COURTNEY FORCE
Driver of the Traxxas Ford Mustang Funny Car

           
After earning her degree in Communications from Cal State-Fullerton, Courtney Force couldn’t wait to start graduate studies this year in what can only be described as a non-traditional curriculum.

Instead of studying abroad, an option favored by many undergraduates, the youngest of drag racing icon John Force’s four daughters is spending her year studying aboard an 8,000 horsepower BrandSource-backed Ford Mustang Funny Car.

At her dad’s behest, the 22-year-old is learning the finer points of driving at 300-plus miles per hour from a teacher for whom she has the utmost respect, older sister Ashley Force Hood, the two-time Mac Tools U.S. Nationals Champion and NHRA national record holder for speed (at 316.38 miles per hour)

“She needs seat time,” acknowledged her father, who last year won his 15th series championship in a spectacular comeback season at the wheel of the Castrol GTX High Mileage Ford Mustang. “We have built a car to fit her and she’ll make test laps on Monday (at selected NHRA tour events).

“I’ve done what I can,” Force said. “It’s up to her sister to take her through the rest of it because she’s already lived it. We’ve got no plans right now. We’re just gonna let her develop at her own pace and see what happens. Ashley’s already told her that it’s a different animal from driving the BrandSource A/Fuel dragster (as she did the last two years for car owner Jerry Darien).”

Consider it the John Force Racing School of High Performance and if past graduates are any indication, Courtney eventually should have a very successful career in either the Funny Car or Top Fuel division.

“We’re keeping our options open,” her father said. “Working with Murf McKinney and the Ford engineers, we’ve been designing a three-rail dragster that uses all the safety stuff we learned with the Funny Cars.”

In addition to Ashley, who finished second in the Full Throttle World Championship standings in 2009, the JFR school also counts among its alumni the late Eric Medlen, 2009 NHRA Champion Robert “Top Gun” Hight and Mike Neff.

After winning her first race in 2009 when she claimed Top Alcohol Dragster honors at the Northwest Nationals in Seattle, Wash., and after earning runner-up honors the same year in the Auto Club Finals at Pomona, Calif., Courtney ran a limited schedule in 2010. An intensified college curriculum restricted her driving time the first half of the year; a tweaked chassis did so the last half.

Courtney already has scored off the track where she was named the Top Agent in the Fiesta Movement, a summer-long program that provided American consumers with their initial introduction to the 2011 Ford Fiesta. Ford Motor Company designated 100 “agents” nationwide who drove and talked about the Fiesta on their MySpace sites, YouTube and Twitter.

Now she’s moving up to a Ford that’s just a little faster than her Fiesta.

Along with her mother Laurie and sister Brittany, Courtney earned her license to drive competitively in the NHRA series in 2005 and has been on course to a full-time racing career ever since, first in a Super Comp dragster in which she apprenticed for three years and then in Darien’s A/Fuel Dragster.

Statuesque like her mother, she was one of the stars of Driving Force, the real-life TV series that aired for two seasons on A&E Network.

Ironically, Courtney’s current career path has closely followed that of Ashley. Both were cheerleaders at Esperanza High School (Yorba Linda, Calif.); both took elective courses in auto shop and welding; both majored in Communications while at Cal State Fullerton; and both earned their racing stripes with wins in the Top Alcohol Dragster division.

Identified early-on by her father as the most likely of his daughters to follow him into the family racing business, Courtney hasn’t disappointed.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” she said, “and to have my sister Ashley and my dad teaching me makes it that much better. I’m just going to learn all I can and see where it takes me.”