentalists into fits of rage, metal and plastic flying every which way like a grenade went off …
… and Force got a little help up out of the wreckage, walked to the ambulance and went to the hospital for a little checkup before being released unharmed.
A spokesman for John Force Racing said, “John is fine. He did go to the hospital as a precaution but was discharged this afternoon and will be racing [Saturday].”
Force himself, with the dismissive attitude you normally expect from a man his age when he’s fallen in the bathroom and you think he broke his hip rather than as a championship-level race car driver who just drove what by the end looked more like an automotive version of Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane, addressed the issue directly.
“That run just showed you the proof that these race cars, my PEAK Chevrolet Camaro, are built to protect the driver,” he said Friday. “Anytime I can walk away from an explosion I know these cars at John Force Racing and all our Simpson safety gear are doing their job. I’ll be out tomorrow, the doctor cleared me and I’m ready to race and entertain these fans. Ready to start winning, that’s what PEAK pays me to do.”
Get up, walk away, get looked at to make sure you’re as fine as you feel, and then don’t forget to call out the sponsors in your media quote.
If that does not make John Force the consummate professional, it’s hard to imagine what would.
After all, it’s not like this has never happened to him before …
That’s not to say that Force has never been hurt; he got absolutely shredded in a crash in Dallas in 2007:
He shattered his wrist and ankle, got “an abrasion down to the bone in his knee”, any single injury enough to end the career of any athlete in any sport and possibly leave them permanently disabled. They were injuries consistent with a soldier getting torn apart by shrapnel from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Force? 11 years later, he’s still racing, still blowing cars up, and telling anyone who cares to ask that he’ll never stop doing it.
That’s why he’s a 16-time champion as a driver, most recently in 2013, where he won the NHRA championship at the age of 64.
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