On the track on which she won her very first NHRA national event, Brittany Force hopes to take the first steps toward securing a record-tying third World Championship this week when she drives her Monster Energy Chevrolet in pursuit of the Top Fuel championship in the 56th annual NHRA Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway.
Coming off a victory in last October’s NHRA Nevada Nationals at Las Vegas and energized by a strong performance in last month’s pre-season PRO Superstar Shootout at Bradenton, Fla., the newly married 38-year-old can’t wait to start racing once again for a championship she won in 2017 and again in 2022.
“I’m excited to get this season started at the Gatornationals,” she said. “After testing in Bradenton with David Grubnic, John Collins and the rest of this Monster Energy team, I feel we have a very strong group.
“We have four new guys on the team and other guys in new positions. Changing up crew and jobs is a challenge, but I feel we got into a solid routine pretty quickly during testing,” said the 17-time tour winner. “We need to start our season strong (by) qualifying top five and going rounds on race day.”
The significance of a third title is that it would tie Force with Hall of Famer Shirley Muldowney for the most championships by a woman in either of the NHRA’s two signature classes – Top Fuel and Funny Car. In fact, she and Muldowney are the only women to have prevailed in either of those categories.
The second youngest of John Force’s drag racing daughters and the only one who chose not to follow her father into a Funny Car class in which he has won a record 157 events and 16 championships, Brittany was rewarded with a Rookie-of-the-Year nod in 2013 although it would be three more years before she would win the first of her 17 “Wally” winner’s trophies at the 2016 Gatornationals.
After claiming the 2017 championship in a car prepared by Alan Johnson and Brian Husen, the graduate of Cal State-Fullerton earned her second with Grubnic, himself a former Gatornationals Top Fuel winner as a driver (2006). It has been Grubnic’s tuning expertise, in recent collaboration with Collins, that has made her car the acknowledged Monster of the Mission Series.
In addition to setting the current NHRA national records for both time and speed (3.623 seconds, 338.94 miles per hour), she raised the Gainesville Raceway speed record to its current 337.75 mph en route to her 2016 victory and is the record holder for time, speed, or both, at 11 other series’ venues.
At Bradenton, she qualified third and upended 2023 NHRA World Champ Doug Kalitta in the opening round before a narrow starting line disadvantage made her slightly quicker 3.752 a semifinal loser to eventual race winner Shawn Reed’s 3.768.
“We had one of the top-running cars and we should have turned on the win light in the semifinals,” she said. “I was a little slow off the light, but that’s something I can fix. I’m pumped with this new group (four new crew members joined the team this year) and excited to see what we can accomplish.”
Surprisingly, despite all her success, including the fact that she is one of only a handful of drivers to have started as many as 50 NHRA tour events from the No. 1 qualifying position, one thing she has not yet checked off her to-do list is a bonus race victory. Runner-up in 2022 and 2024 in what now is the Right Trailers All-Star Callout, she gets another shot this week in a race held in conjunction with the Gatornationals.
This story was originally published on March 5, 2025.
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