YORBA LINDA, Calif. — The stone mansion at the top of the highest hill in town is owned by John Force, 16-time National Hot Rod Association champion.
It has eight bedrooms, a gym, library, sauna, formal living room with a baby grand piano, wine cellar, several fireplaces and an attached apartment for visitors — 17,050 square feet. Outside, the swimming pool comes with a hot tub, several waterfalls, a bubbling fountain and a small mountain featuring a waterslide.
The house has wide and long views in all directions — to Catalina and the Pacific Ocean and, at night, of the Disneyland fireworks to the southwest.
Who lives here? Force, 66, who continues to be the firebrand and focal point of the NHRA, and his wife, Laurie, 65. And they’re on the road much of the year, either racing or making the promotional and sponsor appearances that make the racing possible.
For Force, a man who rose from poverty to become one of international motor sports’ biggest figures, it’s an uncomfortable extravagance, one that’s impossible to hide.
“It’s almost embarrassing,” Force told USA TODAY Sports of the home that cost more than $10 million to build. “I’ve worked hard, and people say I’ve earned it. But it just seems like a waste. A big, dumb house. I never had nothing growing up. If my dad came back and saw this house, he’d get a stick and whip me.”
Force’s first house was a camping trailer his father, Harold, towed from job to job along the West Coast. The family — Harold, John’s mother Betty Ruth and six children — moved from trailer park to logging camp to migrant farm seeking work.
“It was picking berries up and down the California coast and hauling logs in the camps to the north,” Force said.
Family members tell the story of the Force parents picking berries and turning John, a toddler, loose in the fields while they worked. They tied a balloon to him so he could be located easily. It was a great plan until the balloon burst.
“My kids today don’t even believe those stories,” Force said. “They don’t even know what a TV dinner is. I took them to that trailer house, and they couldn’t believe we all lived in it. Now we have televisions with screens bigger than the front window in that trailer.”
Dreamer becomes a racer
As a child, Force dreamed of bigger things. His eyes turned toward racing.
“My father always told me, ‘You’re the dumbest kid I’ve got. You’re a dreamer, and you gotta quit dreaming. You’re never going to be Don Prudhomme or Richard Petty,’ ” he said.
Force was born in Bell Gardens, Calif., about 30 minutes from Yorba Linda, but home was mostly on the road — the same as today. He parked in one place long enough to play high school football, and, as quarterback, he led his team to a record quite unlike the one he would splash across the NHRA. His high school team never won a game.
Drag racing, fortuitously, became his thing and he joined the tour full-time in 1983.
PHOTOS: At home with the Force family
He raced for year after year with little money, buying — or bumming — used parts, piecing together old cars that often never made it past the starting line. Laurie, his second wife (a first high-school marriage ended not long after the birth of his first child, daughter Adria) was a dedicated partner, mixing race fuel, making bologna sandwiches, keeping the team rolling when the dollars ran low.
Finally, Force broke through, winning an NHRA event in 1987. The victories soon came easier, and, in 1990, he won his first Funny Car title. John Force Racing became a top team in the sport, and Force scored a remarkable 10 straight Funny Car titles from 1993 to 2002, gaining fame as a master storyteller and fan favorite along the way.
Sponsors loved him. He was not only a winner but also a bombastic force of nature. In a sport in which some drivers answer questions but say little, Force was the opposite.
Being John Force became a full-time job. And with that came issues, leading to Force’s second unusual housing situation.
'I wasn't a very good person'
By the time of the first championship in 1990, the Forces had three daughters together (Ashley, Brittany and Courtney) and a nice home in Yorba Linda in the shadow of the mountain they eventually would own. It was along a tree-lined street in town near Force’s shop.
For Laurie Force, it was a house but not a home.
John Force found racing to be an all-consuming animal, one that sent him on the highest of highs but dropped him to lows he couldn’t handle without alcohol or conflict — often both.
“I went to bed drinking,” Force said. “I almost felt like I was getting close to being an alcoholic. I’d do my job, but I was drinking. I was gone, always gone. I saw my children, but I missed so many things. If I did come home, I was at the shop until 2 in the morning.
“My wife tells me some of the things I did, and I tell her I don’t remember. She says, ‘That’s because you were drinking.’ That stuff will take over your life.”
Force remembers a tense phone conversation with a crew member sending him into a fury, and that sent his fist into the wall near the phone. It wasn’t the only time.
“We had holes punched in the walls that I covered up with Little Mermaid posters,” Laurie Force said. “They were all over the house. It wasn’t a decorating statement. It was because, ‘Why fix it? He’ll do it again in a week.’ ”
It finally became too much.
During Christmas week in 2000, Laurie loaded her husband’s clothing and other essentials into trash bags, tied them with red bows and left them in front of the house, awaiting his return from an unannounced trip.
“It had really gotten over the top,” she said. “Ashley was in college, and he got mad at her one day and gave her an 8:30 curfew. I could never side with him because I thought he was always wrong. We all were doing battle with him. It was devastating for me and the girls.
“... I remember thinking I wouldn’t let him back in the house until the kids were grown and gone.”
The Forces owned a condominium on a nearby lake — Force calls it the boathouse, and he moved there. The Forces would live apart for the next 10 years, although they often went to dinner together and maintained a relationship of sorts.
“I wasn’t a very good person,” Force said. “I always loved my family. I just failed them. That’s why I can’t fail them again.”
Racing is a family affair
When — or if — he stops driving, Force probably will remain the big gun in John Force Racing, the dynamo who brings in the sponsors. It’s a task he’s unlikely to willingly give up, in part because he remembers what life was like on the other side of the mountain.
“You can’t explain poverty,” he said. “It’s built-in. I live in fear. The sky is falling. I wake up every day, and I’ve got to work. And I love it.”
The work continues because Force is responsible for a web of family ties at John Force Racing. Courtney, 27, races in Funny Car and Brittany, 29, in Top Fuel. Ashley, 33, was a racer and winner in Funny Car before retiring from driving to have two children (Jacob, 4 and Noah, 2). She is JFR’s vice president. Adria is JFR’s chief financial officer, and Robert Hight (her husband, although they’re separated) is the team president and a Funny Car driver.
And there is another generation to consider. Autumn, Robert and Adria’s 11-year-old daughter, competes in Junior Dragster events, and only an unlikely detour will keep Ashley’s youngsters from being involved in the sport. Their dad, Danny, is Courtney’s crew chief, and the two boys enjoy “staging” diecast dragsters on the big table in the den of the Force house. They also “repair” their mom’s shopping cart on visits to the supermarket.
Force, the ultimate machismo guy, stood in awe — although with a bit of confusion — as he welcomed daughter after daughter after daughter after daughter into the world.
“I wanted sons,” he said. “I wanted them to play football. I had Adria, and then Laurie and I had our first, Ashley. Then I began to heat up my underwear. Didn’t work. A girl. Then another.
“I never got to name one kid. I had boy names all ready – Axle, Spartacus, Bubba. Maybe they’ll let me name the cat we’re getting.
“It never crossed my mind that they would be drivers. Then they start racing, and they’re good. They love it. To watch them cry when they win and say, ‘I did it, Dad,’ that’s something.”
Now, in clear contrast to the rocky days, the extended Force family is together. When they aren’t on the road, they rendezvous at the big house. It’s an easy commute for everyone. Ashley and Danny live in the former Force house at the bottom of the hill, and Courtney and Brittany live in a condominium complex 10 minutes away.
And Force is at the center of it all, both at home and at the nearby shop (although JFR’s main shop is in Brownsburg, Ind., the administrative offices and the Force museum are in Yorba Linda). Team members — there are 115 total at the two sites — say he doesn’t dabble in anything but rather is elbows deep into everything, dealing with such minutiae as the design of newspaper ads and the placement of rear license plates on the team’s fleet of transport trucks.
He’s always plotting and planning. Last year, he came up with an idea to honor retiring NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon by putting Gordon’s familiar paint job on the Force Funny Car. There were discussions within the Force team structure about the legal issues and sponsor conflicts that might erupt, but Force listened and finally said, “Doesn’t matter. Let’s do it.”
Virtually the only time Force is quiet — other than during a few hours of sleep each night — is in a movie theater. Cinema is his lone — and a frequent — escape. There he eats popcorn double-soaked in butter and “finds my heroes,” he said.
“Dad is always here, and he’s in everyone’s business,” Courtney said. “He’s always overprotective, but we’re in a family business, and that’s how he is all the time. Even at Christmas dinner, he doesn’t know how to not talk racing. But we’re all like that. We try to talk about something else, but we all stare at each other.”
PHOTOS: Brittany Force's NHRA career
