2. Castrol John Force Racing Story Celebrating 25 yrs Early Days

but it hasn't always been about winning the roar of the crowd great sponsor partnerships and celebrating the spoils of victory john force racing and its history runs allot deeper than most people realize it's origins a lot more humble than most people could imagine though john force racing now boasts sixteen nhra championships numerous speed records two incredible facilities that cover over two hundred and twenty thousand square feet and ten tractor trailer trucks it did not all start out that way in fact john force and john force racing added struggle to gain notoriety and support is quite a different story a story of poverty of hope and determination of life's unforgiving challenges and of life's magnificent rewards it's about how talent and ambition triumphed when john force racing and castrol teamed up together to make history we were poor our entire regimen for a week at a time was beans and potatoes i mean we were poor ok... to think that the all that's happened up till today could have possibly happened wasn't something that we even dreamed about john was the youngest of five so when i remember him my first memories of when he was a toddler and back in those days we were quite poor and we worked in the fields of southern california picking crops and uh... one of the jobs i remember we had was picking strawberries those strawberry rows strawberry rows went on forever and john was just a toddler so my mom my dad myself and my other brothers we would we would work in the fields john being the baby he would have to go out with this 'cause there was no one else to watch him and so what my mom would do she would tie a rock to him on a short rope short uh... role and that way he couldn't wander off he basically played in the dirt all day long john being the sickly one i took care of him we were so poor that we couldn't live in a town we lived out in the woods so consequently we had no friends and the only friend we had was each other okay so john and i grew a bond from the very early years john had a lot of tenacity and lot of self-confidence even when he was only nine or ten years old you could see it and how he challenged life he took on projects and did things uh... who were living in logging camp one time it was twenty miles away from the nearest town and john decided that he wanted to play little league football i use to hitchhike twenty miles in the snow to go up i know this is the old story but true in the snow hitchhike down a log road to get from klamath glen up to crescent city where they played pop-warner football cause if i could put on a helmet and i could have tackling pads i didn't have to have the speed of a runner i could just be tough and hit people head on things they didn't do in flag football because they don't tackle in flag football ok the point is i found that that the cheer of the crowd the football helmet and even though i was handicapped i could do something and that was my dream was to be a football player but i realized being a pro was never gonna happen so what was the next thing where i could wear a helmet and have the cheer of the crowd was never about money i could get in a race car cause a race car did the running for me and i become one of the greatest of all time let's pat ourselves on the shoulder here johnny kai but the truth is the car did the running so racing made sense to me no matter how how hard it was how much you got hungry how much you couldn't pay your bills you could put on that helmet and when you walked out in that stadium the cheer of the crowd to this day makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck and then somebody said boy somebody ought to paint a sign on you somebody'll give you money for what you do hey they'll pay a clown well i was a clown for a lot of years but when i got with castrol we got dead serious and then we started winnin' and it's been a home run ever since long before john force racing and castrol became a successful team john knew he needed help and knew exactly who he could turn to to get his racing career off the ground and running when first funny car was actually was built by uh... john and louie in my garage this was about 1973 74 and they had uh... put together parts and pieces they had picked up from all over they were both truck drivers and what they would do is they would work all day and then the first thing they got off uh... duty was to come straight to my house and i let him use my garage and they would go out there and they would work on that car till midnight two o'clock in the morning sometimes trying to get it started get it to run and the time was coming when we felt it building it got giddy as schoolkids giddy as schoolkids now we're really good we're going to the big time to us it was the big time we never thought about the guys that were runnin' world speed limits and and have sponsors and big fancy rigs but i'll never forget of the week before going to orange county we were going to orange county orange county it's like ice cream ice cream you know what i mean and it was it was it sounds childish now it was our world and that's all we knew we didn't go to the movies and we didn't go to baseball games we didn't play football you know we didn't go to church on sunday we went to work on a race car and it was our whole world it was all we had and uh... i was not uhhh.. i was of the mindset that i wasn't gonna quit and john you couldn't even say that to him what are you crazy you're goin let's go and sitting down on that racetrack uh... in orange county and i'll never forget it i was in the back of the pickup truck and john the en the engine exploded and john made a turn off of the racetrack in the dark with a few lights and i was so scared this is a true story when we went by the car had gone around the end of the guardrail and back up the return road and we're still two hundred feet from where we could turn around i stepped out of the truck scabbed me up so bad it wasn't a thought you know uh... i literally just baled out of the truck there he was and i just stepped out of the truck and we were going probably fifty miles an hour this thing blew up it's on fire motors out front he thinks i'm dead i get off the road down there in the dirt i crashed but i was okay im out of the car brushing up here comes a pickup truck and im like yeah i got to the other end that was something louie cause louie built all the motors he did everything and here he come louie jumped out of the side of truck to get to me like he was going to do something when he got there right fire crews already there louies feet were runnin' one hundred miles an hour and then he realized the truck was going faster than him and he went end over end when he stood up louie was all bloody all beat up jesus and he ran up are you okay brother i said i'm fine and he was a mess he goes man that was bitchin' you see how high the flames were on the car he's all oiled down skins all burnt and he had red blisters on his cheeks cause we didn't have the kind of safety equipment we have now you know what i told him somethin' he was a bad son of a bitch i'm teamed up with the right guy we'll go far well if it wasn't for louie i wouldn't have been here but louie was always there to make sure that that that i would get that whatever i need and then when there was a fistfight louis was right in the middle of it always protecting me i mean that's why i love him then when i started doing was being careful about how i build my engines and so he wouldn't get hurt the first race was the biggest one in our lives though i think uh... as far as getting past the the semi fantasy surreal world of wanting to go somewhere and telling yourself i can do it and deep down inside everything practical says you're not going to do it and ignoring that ignoring that and when they laughed at us and called us leakers told us get that junk off the race track didn't even hurt our feelings ok we'll fix it we'll be back don't come back you know we actually got an eighty-six from from san gabriel they wouldn't let us come back there and race cause we'd blow our engines and the oil would go everywhere and the guys racing would all hate us he was in a ball of flames or some catastrophe every single run and he didn't know what he was doing and his crew was free and you know he had very little sponsorship and it really looked like he was going nowhere but the one thing he did have was a dream and the hard work ethics to make it happen the reason he'd crash so many times was because he was using junk parts he wanted to race bad but he just didn't have the money to finance a real good car john was always the hard issue in this and like he never gave up and sometimes i'd say we could have a regular life let's just get a job no it was never never ever anything to do with an ego or vanity or anything like that was because we didn't care about the outside world it was me and him and that race track and going fast when somebody get his face he would say okay you're right today but i'll be back he was like arnold shwartznegger we'll be back and we're going to we'll kick ur ass we first started out he was always on a limited budget alot of times he'd use my dad's credit card just to get a tank of gas to get back to location to race and when once he got there he would have to find a sponsor that would give him enough money to get back he gives me too much credit uh... he made it easy to follow him because he was a star john was a star to everyone who ever worked for him because he would get you to go the distance without a real reason and then on the way home suffer before you got back to los angeles car burnt to the ground tires flat hadn't eaten in two days he would tell you next week let me tell you how it's gonna happen he'd turn around half the time while he was drivin' but he would start telling you how we're going to put this thing back together and how next time it will be different we'll we'll not be eatin' this we'll not be eatin them green bologna sandwiches we sold tires right off the side of the highway out in the middle of texas we'd you know we sold nitro methane anything we had in the trailer that we could sell quite a few times when we wouldn't eat for two or three days and we literally would go up hide somewhere where nobody was and park our trailer we'd sleep on the tailgate of the trailer five of us guys on a pickup truck and we would spend eleven months on the road in a in a duly pickup truck and uh... that was how bad that we wanted to go racing and those guys that were in the truck with us were guys that had families and jobs at home they'd b.s. their boss into believing that they had a critical situation that they couldn't deny and they would end up in the middle of john and i's dream and john would always keep the dream going at the end of the day it was just a process of what we did gettin' the eighteen-wheeler he was with ashley uh... in a truck stop uh... when she was a baby and lorrie was riding in the sleeper we're running out of diesel fuel and louie got out and talked this trucker into giving us gas or the baby was going to freeze to death 'cause we're out of money so that was the early days of struggle and there's a million cars in there that we crash rolled fuel alters over end over end burn em up set em on fire wheel deal hustle that's how you did it but along the way those were the good days i mean castrol come along later and this is the good life you know i mean actually getting a paycheck to do what used to do just as a hobby i told him i thought it was foolish and i thought he was going to kill himself doing this because he was so bad and for the first couple of years he was probably the worst car out there in the circuit he was absolutely horrible and his team like i was a team member what do i know about race cars he had me packing parachutes uh... i backed up the race car mixed the fuel you know anybody who is a friend of his and was free labor they were on the crew there's no comparison how it was in the early days because we were starving to death when we say all baloney sandwiches and kept them underneath the seat of the truck my kids can't even fathom what it was like when they got lounges and big eighteen-wheeler transporters and air conditions big-screen t_v_s and we lived out of a pickup truck his personality really connects with the consumer he uh... is was a truck driver when he was growing up he never has lost sight of where he came from and that those are the people that make all this possible uh... i always compared to to his choice of foods what we have a gourmet chefs who travels with us now and he cooks meals that you get in an upscale restaurant but john still prefers the standards that he grew up with the fry baloney sandwiches cheeseburgers hotdogs tuna fish sandwiches and peanut butter and john's loyalty is unquestioned um... loyalty to his fans loyalty to his sponsor's loyalty to his team um... i think you know that loyalty factor is something i think that all that also will stand out from the standpoint of fans sponsors everyone is aligned and that uh... you know he is uh... quite a representative to have as a sponsorship partner people say why do you love the fans the fans use to feed us where the fans would come to the ropes they were famous racers they were winnin' uh... you know that signing autographs say hi we'd spend all day talkin to em we knew if we talked enough they bring us all dinner (talking over eachother) ... just being part of that deal with them he understands the importance of maintaining our customers and at the end of the day comes down to understanding importance of selling our product i think early on his career before he achieved anything he recognized that even though he wasn't a very good racer at the time that he had a gift for gab he could attract a crowd simply by telling stories and and really at that point in his career he would engage fans at the ropes and and tell how hard off the race team was that they'd bring food and everything

Channel: iamautobody

Views: 283,966

Rating: 4.7673669 out of 5

Keywords: Speedway, ashley force, fast cars, National Hot Rod Association, Chapter 2, professional women drivers, celebrating 25 years, race car, funny car, nhra, gtx, eric medlen, race track, castrol, the early days, Automobile Industry, drag racing, john force racing, courtney force, brittany force, Best, Funny Car Auto Racing, bp lubricants, force family, Castrol Gtx, car crash

Id: z92eEPW5mms

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2012