He used to go to the boss all the time, full to the top with questions. What’s it like, John? How do 8,000 horses feel, right before you turn them loose? What goes through your mind in those four seconds of sound and fury and 300 mph G-forces?
Robert Hight wouldn’t give John Force a minute’s peace.
Now he doesn’t give him a moment’s respite.
Now he’s not only the voice in Force’s ear but the hair trigger in the next lane over, waiting to beat the master off the line and unleash his own four seconds of sound and fury. So you can add that thread to this tangled web, this labyrinthine tale of family and business and dreams deferred and dreams come true, finally, with just a pinch of vindication to sweeten the whole.
Begin with this, speaking of vindication: Robert Hight is the reigning NHRA Full Throttle Funny Car world champion.
He won it after snatching the 10th and final spot in the Countdown To 1 playoffs at the end of the 2009 season, then winning three of four races in the final rounds. Some people thought the whole thing was a crock, because Hight hadn’t won a meet all season and thought he only got in because Force, a 14-time Funny Car champ, deliberately lost in the last one of the year to help Hight reach the playoffs.
Force, after all, is Hight’s boss. He’s also his father-in-law; Hight is married to Force’s oldest daughter, Adria. And it was Hight’s sister-in-law, Ashley Force Hood, whom Hight beat in Las Vegas to nail down the Countdown title.
So, chortle-chortle, hyuck-hyuck, of course he won. Of course.
What about that, Robert?
“Well, it was more relief that we won, actually,” says Hight, who’ll be going for his fifth win of 2010 this weekend at the 56th annual Mac Tools U.S. Nationals at O’Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis.
“I believe we’d proved ourselves even up to last year,” he said. “My second year I finished No. 2 in points. My third year we were No. 2 in points. And then in 2007, had we not lost our teammate Eric Medlen (who was killed in a crash), I believe we would have won the championship.
“So I believed we had proved ourselves before. But also as a racer and individual, you start thinking when you finish second so many times maybe you don’t have what it takes to be a champion.”
That he had what it takes to be a racer, he never had a doubt. From the time he first saw a Funny Car go screaming down a quarter-mile of asphalt, he knew that’s what he wanted to do; problem was, wanting and doing are two different things. And so he went to work for Force as a clutch man, peppered him with questions, peppered him with more questions once Medlen, a fellow crewman, got his chance to drive.
“I never did come out and say I wanted to drive,” Hight recalls. “But just planting the seed all the time, asking questions … He just never put two and two together that I wanted to drive.”
Once Medlen got his shot, though, Hight finally acted. Went through Frank Hawley’s school. Earned his license in Topeka, Kan., in 2004. Landed a sponsor, the Auto Club of California, which unlocked the door for him the way sponsorship unlocks the door for everyone these days – as his father-in-law told him the day he earned his license.
“This doesn’t meaning anything,” Force said. “Just because you’re my son-in-law doesn’t mean anything. We have to be able to sell you to the sponsors.’ ”
They did. And Hight earned the NHRA’s top rookie award in 2005. Then he finished second to Force in 2006. And he came to Indianapolis 30 points behind his father-in-law in the Funny Car points.
“We are one big team,” Hight says. “The Funny Car class is so tight that’s the only way you’re going to win is to stick together.”
No question(s) about it.
