The response was not immediate. “Yes.”
In Jack Beckman’s heart, it was. However, the reality of his existence away from drag racing for nearly three years demanded that certain components fall into place before he could accept the dream offer for any nitro drag racer on the sidelines.
Beckman’s dream offer was to fill in for 17-time drag racing champion and Funny Car winner John Force.
“When Robert [Hight] called me, many things had to fall into place,” Beckman remarked. “The sponsors and family had to be comfortable with it. Obviously, John and Robert had to be comfortable with it, as did my work.
The other entities agreed with it. Beckman now needed to persuade his boss, the most important factor in the equation, to side with him.
So, how could Beckman persuade his boss at the elevator repair company that he would require enough time away from the shop to follow this goal, which was not exactly conducive to effective elevator repairs?
“I promised him tickets to Pomona,” Beckman added, laughing.
Beckman’s affiliation with the company began in 1988, when he worked for the supervisor’s grandpa. His supervisor was completely behind Beckman’s opportunity.
“He remarked, ‘Hey, I’m very family-oriented. We’re a family in the elevator business. “I know the race people are also your family,” Beckman recalled. “We sat down and went through the days. He answered, “I can make it happen.” “Let us do it.”
And with that, Beckman was off to pursue what some would consider a lifelong goal. Indeed, the previous NHRA winner saw it the same way, though he had distinct visions of how his “dream” would unfold.
“I had hoped, but not under these circumstances,” Beckman remarked. “I believed my only chance to return to the sport would be if John declared in a year or two that he was ready to retire, and I was fortunate to be invited to fill that seat. I never believed Superman would be harmed. The whole situation seems strange to me. I truly believed that ship had passed me up on going back in a race vehicle, and now here I am.”
Prior to Norwalk, Beckman made his final fuel Funny Car runs at the NHRA Nevada Nationals in Las Vegas, losing in the first round to Paul Lee during the pandemic-shortened season. His employer, Don Schumacher Racing, began downsizing, including the dissolution of both of Terry Chandler’s teams.
On a sticky, muggy day in Norwalk, Ohio on August 2, 2024, Beckman was reintroduced to driving a gasoline Funny Car under the most unfavorable conditions.
“I’ll tell you the worst part: getting strapped in,” Beckman said. “I don’t mean for the run; I mean putting all of my safety equipment on; the car was still on jack stands. I wanted to make sure the harnesses were properly fitted and the seat inserts fit before climbing in there. They went to tighten me up. I’m like, “Oh my God.”
“I had a head cold, and getting into a car with one is never fun. But I hadn’t done it in three and a half years, and it was kind of like, ‘I don’t want to be in here. I just don’t want to be in here.”
“My back was knotted up on the lower right side, and when they squeezed those harnesses down, it was like, ‘Oh.'”
“But once they pulled up the staging lines and I got strapped in, I was like, ‘Okay, I feel a little bit better now.”
The engine ignited in John Force’s PEAK-sponsored Funny Car, and Beckman punched the throttle for his first burnout, which was quite mild by old-school Force standards.
Then he took off and drove at 308 mph for 4.007 seconds. Suddenly, the white noise in his head was gone forever.
Some could compare it to riding a bicycle. Beckman believes it’s all about preparation and the guidance of two-time NHRA champion and experienced drag racing school instructor Frank Hawley.
“I’d practice a lot of runs,” Beckman said of his preparation. I talked with Frank Hawley. Frank was out of office for ten years. He hadn’t driven a Funny Car in 22 years before getting back in. I am both a student and an instructor at Frank Hawley Drag Racing School, and he is my go-to guy for getting your head right.”
Interestingly, Beckman approved licenses for the Force girls, Brittany, Courtney, and even matriarch Laurie. He was getting his license back in a John Force Racing Funny Car.
“I just practiced a lot of runs at home,” Beckman explained. “When the car began, I felt very fine. It was literally getting those harnesses strapped on, and it was hot and humid outside in Norwalk, and I was thinking, ‘Ugh, I don’t miss this part of it.’
“I barely pressed the accelerator six or seven times. Once I was strapped in for the fourth time, I was like, “Yeah, okay.” You’re going to sweat profusely. This is part of the job. “I miss this.”
Beckman completed his licensing credentials during the Summit Motorsports Park extravaganza, Night Under Fire. It was as if he never left.
“The whole weekend seemed surreal to me,” said Beckman, who finished runner-up to Dale Creasy in the Chicago-style format. “Go out there, strap in John Force’s car, make a bunch of runs, get to go 309 miles an hour, and say, ‘Okay, that’s what it feels like.
“Track conditions would not let us tune up to run 380s. I have no misperceptions that going 3.85 versus going 4.00 are entirely different zip codes. So my back and my butt, my brain still hasn’t experienced what that car’s going to give us under overcast national event conditions. But the fact that I could stand on the throttle that many times and get used to the repetition of doing that will help out and pay huge dividends for us.
“It’s pretty cool that we can do something that has never happened in NHRA drag racing in this organization’s 70-plus-year history.”
The reality stands solid; if Beckman gets a nod from fate, he could drive to NHRA championship No. 17 for Force, which is well within the rules established by the sanctioning body.
NHRA substitute rules instituted in the pandemic season of 2020 allowed a team to employ a substitute driver for up to eight races in a season to gain points for the injured/ill participant. Force was second in the championship points when he suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury [TBI] at the NHRA Virginia Nationals on June 23, 2024.
Beckman isn’t the first substitute driver in the nitro ranks since the NHRA’s rule was implemented. Jonnie Lindberg filled in for Covid-afflicted Bob Tasca III, who finished fifth in the 2020 point standings. A year later, Tommy Johnson Jr. subbed for Matt Hagan, another Covid victim, and won the first race of the Countdown. Hagan finished second to Ron Capps in a championship race down to the wire that season.
“This is such an odd year,” Beckman explained. “During COVID [2021], Tommy Johnson filled in for Matt Hagan for a couple of races. Back in the AHRA days, James Warren filled in for John Wiebe when Jeb Allen and John Wiebe crashed at that Tulsa race. But NHRA’s never had anything like this. Even their COVID policy doesn’t compare to this eight-race ability to have somebody else earn points for you.
“In a week and a half, when I get to Brainerd, I’m going to put on my helmet; that’s the hat I will have on there. That’s where it will start to sink in: we’re eight races with a mission, and that’s to get John’s [NHRA] championship No. 17. And, we have a very realistic shot at that, and it’s a huge weight to carry, and it’s an unbelievable honor.”
There will undoubtedly be controversy circling the sometimes toxic world of social media, citing the unfairness of the situation. Beckman is prepared with a bit of justification for those who demand an asterisk if he’s able to pull off the Force-like feat.
“I’ve thought about that,” Beckman said. “It’s different. You could theoretically put an asterisk next to everybody who won the championship in the Countdown era. You could theoretically put a champ asterisk on every championship from ’64 to ’73 when it was whoever won the last race of the year. There are many people who won exactly one national event in their life in their NHRA tour, and they’re world champions. And I understand that. I’m a purist, and our sport should be handled more like golf.
“You go out there throughout the tournament and you accrue points and they all add up. There have been changes to the point system, there have been changes with this Mission Foods deal, and there have been changes with qualifying bonus points. There’s been a ton of changes there, the Countdown being the most recent and drastic one, and this one is unprecedented and I understand that.
“Somebody’s going to win the championship this year, and my goal is for that somebody’s name to be John Force. So I would just say people can interpret that through their own lens, and that’s not my responsibility, obligation, or issue to debate that with them.”
As Beckman determined that the unfavorable weather conditions were not what he missed on Saturday in Norwalk, he didn’t have to search far for what he did miss.
“The fans,” Beckman said without hesitation. “I was a little embarrassed at first. As an elevator guy, I’ve never had a customer want to come up and take their picture or have me sign something because I fixed their elevator. It just hasn’t happened. With the exception of going out to Pomona twice a year and signing a couple of autographs, I don’t do that anymore. That has not been part of my life for almost four years. Then to go back to Norwalk, which is arguably one of the most densely attended drag racing events of the year, Saturday at Norwalk, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, Jack, you’re going to go get your license. It’s a test session. There won’t be anybody in the stands.”
“It was being thrust under the spotlight and it was magnified going there. At first a little embarrassing, and then it became really humbling and I realized, ‘Man, these are good people that a lot of them, you can tell they’re spending their hard-earned money to come out to the drag strip, and they think all of us are pretty cool.”
“I think all of them are pretty cool, so interacting with the fans was a cool thing. I’ll tell you something else that I didn’t even know I missed until I experienced it again. It’s the camaraderie with the crew. It’s the people going out of their way on the team to make sure I’m as comfortable as I could be. It’s those little jokes in between runs. It’s that fist bump there. I really missed that.”
If Beckman can pull off the unthinkable and win for Force, it will be a full circle moment, reimbursing an iconic drag racer who invested in an unproven nitro rookie some 20 years ago.
“When I got my first pro ride in 2005 in a Top Fuel dragster, John Force bought me a firesuit with my last name down the legs, just like his team had,” Beckman recalled. “It was just a plain firesuit with no sponsors on it. John Force bought me a safety equipment bag from Simpson. When I got the call and was going to go back there to get fitted, I loaded the stuff that I had that I wanted to use for the fitting in that same Simpson bag 19 years later.
“My connection to the Force Family goes way back, but my connection to John goes back even further. I remember going to Bandimere when I was in the Air Force in 1984, and I’ve got pictures of John Force doing a burnout there. I’ve been a fan of John for 40-plus years. On June 28, 1987, John won his first NHRA national event. It was the day I turned 21. I remember reading about it a week later because that’s how long it took to get results back then and thinking, ‘That’s pretty damn cool.”
“I’ve said through all of John’s trials and tribulations that in my eyes, John Force can do no wrong because I’ve seen all the different sides of John Force. I’ve seen the John Force that goes out of his way to do things for fans and other racers and the organization that he has never taken credit for. If somebody wants to give him credit, he’ll take them off to the side and say, ‘I don’t want that. I don’t want that out of this.”
“He just wants to make people happy and make things better for the sport. It’s never about him patting his own back. It’s not lost on anybody, including me, that I’m the guy taking John Force’s seat to finish this year. It’s unbelievably awesome, and I hope that I will remember to keep things in perspective. When things get stressful and pressure-packed, remember that I’m the guy who got that call to fill in for somebody who I love, respect, appreciate, and have always looked up to.”