TF2

Steve Torrence

Total Wins

Kilgore, TX

DATE OF BIRTH

April 17, 1983

Years Racing

20

Favorite Track

Texas Motorplex

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.

That’s a feat akin to the Houston Astros negotiating the baseball playoffs without losing a single game or the Dallas Mavericks not losing once en route to an NBA championship. It’s the motorsports equivalent of the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ perfect season.

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.

Steve Torrence holds up his NHRA World Championship trophy.

Steve Torrence launches off the line in his NHRA Top Fuel Dragster.

Steve and Natalie Torrence hold their daughter after winning an NHRA National Event in St. Louis, Missouri.

After a very un-Torrence-like 2022 season in which he finished sixth in points while his team made major changes to the engine/clutch/driveline setup, he returned to form in 2023, ultimately finishing second to veteran Doug Kalitta after leading the points for an unprecedented eighth straight season in a car maintained by veteran crew chiefs Richard Hogan and Bobby Lagana Jr.

“I’ve got a really good group of guys that have stuck with me through thick and thin and who work their tails off day-in and day-out,” Torrence said. “It’s just humbling to be a part of a team that has accomplished what we have.”

Torrence’s dominance, including a remarkable 55 race wins in 13 seasons from 2012 to the present, is especially remarkable considering the fact that, at the outset, he opted to defy then conventional wisdom that championship success was only possible for those teams that designed and built their own equipment: chassis, engine blocks, pistons, cylinder heads and superchargers.

For the Torrence team, the business plan was to invest in readily available parts while focusing on hiring personnel like Hogan, Lagana, clutch specialist Gary Pritchett and others who, instead of designing and manufacturing, were more skilled in fine-tuning those parts to work in consort.

Another anomaly is that while most of those against whom he competes are full-time professionals in drag racing, Torrence has maintained a day job that consumes almost as much of his time as racing. Like his dad, the Kilgore College graduate spends his weekdays working in the family business, bidding the pipeline jobs that are the heart and soul of CAPCO Contractors, Inc.

His is the quintessential small town success story. Although his team leases shop space in Brownsburg, Ind., just a couple miles from Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park, the home of the Labor Day U.S. Nationals, Torrence still lives with his wife Natalie and daughters Haven Charli and Harper Sloan in Kilgore, the town in which he grew up, one that once boasted the greatest concentration of producing oil wells in the world (1,100).

The only child of racing teammate and CAPCO founder Billy Torrence and race team manager “Momma Kay” Torrence, he doesn’t just project a cowboy lifestyle for television and social media. He actually lives it, dividing whatever free time he has between his home in Kilgore and a south Texas ranch on which he hunts deer, runs cattle, practices his roping skills and entertains business clients.