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Rick talks with NHRA drag racer, Steve Torrence at the massive SEMA Show in Las Vegas.
Steve and his dad race for the same team and he’s still in contention for the NHRA title with one race remaining.
The most dominant Top Fuel Driver of this decade
Steve Torrence’s rise to the pinnacle of drag racing success is one of the great Horatio Alger moments in American motorsports.
Diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma as a teenager, he underwent months of radiation and chemotherapy treatment before emerging cancer free and ready to make the most of his second chance. The experience, which he considers “the biggest race I’ve ever won,” completely changed his perspective, spawning the laser focus that fueled his later success both on and off the track.
After losing the 2017 NHRA Top Fuel championship on the final day of the season, an outcome likely sealed weeks earlier when his primary race car was destroyed in a 300-mph crash at the Texas Motorplex outside Dallas, he left nothing to chance the following season when he became the first and only driver in any racing discipline to sweep all the events comprising NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship.
Nevertheless, that proved to be only the beginning for the talented Texan, who remains the only driver ever to have won NHRA series championships in both the Fuel and Alcohol categories. Thirteen years before he hoisted that first Top Fuel Champion’s trophy, he won the Lucas Oil Top Alcohol dragster title by reaching the final round in 11 of 13 starts while posting a 37-4 elimination record.
He repeated as Top Fuel Champion in 2019, won yet again in a 2020 season abbreviated by the COVID-19 pandemic and made it four straight in 2021.
In winning 11 of 20 races during that 2021 campaign, the one-time black belt in taekwondo became just the fourth driver in NHRA pro racing history to secure as many as four consecutive championships, joining Don Prudhomme, Kenny Bernstein, John Force, Lee Shepherd, Bob Glidden and fellow Top Fuel driver Tony Schumacher.
Rick talks to Steve about all that, new technology and more!
