Family aspect joins Force, Lucas Oil in partnership
Castrol leaves, Lucas arrives as team's sponsor.
Photo by: NHRA
NHRA drag racing is a true family sport. A glance around the paddocks of any of the 24 Mello Yello Drag Racing Series professional and the multitude of Lucas Oil Sportsman amateur events held around the United States attests to that factoid.
Parents and children are always welcome in the NHRA pits where drag racers interact with the public regularly, sharing tips on how they prepare, drive and promote their Top Fuel, Funny Car, Pro Stock and Pro Stock Motorcycle entries. The interaction is natural, normal and relatively unique to this form of motorsport.
Two of the more prominent families engaged in professional drag racing are the Force family, where patriarch John Force presides over four entries for himself, daughter Courtney and son-in-law Robert Hight in Funny Car, while daughter Brittany goes her own way with a Top Fuel dragster. Well, there’s always going to be one member of every family that wants to do something different, right?
Lucas family
At the other end of the spectrum is the Lucas family, whose Lucas Oil products are in use throughout the NHRA paddock and where Forrest and Charlotte Lucas promote their wares by sponsoring Richie Crampton’s Top Fuel dragster and occasionally their son Morgan Lucas competes in Top Fuel as well - he’s concentrating on the business side these days and starting his own family - as well as lending the Lucas family name throughout the paddock for partnerships in many different professional and amateur categories.
Next year these two big racing families will unite, as John Force Racing (JFR) gets lubricated by Lucas Oil products. John Force Racing ended a 29-year relationship with Castrol after the 50th annual Auto Club Finals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona. Just prior to the two final qualifying sessions on Saturday, John Force Racing and Lucas Oil announced that all four JFR entries will carry the Lucas Oil brand prominently on all of its race cars.
As Force so aptly put it, “Castrol will always be a part of our history but Lucas Oil is our future.”
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