TULSA, Okla. — With his run during the Lucas Oil Chili Bowl Nationals this week, Austin Prock will rekindle the relationship between the Super Bowl of Midget Racing and the National Hot Rod Ass’n.
Prock, whose full-time job the last few years has been as a Top Fuel dragster pilot for John Force Racing, will wheel a car for Hayward Motorsports during Thursday’s John Christner Trucking Qualifying Night.
He becomes the third driver with NHRA ties to make a Chili Bowl appearance, joining Gary Scelzi (2008) and Cruz Pedregon (2010). This is third Chili Bowl start, but his first two tries were prior to his drag racing career.
Originally from Lansing, Mich., Prock got his start in midget racing before he followed his father, champion NHRA tuner Jimmy Prock, into the straight-line world.
He won the STARS National Midget Series championship in 2014, his first full-time year in the discipline, before running dirt sprint cars for a short time.
The younger Prock went Top Fuel racing in 2019 and promptly earned Road to the Future honors — NHRA’s rookie-of-the-year award for its four professional classes.
With JFR dormant for most of last year after the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world, Prock saw an opportunity to return to his racing roots and seized the chance.
“Hayward Motorsports has top-of-the-line equipment, with Brodie Hayward leading the fleet, and it’s an awesome opportunity that I’ve been given to come back to my roots that I’m really excited about,” Prock said. “It’s been since 2016 that I was last in this building and it has pretty much been that long since I’ve even touched one of these cars. It’s all coming back to me, but it’s definitely been a learning experience to get re-acclimated.
“I’ve always wanted to come back to the Chili Bowl, but with our typical drag racing schedule, we’re usually getting ready to go testing right about this time. So with the season pushed back to the beginning of March, that opened up … maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity to come back here and have some fun again,” Prock added. “I’m really looking forward to it and, hopefully, it’s like riding a bicycle where I haven’t forgotten how to do all this.”
Unsurprisingly, Prock noted that going dirt midget racing at the Chili Bowl is “nothing even close” to his normal experiences of going down a 1,000-foot drag strip at more than 330 mph.
“It’s all totally different. I didn’t spend a lot of my racing career driving on dirt; a majority of my success came from pavement racing. Even when I was doing this (dirt racing) five years ago, I was still learning every day,” Prock explained. “Just being outside of the sport and watching how everything has evolved in this discipline, it’s not easy and I think studying the guys who are fast now does a lot of justice.
“Hopefully I did enough studying up and I can get that feel right that I need and make some speed out of this thing.”
Though he’s five years removed from his most recent Chili Bowl attempt, Prock believes he has “as good a shot as anyone” of being able to challenge for his first start in the Saturday night A Main.
That process begins with Thursday’s preliminary program, where Prock has high hopes for success.
“I really have confidence that we can win our heat race,” he said. “I felt like the last two times I’ve been here, I had a really good shot of doing that … and that kind of sets the tone for the whole week. I’m still pretty bitter that I haven’t checked that box yet, even though it’s been five years now. Bad luck and just things not going our way kept that from happening and that really is half the battle here.
“I’d like to get off to a good start, win the heat race and see where things go from there.”
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