Team
A Family Affair
When Steve Torrence founded Torrence Racing in 2012, he had no idea that his simple plan to contest the NHRA World Championship would re-invigorate the sport at its highest levels. At the time, conventional wisdom suggested that to be successful in the sport’s elite Top Fuel and Funny Car divisions, one had to be part of a multi-car team that designed and built its own chassis, engine blocks, pistons, cylinder heads and other proprietary parts.
Pundits insisted that was the very reason drivers at John Force Racing and Don Schumacher Racing won the bulk of the championships in those two categories, especially early in the Countdown Era.
However, Torrence was not convinced. Since JFR and DSR already had done all the design work and testing and now had a large inventory of hard parts, the Texan believed he could achieve his lofty career goals simply by buying available equipment “off the rack” and hiring the very best technicians to assemble and fine tune it for competition.
It is a formula that, in the team’s very first year, yielded tour victories at Atlanta, Ga., Englishtown, N.J. and Seattle, Wash., and sent Torrence into the NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship in fourth place in the standings. It was a breakout performance that did not go unnoticed and the formula that delivered those results ultimately was adapted by Mike Salinas, Josh Hart, Tony Stewart, Justin Ashley and others, creating the most competitive Top Fuel division in NHRA history.
Of course, Torrence Racing didn’t just magically materialize in 2012.
The seeds from which it would sprout were planted years earlier when a young Billy Torrence adopted drag racing as his “go to” recreational outlet after a workweek spent welding pipe in the oilfields of East Texas. His passion for the sport thankfully was shared by his wife, Kay, and later by their son, Steve.
Although he raced in a number of sportsman and bracket categories, the elder Torrence found his niche in Super Comp where, in 1999, he won the NHRA points championship in a South Central Division encompassing Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana.
When Steve was old enough, he joined his dad on the racetrack and, after a brief stint in Super Comp, followed by a frightening bout with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he climbed into a Top Alcohol Dragster in which he won the 2005 South Central Division Championship, the sport’s oldest, biggest and most prestigious single race, the Labor Day U.S. Nationals, and the 2005 Lucas Oil World Championship.
He remains today the only driver to have won NHRA championships in both the Top Fuel and Top Alcohol divisions.
A growing need for speed compelled Steve to license in a Top Fuel dragster in which he made his series debut in 2006 at Richmond, Va. Ultimately, he would compete in 47 races in other people’s equipment before finally deciding that if he seriously wanted to race for the championship, he needed to control as many elements as possible himself. That meant assuming an ownership position.
Meanwhile, Billy Torrence continued to race his Super Comp dragster whenever he could despite new demands on his time brought about by his 1995 founding of CAPCO Contractors, the family-owned oil-and-gas pipeline construction and maintenance business.
After a pair of runner-up finishes in NHRA national events at Memphis, Tenn., in 2002 and 2009, he earned a breakthrough victory at Las Vegas in 2011 and, two years later, earned his Top Fuel license, enabling him to race alongside his son while still driving the Super Comp dragster whenever feasible.
In 2018, Billy won his first Top Fuel race and a year later, he and Steve made history when they opposed one another in all-CAPCO final rounds at Topeka, Kan., and St. Louis, Mo., becoming just the second father and son to race against each other in national Top Fuel final and the first to do so more than once.
Today, Torrence Racing, which houses its two 335 mile-a-hour Top Fuel dragsters in shop facilities in Brownsburg, Ind., still is all about family. “Momma Kay,” the de facto team manager described by her son as “the glue that holds this whole operation together,” is assisted by Steve’s wife, Natalie, who manages the team’s marketing and public relations through her own company, Innovation Creative Experts.
The “CAPCO Boys” who prepare and maintain those cars also are considered family, especially since many of them were racing with Steve from the beginning.
The Torrence Racing bounty through the team’s first 13 seasons is impressive by virtually any standard. It includes 63 NHRA tour victories in Top Fuel (55 by Steve) and one in Super Comp (Billy at Atlanta in 2016) plus four World Championships and wins in the TRAXXAS Nitro Shootout (Steve in 2017) and the Pep Boys All-Star Call-Out (Steve in 2022).
In 2024, Steve became the latest member of the NHRA 500 Club, restricted to drivers who have won at least that many competitive rounds in the primary series.