John Force sees progress in drag racing safety

By MIKE HARRIS | The Associated Press • Published March 11, 2009

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When budding NHRA star Eric Medlen was fatally injured two years ago it was seen as a tragic but isolated accident in a risky profession.

Then drag racing received another blow: the death of veteran Scott Kalitta in a crash last June.

That served as “a wake-up call,” said 14-time NHRA Funny Car champion John Force, who owned Medlen’s car.

“Even a few months after Eric, I was thinking maybe everybody was right and it was a one-time fluke,” Force said in a recent interview. “Then, Scott was killed. We saw something called harmonics and oscillation and we couldn’t figure out why.”

Force said the resulting vibrations meant that Medlen hit his head many times, and received multiple concussions, during the crash.

Much like the death of NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt in February 2001, the deaths of the 33-year-old Medlen and the 46-year-old Kalitta have become a catalyst for major safety changes in the sport.

In the aftermath of Medlen’s crash on March 19, 2007, at Gainesville, Fla., Raceway, the site of this weekend’s Gatornationals, John Force Racing and Ford Racing started “The Eric Medlen Project.”

The objective was finding and improving safety innovations for the sport, and it has led to a series of safety measures ranging from significant Funny Car chassis modifications to the installation of the Ford Blue Box, a crash data recorder, on all nitro cars.

“If you look at the foam we had protecting the driver, it was made for two, three, four hits,” Force said. “But no one talked about oscillation and harmonics — a vibration so great (Medlen) hit a hundred times.”

“We made mistakes in evolution during the first 50 years of this sport that we didn’t see,” he added. “If you look at the chassis on the showroom floor (of his California race shop), Brute Force, a car I drove over 30 years ago, and the car I drove two years ago, they were identical.

“Nothing changed. We always thought a chassis just held the tires up, gave the drivers a place to sit and, hey, we got caught.”

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