Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption. I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway and more, much more than this, I did it my way.
Doing it his way means, “I can say what I want to say. I do have boundaries,” the Snap-On Dodge boss noted. “But I can say whatever I want — and I usually do.”
Pedregon definitely isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
He accused one opponent of cheating: “He manipulates the outcome of these races. He should be ashamed of himself.”
Another one he dismissed, saying, “I have bigger fish to fry than to worry about what that knucklehead says.”
He once sparred with one of his own crew members.
He isn’t shy about expressing disgust at annoying trends — such as when he trains mechanics, only to see his better-funded rivals pirate them. “That just chaps my rear,” he said. “But my team will be strong, regardless of who they try to hire out from under me.”
When many were shocked that he fired a crew chief, he bristled: “Did I marry this guy when I wasn’t looking? I didn’t marry the guy. I just hired him for a year.”
For a while, he saved himself the trouble of finding the right crew chief — and hired himself … well, his alter ego, “Juan Mota.”
After winning in 2014 and tying legend Don Prudhomme on the list of Funny Car winners, he hinted at occasional racial discrimination and said Prudhomme was his hero for enduring the same.
So Pedregon isn’t a shrinking violet.
He laughed and shrugged off Force’s tale that “back in the day, Cruz Pedregon would get to the end of the track and jump out of his car and say, ‘I am the king’ — even when he lost.”
Pedregon never shrugged off Force, a 151-time winner and 16-time champion — and vice versa.
When Pedregon drove with McDonald’s sponsorship, Force called his aggravating nemesis “that kid driving the hamburger stand on wheels” or the car “the hamburger stand from Hell.”
A part of Force will probably never get over the way the 29-year-old Pedregon waltzed into the class in 1992 after a part-time Top Fuel run the season before — and in his first year won six Funny Car races and the title.
With that, Pedregon dethroned two-time champ Force and became the only driver in the decade to command the class besides Force.
Ultimately, Force called Pedregon one of his toughest rivals throughout the years and said the younger driver from the same rather hardscrabble suburbs of Los Angeles earned his respect: “because he could drive the truck. He could tune. He could promote. He could fist-fight in the parking lot. I really had a lot of respect for him. He came from a racing family.”
Yes, there were times I’m sure you knew when I bit off more than I could chew. But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out. I faced it all, and I stood tall and did it my way.
Pedregon has christened his Funny Car bodies with intimidating names: Frankenstein, El Jefe (The Boss), El Guapo (Good-Looking), El Chingon (The Badass), Chingaso (Street Fight), El Demonio (The Demon) and Chicano.
Some of them hit the wall. Some blew up. Some caught fire. Some failed him and left him with a DNQ — like at Heartland Park Topeka in 1997. The following day, Pedregon underwent an emergency appendectomy. The next weekend, in the final round at Memphis, he suffered burns when his engine detonated.
Some cars landed in the winners’ circle — 36 of them. And one literally flew across the finish line during eliminations at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and beat Robert Hight.
Master or disaster — Pedregon invested 100 percent of himself every time.
“I have struggled at times on the track,” he said, “but the tradeoff for me is that I built an operation that will last for many years.”
To think I did all that — and may I say not in a shy way … Oh no, oh no, not me — I did it my way. The record shows I took the blows and did it my way. Yes, it was my way.
“I won my first championship in my 20s, became an owner in my 30s and I look back and think, ‘Man, I’m glad I did those things,’ because I’m able to enjoy life,” Pedregon noted. “I don’t live beyond my means. I don’t have a car collection. I don’t have a fancy house. I’m committed and dedicated, as I’ve always been, to building a winning program. That’s where I feel we’re at now.”