“Fast Jack” Beckman, who came out of retirement last season to drive John Force’s PEAK Antifreeze and Coolant Chevrolet SS to a second-place points finish behind teammate Austin Prock, relishes the fact that he and his team are partnered this week with HendrickCars.com at the 15th NHRA 4-Wide Nationals at ZMax Dragway.
“Rick Hendrick is a high-performance man in every sense,” Beckman said of the CEO of Hendrick Automotive Group and founder of Hendrick Motorsports. “Whatever he does, it’s 100% and it’s successful. Partnering with him at ZMax is a racer’s dream.
“With Brittany’s dragster (and reigning NHRA Pro Stock Champion Greg Anderson’s Chevy) also sporting HendrickCars.com this week, there is a very realistic possibility of giving ‘Mr. H’ a triple win,” said the two-time World Champion and 36-time Funny Car tour winner. “Our PEAK Squad is definitely up for the challenge!
“I’m looking forward to sharing some stories with him,” Beckman said of the man whose NASCAR team has won a record 315 Cup races and 14 championships. “He’s had drag boats and has been involved in drag racing for many years. This stuff is in his DNA. What you find out is, car people are car people. When you boil it down, we all are cut from the same cloth.”
Coming off a disappointing first-round exit in the most recent event in the 20-race Mission Foods series, Beckman is hoping to recapture the form that made him a winner of the Charlotte 4-Wide in 2011 (a year after Force won the inaugural event featuring the non-traditional format) and 2015.
“We found our problem,” Beckman said of the glitch that led to his only first-round loss in 12 races at JFR. “And I expect us to be right back into championship form this week.”
Until it stumbled at Las Vegas, Beckman’s Chevy had been the most consistent on the circuit with a reputation for being equally adept at negotiating cool and hot racing surfaces at the direction of crew chiefs Daniel Hood, Chris Cunningham and Tim Fabrisi.
A three-time race winner for JFR and winner of the team’s 300th Funny Car race, Beckman first distinguished himself in sportsman racing, where he won the 2003 world championship in Super Comp.
On the heels of that success and after battling cancer to a standoff, the U.S. Air Force veteran got his first pro ride in a Dexter Tuttle Top Fuel dragster in 2005. A year later, he made his Funny Car debut with Don Schumacher Racing, winning 33 times from 2006 through 2020, when he lost the ride to a lack of sponsorship.
That sent him back to work as an elevator technician, the job he had left behind 22 years earlier. He never expected to take a second sabbatical, but things changed dramatically last June when Force was injured in a crash at Richmond, Va., and he was summoned to fill in.His performance, which included two wins in the Countdown, earned him a full-time shot this year at a second Funny Car championship to bookend the one he earned at DSR in 2012.
This story was originally published on April 23, 2025. 
