- 3-Time Funny Car champion and team president Robert Hight is staying at John Force Racing
- Hight said he wasn’t interested in following the lead of Top Fuel’s Antron Brown, who is breaking longtime ties with Don Schumacher Racing after this weekend.
- Hight is a key cog in the John Force Racing machine that has produced 21 championships and 286 victories.
NHRA Funny Car racer Robert Hight minced no words in discrediting the rumor that he is leaving John Force Racing to start his own team.
Hight, who rose from crew member to driver to President of the organization and three-time champion, said, “That’s bullshit, 100 percent. If John gave me the team right now, I wouldn’t take it. I don’t want anything to do with owning a race team.”
He said he wasn’t interested in following the lead of Top Fuel’s Antron Brown, who is breaking longtime ties with Don Schumacher Racing after this weekend to form his own team: “Oh hell no.
“No – because I want to be part of the machine that we have. I don’t want to be out on an island,” Hight said Friday night after grabbing the provisional No. 1 qualifying position for the Auto Club Finals at Pomona, Calif.
“If John gave me the truck and trailer and race cars and the team and the sponsorship tomorrow, I wouldn’t take it. So no, I’m not into that,” he said.
Hight is a key cog in the John Force Racing machine that has produced 21 championships and 286 victories. As president, he is in the unique position to shape policy, establish business-development initiatives, and represent the company in corporate America boardrooms during sponsorship negotiations.
“That’s why I want to continue,” the driver of the Auto Club Chevrolet Camaro said.
“One thing I’ve learned is that it takes a lot of good people to make everything happen. And I don’t think with one team you can have enough good people to make things happen. So I want to be part of the machine that we have now. We have a lot of great people that pull their weight and have been doing this a lot of years. I want to be part of a team, not out on an island by myself.”
Another wild rumor that floated around the drag-racing community recently is that Don Schumacher Racing’s Ron Capps will join John Force Racing, but that almost certainly is not true.
“I’ve heard lots of rumors,” Hight said, “but I don’t believe that’s going to happen.”
Instead, he said, “Our goal is to get Austin Prock back in the seat, have four of our own cars. It makes more sense for the whole infrastructure that we have at John Force Racing—the fab shop, the machine shop to make our own parts—it honestly makes more sense with the investment that we have to make for four teams [rather] than just three.”
Hight said the organization is “working on it” to bring Prock, the 2019 NHRA rookie of the year, back to the cockpit. He is licensed in both the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes.
“I’d say it’s looking really good right now,” he said, but cautioned that nothing ever is certain until contracts are signed on the dotted line. “I’d say there’s a better than average chance he’s going to be out here at Pomona [in mid-February, when the Winternationals will begin the 2022 season].”
He hinted that current marketing associate Frank Tiegs—Prock’s original sponsor with Montana Brand and Rocky Mountain Twist and whose Flav-R-Pac brand is on Brittany Force’s dragster this year—will be involved in Prock’s team.
Susan Wade has lived in the Seattle area for 40 years, but motorsports is in the Indianapolis native’s DNA. She has emerged as one of the leading drag-racing writers with nearly 30 seasons at the racetrack, focusing on the human-interest angle. She was the first non-NASCAR recipient of the prestigious Russ Catlin Award and has covered the sport for the Chicago Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger, and Seattle Times. She has contributed to Autoweek as a freelance writer since 2016.
