Take 5 With Ron Capps
Though Ron Capps is the 2016 NHRA Funny Car champion, we took the opportunity to ask him questions we’ve wanted to ask for years, unrelated to this, about his first championship. So we passed on asking the veteran Top Fuel and Funny Car driver about how it finally feels being champion or things about his numerous bridesmaid seasons. Instead we asked a number of questions where he said, “Gee, I should have an immediate answer, but I don’t,” or, “No one has asked me that before.” We made Capps dig down a bit to find out what it’s really like to drive one of these violent, unpredictable rockets we all love watching.
HR] Is there pressure for wins to keep your seat?
RC] Yeah, and for me I’m in a situation that’s unique because I’ve never had to bring any money for my seat, and that’s going back to Don Prudhomme and then Schumacher with the Napa car. As in every motorsport, especially NASCAR and IndyCar, it’s big, and it’s now happening more in drag racing, where it’s common for someone to bring a million-dollar check and get a ride. I came up as a crewmember wanting to drive, so I came up a little differently, but I wake up every single morning whether there’s a race or not with that fear, so that drives me and keeps me successful and doing what I’ve been doing. I have to feel that way, and every time I stage and look over in the other lane, I have to look at it like they’re trying to take money out of my pocket, so that’s always in the back of my head.
HR] Has it happened to you?
RC] I know there have been people that have tried to acquire my ride, but the cool thing is that Don Schumacher has been very vocal to me about that. You see I still drive like I did with Roger Primm in my rookie year and he ran that out of his pocket and was looking for a sponsor. I knew we had the best parts in the business, but we didn’t have very many of them. I learned to manage the equipment and know when to shut the car off, and I still drive that way. Both Don Schumacher and Don Prudhomme have told me point blank that they would rather pay the extra money knowing I’m in the seat than to take in a million dollars for someone that can’t drive, and I had a lot of drivers try to get my seat, especially when I drove for Prudhomme. Plus, you also have to represent the sponsors and the owners themselves. The greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten is that the owners never have to worry representing them whether I’m at some function or dinner giving a speech. It’s a huge relief for an owner and sponsor. The sponsors for both Schumacher and Prudhomme have it written in their contracts that I be in the seat, which is good for both ends. Anyone that has the guts or is brave enough can drive one of these things, but the good drivers know when to shut it off, and that’s what owners look at.
HR] You’re 51. When will it be time to quit racing?
RC] John Force. Every Friday before qualifying he comes up on his scooter and finds me and says, “Capsi, ain’t this great driving a Funny Car,” and we have this conversation and it’s like he’s 21 years old and it’s his first year driving. He’s got more enthusiasm than any driver I see. There are rookie drivers that don’t have the enthusiasm he has or the appreciation for what we get to do, and I have it—I don’t have to worry about that, but he’s a reminder every weekend and he’s 67. He’s one of the toughest guys I race and he just beat me on a holeshot. I work out and am in good shape and feel like I’m 25. I can’t believe I’m 51, but my reaction times are good. I would say Don Prudhomme knew when to get out and he never thought about getting back in. He told me once when you don’t feel like getting into one of these things, then it’s time to get out. I don’t know how to answer that other than what I’ve said.
HR] You’ve driven both Top Fuel and Funny Cars. Which do you prefer to drive?
RC] Without a doubt, the Funny Car—it’s more exciting to drive. The Top Fuel car kicks you in the butt, has more g-forces, moves harder, and accelerates much quicker earlier in the run, but the Funny Car is the most unnerving. I’ve driven dirt and NASCAR, Sprint Cars, and road-raced just a lot of cool cars like Formula cars, but there’s nothing on the planet like a fuel Funny Car; it’s unnerving, unpredictable—when you step on the pedal of a Funny Car, you don’t know where it’s going to go. It’s evil-handling, they’re not made to handle good, and yet we get to go 0 to 3.8 seconds at 330 mph and you can’t see very well locked up in this body. So without a doubt, I think that FC is much more exciting to drive.
HR] Will the car telegraph to you before getting out of shape or are you reacting?
RC] You’re reacting mostly. We have swept-back headers now that really make the front end light and put it in the driver’s hands more than ever. They were difficult to drive before, and now it’s even so much more exciting after a run that it’s hard to explain. I’ve driven a lot of nostalgia cars recently like Del Worsham’s Blue Max and LA Hooker, and those cars lack the downforce we have now, and the front ends are light and you shift them like you did in the 1970s, and that’s how our cars are now. They don’t give you a lot of warning and things happen fast, so if you wait too long to do something it can hurt a lot of people. You know when you sit on a barstool and you lean back a little and you think you’re going to fall, but you catch yourself and for that split second your stomach goes into your throat? That’s the feeling it is for 3.8 seconds. You don’t know what’s going to happen and you’re on the edge.
HR] Are you chasing that feeling?
RC] You do not enjoy the runs—not any of the 3.8 seconds. You’ve got sponsor pressures and the owner standing behind you and everyone that has worked on this thing for the last few hours and days, and it’s your car not to mess up. You don’t enjoy the run, but when the chutes pop and you know they’re out, then you reflect on that run and think it’s awesome—or that was crazy, or what did I just do? You enjoy it in that shutdown area. You fight for your life to keep the car straight and do everything right in a split second.
HR] How different is it from driving a Top Fuel dragster?
RC] When you’re in a Top Fuel car, you feel with your butt and it’s trying to drive right up your ass and catapult you, basically. But like in the old days with the Top Fuel cars, you sat over the rear end, you can feel it, and that’s why the drivers were so good. Recently, I went back into Tony Schumacher’s dragster because he couldn’t test that day and I wanted to re-up my license in Top Fuel anyway, and I made a run that was right at the record, but I hadn’t been in a dragster in a while and was used to the Funny Car. I was all over the track and they could read “Army” painted on each side of the dragster all the way down. I was being pushed from behind and so far ahead that it freaked me out. I was just trying to point the car, but in the Funny Car you’re over the rear end and it’s like a Sprint Car on dirt—you drive with the throttle to steer.
HR] Every driver has a regimen or routine they follow for every run. What’s yours?
RC] You have the tow vehicle in the staging lanes and I get dressed the same way every time outside the tow vehicle, and they put on the neck and head device. Then I walk around the car and come in the left side, but I check my parachute cables and check the spoiler. Then I get in and ease into it, and getting into a Funny Car isn’t easy. Two guys buckle me into the car and then gloves, left hand first, that they put on me after I get buckled in. It’s not any luck thing that I do, it’s routine. Once I’m all in, I can hear three or four cars paired ahead of us, but it’s quiet and I think about anything and everything that could go wrong because I’ve been through about anything that can go wrong in the past. So I think about what I’ll do if it does go wrong—what I’ll shut off first and the order that I was taught. Then I start thinking about the positive things, that it’s going to make a record run and that I’ll be the number one qualifier tonight. Then how good it’s going to run, and I do that every run because it’s so split-second that you have to have it ready to go in your brain. That’s my ritual. I have a checklist. I took my 20-year-old daughter up to Fontana to get her Super Comp license about a month ago and I told her, “Look, I’ve been driving 20 years and I do the same checklist in my car before every run—how we start the car, the procedure for turning the fuel pump on, exactly how I do the burnout, flipping the oxygen air into my helmet, then checking the reverse lever, checking the fuel lever, then checking the air over and over—I probably do it 20 times,” so that’s what I told her. It’s not because you don’t know if you’re going to be good enough, it’s because you have to do everything in an order exactly the same. If something is not right and Rahn Tobler, my crew chief, starts it and does something different it throws everybody off. It’s funny how everything flows together.
HR] In 2014 you were involved in a massive explosion where something from the car hit you during the explosion. Do you feel safe in a Funny Car?
RC] I feel safer. Right after that, Rahn Tobler and Don Schumacher went to work with our fab shop and had them build a cover in front of me—it used to just cover my hands in case of fire, but now that cover is almost eye level. That helmet is in my son’s room; something came back and knocked me out, and thankfully [we had] all of the safety implementations they put in a few years ago, so now if the body blows off it automatically pops both chutes and shuts the fuel off. There’s a beam in the shutdown area that does that. So it did that, otherwise I would have been at a high rate of speed and been off into the sand trap and net and probably been hurt or killed. I don’t know whether it was a piece of the body or maybe the supercharger came back and hit me, but now with the cover up, it will deflect whatever is coming back at me, so it’s much better.
HR] Is there something you’d like to see changed to improve handling or safety?
RC] I wish there could be less downforce on these cars and give more control back to the driver. I love driving Funny Cars in nostalgia drag racing because it’s two-speed, old-school bodies, no side windows and no rear spoilers per se, no long nose, no ground effects, and they drive that way—and I love driving them. You have to listen to the car, there’s no computer in a lot of them. I have to tell the crew chief how it felt and then they have to make a decision based on that. Nowadays they don’t talk to a lot of the drivers because they have computers. I got into a little bit of heat last year because I was asked the same question, and I said I wish they would do a couple of races where they took the computers off and then we’d see who’s the best crew chief—drivers would have to give feedback. There’s a lot of crew chiefs that wouldn’t know what to do now because they only look at the readouts, so that’s why I’ve been lucky to drive for the Ace, Tim Richards, Roland Leong. Roland was my first crew chief—he’s old school, he’d look at the plugs and bearings. Nostalgia Funny Cars are so much fun because they move all over and have no downforce; you have to drive them and then you have to shift them. I miss super-long burnouts, too; I’m not even allowed to do a long burnout now because we’ll get the tires hot. We have infrared to tell us how hot the tire is after a burnout, so the super-long burnouts are gone. The fans love them and we like to do them, but you don’t do them anymore. The mayhem and shifting—it’s so much fun. If you take the rear spoilers off and get rid of the downforce, we won’t run as fast, but it would look more like the car that you go to the dealer and buy. See, it got out of control all of these years because guys like Dale Armstrong would test something, go into the wind tunnel, and come out with something that wasn’t in the rulebook. So they started making rules around the crew chiefs that were really like mad scientists—they were unbelievable. That’s why I love it so much. NHRA didn’t let it get this way, they were just trying to keep up and corral it as it was happening. But before you knew it, you had these cars with great, big spoilers and swoopy designs.
HR] And no limits to equipment?
RC] If they put a limit on superchargers and on cubic inches, all that will do is—with the bodies we have now—they just become slot cars; they’ll be so predictable to drive that almost anyone will be able to drive them. Right now they are at the edge of out of control, and that’s why they’re awesome. Slowing them down mechanically by compression or supercharger or nitro limits with the bodies we have now, the cars will just go right down the track. Be nice when you write this—help me out a little bit.
HR] Are these multi-car teams, one of which you drive for, really good for the future of professional drag racing?
RC] They’re not healthy for the sport, and now we see short fields. You see flashes of brilliance with guys like Tim Wilkerson, and I love that guy, and if we don’t win I love seeing him win because he’s a throwback and a single-car team. With that said, it’s tough because I was that kid in the stands that rooted for the little guy over the big sponsored teams, and now I’m that big sponsored car, so I understand that from a fan’s point. But when the potential sponsors come around and they’re walked around by the NHRA or an agent, and they come to teams that might need a sponsor and they’ll introduce them and then show them how they can be a good representative of their brand and be the best car for that sponsor, at the end of the day there’s a reason that Don, Kalitta, or Force have these sponsors. I’m not saying this to rip on the single-car teams, but there’s a lot that comes with sponsoring a big team, and it just builds, and then you have these other great sponsors that can join. The toughest cars I race are my teammates because I know their cars will be the same or better than my own car because technology is shared and they are very similar. Peter Clifford is trying to get the costs down by putting moratoriums on the superchargers—we can’t have the cylinder head or supercharger of the week like we used to, where there was a wazoo supercharger and then everybody had to go out and buy one, then there was a new one a month later, so it became out of control and only the big sponsored teams could afford it. Wilkerson or Cruz can run as good or better than we can, and we’ve seen them run better than us sometimes. They have to be able to afford to keep doing what they are doing. If they put a moratorium on spending, it will help these teams.
HR] What was your most important win to you and why?
RC] My rookie year in Roger Primm’s car in Seattle was probably my most important. I wore a firesuit with patches my mom sewed on and we had no sponsor, and we beat every big dog: Bernstein and then Don’s car in the final. We shouldn’t have won the race, but we ran as good or better than everyone else and we won, and then on top of that I was a rookie and that never happens.
Quick Facts
The Much-Deserved Victor
– Ron’s brother, Jon Capps, is a part-time Funny Car driver.
– Ron has been a Funny Car bridesmaid in 1998, 2000, 2005, and 2012.
– Ron’s best elapsed time is 3.885 seconds at Pomona in 2015.
– Ron says his first race was from inside his mother’s belly before he was born.
– Ron’s first Top Fuel ride was in Roger Primm’s dragster in 1995, winning the Atlanta race in his rookie season.
The post HOT ROD Interview: 2016 Funny Car Champion Ron Capps appeared first on Hot Rod Network.