Photography: John Force Racing / Gary Nastase / Auto Imagery
SONOMA, Calif. (July 25, 2025) – On one of her favorite racetracks, in what always is one of the season’s most highly anticipated Friday night qualifying sessions, two-time Top Fuel World Champion Brittany Force unleashed the monster in her Monster Energy dragster, re-setting her own national speed record for the second consecutive week and claiming the provisional No. 1 starting position for Sunday’s 37th NHRA Sonoma Nationals.
On a 70-degree racetrack with air temperatures in the 50s, the 39-year-old daughter of 16-time Funny Car Champion John Force stopped the timers in a track record 3.645 seconds at an NHRA national record 343.16 miles per hour, the fastest speed ever achieved in motor racing. Her speed at 660 feet was a jaw-dropping 304.94 mph.
“I have to credit (crew chiefs) David Grubnic and John Collins and the whole team,” Brittany said of the milestone. “I’m so proud of them. This is incredible. On that run, it actually moved around a little and I thought about taking my foot out of it for a second and then I said, ‘No, I can get it there.’
“I couldn’t hear anything on my radio and then they repeated the 343 speed and I thought they were joking,” said the 18-time pro tour winner. “I’m so pumped and so excited to do this in front of all the fans here.”
For the 2013 NHRA Rookie-of-the-Year, it was the third time this season she has eclipsed her own national speed record and Sonoma Raceway is the fourth different track on which she has broken the 340 barrier.
After setting the record at ZMax Dragway in Charlotte, N.C., last April when she crossed the stripe at 341.59 mph, she reached 341.42 mph in winning the New England Nationals at Epping, N.H., on June 1 and then raced beyond 340 three times last week in Seattle where her 341.85 mph charge stood as the national standard for exactly five days.
“This is still settling in,” said the 2022 Sonoma Nationals winner. “We’ve run great mile per hour lately, but our goal is always elapsed time, not mile per hour, but to jump over 342 and go right to 343, I still can’t believe we did it. We’ve worked hard to get here but we’ve got a cleaner, more consistent package than we’ve had.”
Her Friday night performance broke Doug Kalitta’s track ET record (3.649) and obliterated the track speed record she set Friday afternoon (338.94 mph).
After going 1-2 in the afternoon session, neither Austin Prock nor Jack Beckman was able to capitalize on the prime conditions that prevailed Friday night and, as a result, wound up fourth and fifth in the provisional order at 3.891 and 3.895 seconds, respectively.
In the cool of Friday evening, when Matt Hagan surged to No. 1 at 3.861 seconds at 332.94 mph, Prock and his national record-holding Cornwell Tools Chevy SS slowed to 5.014 seconds at 185.69 mph and Beckman to 8.197 at only 83.53 mph in his PEAK Antifreeze and Coolant Chevy SS.
“Difficult end of the day,” Prock said of his Friday evening result, “but we made a nice run the first session. We made some big changes to this race car over the last few days to try and get it to run better in the cooler conditions.
“It was really close to making it down the racetrack on the second run,” said the reigning series champ and current point leader, “but it just wasn’t our night. So, we’ll regroup and try again tomorrow. I think conditions will be great. We’ll be able to run close to a 3.86 if we really have our stuff together. So maybe we can squeak one out.”
Beckman echoed those sentiments.
“Ups and downs of Friday,” he said. “We unloaded on the first qualifying run and made the second quickest run of the session (and) we thought we were making the right adjustments (for Q2), but we just weren’t aggressive enough.
“So, we looked back at the notes,” said the 2015 Sonoma winner, “and we think we’re starting to see a pattern with missing it by not being aggressive enough. So, the crew chiefs are going to dig in a little bit further and this might be something that opens that door and leads us down the right pathway to what this car needs to get it back in the sweet spot.
“We just have not been in the middle of our sweet spot the last couple of races,” admitted the 2012 Funny Car World Champion. “We’re already fast, we just need to get our consistency back.”
