Family operation buoys top driver
It could be argued that the most dominant person in pro sports these days is a boss for a Texas pipelaying company.
Four days a week, Steve Torrence works 12hour days at the family business, Capco Contractors in Kilgore, 120 miles east of Dallas. It has about 350 employees.
On Fridays, he travels to the next stop on the National Hot Rod Association tour, where he guides an 11,000horsepower Top Fuel dragster in the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series. He dominated the 2018 season with 11 wins, and he’s doing it again this year.
In his weekend job, Torrence goes from zero to 330 mph in 1,000 feet — in a little more than 3½ seconds. Astronauts don’t experience quite this kind of acceleration on liftoff, although they do wind up with a better view.
Entering this weekend’s NHRA Sonoma Nationals at Sonoma Raceway, Torrence, 36, has a whopping 555point lead over Brittany Force in the standings through 14 of the 24 races on the schedule. His latest win, on Sunday in Denver, was his eighth of the season and 35th of his career, tying “Big Daddy” Don Garlits for seventh place on the alltime list.
That’s impressive enough in its own right, but even more remarkable when you realize he didn’t win any of the first five races this year.
His father, Billy, drives in a limited Top Fuel schedule. Meanwhile, Steve’s success has put a spotlight on primarily onecar teams, at the expense of better funded, multicar teams like Tony Schumacher Racing and John Force Racing. The Schumacher team dominated Top Fuel from 2004 through ’17, and Force did the same in Funny Car.
A familyoriented organization “has been a recipe for success for us,” Torrence said in a phone interview after last week’s qualifying rounds in Denver. “We take that family atmosphere into the race team.”
Two other drivers in smaller operations, Mike Salinas and Bob Tasca III, have had success this year. Salinas, a San Jose native who now lives in Morgan Hill, has long competed in a limited Top Fuel schedule, but he has won two events this year for the aptly named Scrappers Racing.
His daughter, Jianna, will race a Pro Stock motorcycle at Sonoma. She survived a 132mph crash last month at a race in Joliet, Ill. Amazingly, she walked away unhurt.
Her father thinks the key to success in NHRA is to keep the operation small.
“Sometimes when you get too big, you lose focus on why you started it,” he said. “We don’t have all the flaps and all the craziness that having three, four or five cars takes.”
He also brought in engine mastermind Alan Johnson, who has worked with the Schumacher, Force and Torrence teams, as his tuner.
Tasca posted backtoback wins this year for his onecar Funny Car team. During this season, he traded crew chiefs with John Force, getting Discovery Bay native Jon Schaffer for Mike Green.
“I don’t know if it’s ever been done,” Tasca said. “I think a lot of people thought I was crazy, but they don’t think I’m crazy anymore. It was a roll of the dice. I went with my gut. And it’s really paid dividends for our team.”
According to Tasca, it helped the smaller teams that the NHRA put a costsaving “moratorium” on new technology in recent years and limited testing on various tracks. Previously, the big teams were able to do more track testing than the smaller teams.
“We’re always looking to try to make the cars better, but the bottom line is years ago, you did it with better parts,” Tasca said. “Now, we’re making the cars better by tuning them, spending more time on the clutch setups. We don’t have the ability to make new cylinder heads every year or new manifolds every year. Those kinds of advancements have been put on hold.”
The Force team is still, yes, a force. In addition to secondplace Brittany in Top Fuel, her brotherinlaw, Robert Hight, leads in Funny Car with John Force third. Hight won at Sonoma last year and set the Funny Car national speed record (339.87 mph) and the track’s elapsedtime record (3.806 seconds) in 2017.
Whatever restrictions have been put on technological advances, Torrence is the king of the NHRA hill at the moment. He’s certainly no stranger to adversity. As a teenager, he dealt with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and three years ago, he suffered a heart attack on the eve of a race in Ohio.
The health scares “helped mold me as a person and who I am today,” he said. “There’s really no time in life for mediocrity. I try to give everything the best effort I can. You’re not promised tomorrow. You’re not promised the next minute. When I’m in my grave, I want to leave no questions to the fans or the people around me that I did the best I could. I gave it all I had.’’