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NATIONAL HOT ROD ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCESeptember 9, 2015Jack BeckmanSCOTT SMITH: Jack Beckman is the driver of the Infinite Hero Dodge Charger. Beckman earned the No. 1 seed this season during the eliminations at the most recent U.S. Nationals event. He has six wins this season, one runner-up finish, five No. 1 qualifying positions, and this is his first time to be the No. 1 qualifier heading into the playoffs. He is also the 2012 Funny Car world champion. He won the most recent event here at Indy. Jack, you as well kind of talked about after the race on Monday that you couldn't quite put into words what winning Indy meant to you. Do you have a little bit clearer picture now after a couple days? JACK BECKMAN: Wow, interesting question. I think from outside people tend to think that driving a Fuel car is a rockstar style job. It probably is. What they don't realize is rockstars have regular jobs, too. They have houses that need fixing, spouses, kids. There's not that opportunity to just go off the reservation and party and celebrate. I was on an airplane at 6:40 Tuesday morning heading back home to my eight-year-old and four-year-old kids, my wife, right back into dad and husband mode. You didn't get that, Yes, we did it, type of feeling. Then again, that's kind of been my life since I've been a professional driver. I didn't bring the trophy home with me either. I was not about to put it in carry-on up in the overhead bin there. I'll get that in Las Vegas. It's starting to sink in that we won Indy, that we doubled up at Indy, swept Indy, new track records, top speed. But I think the final portion of that is going to be when that trophy -- it's so funny, I came home and my mother-in-law had rearranged the trophy shelf in the closet, and there's a post-it note that says 'Indy.' That's the space reserved for it. So when the trophy parks itself there permanently, that's when I put the exclamation point on it. SCOTT SMITH: Looking back at the season as a whole, when we left Pomona, it was a DNQ. You left Phoenix with a first-round loss. I think you were 15th in points. Did you in your wildest dreams think this is where you would be going into Charlotte? JACK BECKMAN: Well, I knew we were going to be in good shape. When we DNQed at Pomona, I was very surprised that I wasn't absolutely devastated. But I think I recognized that we lost the last session due to rain. It was an entirely new combination for Prock and Medlen. It was really a new combination for Cunningham, who stayed on from last year. We did kind of a hybrid. Jimmy brought some of his own technology over and stayed with a lot of the DSR parts. It was new for everybody in the crew chief area. I knew, and I said it back then, give us 20 runs to the finish line and we'll have this figured out. Our 18th run to the finish line was the final round in Charlotte and our first win of the year. From there it's just been fantastic. But, no, I didn't think we'd be first right now. I remember Saturday at Sonoma. They did an interview with Ron Capps and I. One of the questions asked was, Do you guys think you can catch Hagen for first in the points? We just came off a Denver win. Going into Denver, we were nine rounds behind Hagen's car. I was real skeptical about our chances for catching him. As I explained in that interview. I said, Not only would we have to be near perfect, but they would have to stumble. That team had not yet stumbled this year. I can't believe we went from a nine-round deficit to an eight-round surplus in that period of time. We gained 17 rounds on what was the best team out there, and I thought that would have been impossible. SCOTT SMITH: We'll take questions for Jack. Q. I did a little research. I found out what your name means in Indian. It's, He Who Walks on Water. JACK BECKMAN: I like that in the press room. Pretty surreal deal. Q. Every year for the last couple of years, we've always had to have the same talk, or we've always heard the same thing. Is Jack Beckman's ride secure for next year. I know you got tired of hearing that every year. I'm guessing you feel quite a bit more secure these days? JACK BECKMAN: Well, I mean, the bottom line is, it's all about money in these cars. It's all about funding. The issue that we were up against for the last few years is Valvoline paid us for 10 races. So that meant we were committed to running the car, but we were trying to fill in more than half a season's worth of funding. Don runs Schumacher racing like a business. That's why it's been successful over a 15-year period. The first thing you protect are your marquee teams, that had always been Army and NAPA. When Don needed to shore up the NAPA team in 2012, the only logical choice was take it from the lowest funded team, which was the car I drove. I never took it personally. A lot of people thought it was. I knew it was absolutely about business. This year through Terry Chandler, we have the funding, and Don proved that by bringing on Medlen and Prock. From my understanding, we will continue with Terry Chandler through next year. It's wonderful. This is the earliest in the season in my entire nitro career, in 10 years, the earliest I've ever known that I've had a job the next year. Q. When you started off the season, you mentioned, Give us 20 runs. Based off of the years that you'd had before that, was there really a reason to feel confident in all of that? JACK BECKMAN: 20 runs to the finish line. If you go out there and smoke the tires at the step, you typically don't learn a lot. I said, 20 runs to the finish line. Yes. When you look at a guy like Jimmy Prock, you have to know that his track record dictates that he may stumble, but he'll pick himself up and be at the head of the pack pretty soon. I knew Cunningham had enough knowledge of the way our stuff worked last year to help Jimmy assimilate into the DSR technology. I knew Jimmy and John were going to figure out the stuff they brought in and homogenate that with our stuff. Q. I see that you caught your stride in the beginning of the season. For the last third of the season, you have just really put things together. What has changed between starting off in Pomona and right now? JACK BECKMAN: Mastering the combination. I mentioned, Jimmy clearly had a great working combination over at John Force Racing. You look at last year, DSR won the championship with Hagen and Venables. They clearly had great working relationship with DSR technology. I believe that when Jimmy first came over, he wanted to adapt all of technology, wholesale changes to his car. As he started looking through our parts, our clutches, our super chargers, our cylinder heads, our camshafts, super heads, he came to the realization we had some good stuff, too. I believe he cherry picked. He made a couple changes or things he was more familiar with and kept the stuff he liked of ours. It just took a while to make everything work right. It's really about making the car predictable. Once it's predictable, it's consistent. Once it's consistent, you can step on it and pick up the performance a little bit. It's absolutely not one thing. I hope that the rest of the competition thinks it's one thing on the car, because what will happen is they'll change that one thing and realize they're still 3/100ths behind us. We did it with 15 different things. I hope it takes them six more races to catch up. Q. I read in 2012 it was a rebuilding season for you and that was the year you won the championship. Do you see any parallels between this season and that season? JACK BECKMAN: Gosh, I hope they end the same (laughter). Sure, yeah. The interesting thing is, if you look at the Infinite Hero team, I'm kind of the new guy. Jimmy, John and five of the crew guys all worked together last year. Chris Cunningham and I are the only two that were on that team at the end of last year. So it wasn't about them coming over to a new situation. I was kind of put in a new situation. And the same thing happened in 2012. When Don decided to switch Capps and my team and cars and trailers, I walked over to a different pit area. The only thing I had was my fire suit, helmet and body, body of the car, and we didn't even have a crew chief yet. He had not even decided who the crew chief was going to be. There was a bunch of pissed-off guys. They had been working for Ron Capps for years. The carpet got pulled out from under them and now they have a some guy named Jack Beckman as their driver. Boy oh boy, did we come and put things together. Todd came in, rallied the guys. He and Terry Snyder made all the right decisions up in the crew chief lounge. It was an absolute Cinderella story. The biggest difference between that and right now is if Jimmy Prock wins the championship, nobody is going to think that was a Cinderella story. Q. You're certainly on a roll this season. An understatement really. Winning streaks in sports come and go. They always carry that certain 'wow' factor. Can you maybe define what that is, what that means for you and your team? JACK BECKMAN: Yeah, you know, maybe an interesting parallel. It would have been interesting to talk to Joe DiMaggio 38 games into his hitting streak, which I think ended at 56 games or something. At some point you're just out there swinging the bat at the ball. After a certain number of consecutive hits, people start going, This guy is on to something, how long is it going to last? I think what happens is, when everything is going well, doing your job right is actually easier. I think the results can oftentimes drive the attitude. But I don't think you're ever going to start getting good results unless you have the right attitude to drive that. So I think that even when things were horrible in 2014, one final round, no wins, I still think I kept a good attitude. I did my best every time I could go up there. I came back with a smile even though sometimes I felt like crying. In some ways keeping my head above water helped prepare me for when things go well. I'm not beating my chest or pointing my finger at anybody. Like you said, these things can come and these things can go. I think the 11 of us are doing enough things correctly, I think we are blending with each other, the chemistry on the team are fantastic. There are no heroes on our team. There's 11 people that equally share in the tasks and should equally share in the results of this. I think because of that, I don't see any reason why this can't continue for six more races. Q. Your team smiles quite a bit right now, right? JACK BECKMAN: I thought you said 'smells quite a bit' (laughter). It's easy to be a great winner, have a great attitude when everything is going well. It's tough when you're struggling. We were struggling early this year. We went to Phoenix and tested after Pomona. Then we lost first round at Phoenix. We stayed in Phoenix and tested again. I'm going to tell you, the only car in the pit area, the only car running that day, we're eating pizza over lunchtime, we go out there and run a 395. That little piece of paper that said that number put the smiles back on the guys' faces. We had a talk. We're struggling right now, but let's never forget what we're capable of. Jimmy is a very motivating guy. It's not a crew, it's really a family. Before Indy and after Indy, we all got together at Jimmy's house. It's just so gratifying to see that people get along the way they get along. Because that's a home race for the crew, all the guys had their spouses or significant others there. It's a big family. It makes a difference on the racetrack. Q. You're having the stellar half of a season you want to have. The one thing that I notice constantly is it's no longer an amazing moment for you to run a 3.9 second run. What does that mean to you and feel like to you making that run? JACK BECKMAN: I think when Tim Wilkerson ran the 100th 3, and I believe it was at Brainerd, I think that's kind of the point where you can tell yourself, the novelty's kind or worn off on seeing a 3-second time slip on the scoreboard. Unless you get miserably hot race, or perhaps somebody does it at Denver, then it will be a big accomplishment. But you're right, I think Jimmy, John, Chris, the Infinite Hero crew, have changed the paradigm for Nitro Funny Car. What once was impossible has now kind of become routine. I thought at the beginning of this year if you did everything perfect and the conditions were right, you'll see a 3.93 out of a Funny Car. How many sub 3.93s have there been this year? More than a handful. What happens is at some point you're so flabbergasted, it's just not the same reaction to see that number crop up on the scoreboard. The other thing that we've done, our semifinal tracks this run, we went a 4.02. While nobody is going to look at the scoreboard and go, Oh, my God, a 4.02. We ran that on a 128 degree racetrack. That's impossible to do before this year. It's not that we're running these huge ETs. It's that we're running ETs on hot racetracks that are six/hundredths better than you would have expected last year. That Infinite Hero brain trust has reset the standard and benchmark for what's possible in a Funny Car. Q. What does that mean to you as a driver when you know even though the temperatures are up, that you can still run fast or as fast as you could run when conditions used to be perfect? JACK BECKMAN: I think my realization on that is that as you go faster under similar conditions, relative to what you did last year, logic would dictate that you're getting closer to that tipping point, that you're balancing more on the razor's edge. I realize that it is so critical to be smooth on that car. The first qualifying run we made at Indy, I think I oversteered it to try to keep it in the groove, and that unloads one tire a little more than the other as the weight transfers to the side. You're seeing lateral Gs. The car didn't like it. It smoked the tires. Ron Capps will tell you the same thing about the night run out there. It's just so much more critical. The things we've done to make these cars accelerate harder have also made them more difficult to drive. So it's really tightened up that window for the drivers on trying to be perfect, manage the car, and yet not overcorrect when necessary. Q. After this historic win for you, are you going to do anything special for her (indiscernible)? JACK BECKMAN: After winning Indy? What Anthony is talking about, when you win a race, you get a race-winning jacket. I hadn't won in 55 races. There was no question in my mind that if we won, no guarantee we were going to win one, that that jacket was going to Terry Chandler. Wouldn't have a job this year if it wasn't for her. The funny thing is Terry doesn't want you to do anything for her. Her greatest joy, tell you a quick story, on our Saturday night qualifying run, I took a six-year-old boy and his father -- the boy's name is Jordan and he has muscular dystrophy. He has the worst type of muscular dystrophy and he doesn't have a long life expectancy. I met his parents through some of the firefighters that worked at the track. They had done a benefit for him. Well, I walked Terry and her husband Doug over to our tow vehicle before we ran that night and introduced them. Obviously with the Make-a-Wish deal, you know Terry cares about the children as much as she cares about the veterans. She has a foundation to help kids. All I wanted to do was introduce him to her. She loves things like that. She's going to help the family out. She doesn't want any thanks. Her thanks is being able to do something for that family. Q. The Infinite Hero program, have you seen an increase in money for coins? JACK BECKMAN: Yeah, great question. My God, is it interesting. The faster your car runs, the more rounds you win, the line gets deeper and deeper to sell these challenge coins. I take 15 every run, lately I've had to bring 25 on many run simply because we sell out. I don't ever want to sell out because every coin is worth $100 towards helping veterans coming back with physical or mental or brain injuries. The Western Swing, to give you guys an example, a good race would have been 48 to 50 coins, so $5,000. I did over 300 coins on the Western Swing alone. So we averaged $10,000 a race over those races. I didn't get the total from Indy, but it's got to be way up there, as well. I think we just passed $120,000 mark for coin sales. That's strictly NHRA fans showing up at the ropes or going online at Infinite Hero and making that donation. That represents 1200 coins that I've taken down the drag strip this year. Way above my expectations. And we're not done yet. Q. Following up on one of the questions you answered about Jimmy Prock cherry-picking combination and parts. Would you say that you're about as close as there is to a John Force, Don Schumacher combined Funny Car? And has Jimmy been willing to share any of that information with other teams? JACK BECKMAN: Yes and yes. It's an open-door policy in our lounge. I hope that changes now that we go into the Countdown. Here is the funny thing. Don Schumacher has four Funny Cars. If I'm driving the one that's struggling, I want the best car to share all their information with me. If I'm driving the one that's excelling, I want to wait three months and share all the information with the other teams. It's an absolute open-door policy. Don is very savvy about letting the crew chiefs do their own thing and it will lead them down different paths. He's also smart enough to know when it's time to intervene. It's amazing how different the philosophies are amongst the four teams and how we approach running the car. But I think that the other three crew chiefs have made us a little better and I think Jimmy has made the other three cars a little better. SCOTT SMITH: Jack, we'll let you get back to your afternoon. Thank you very much for taking time out of your day to join us. JACK BECKMAN: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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