There Is A Renewed Urgency To Protect NHRA Competitors

International Hot Rod Ass’n President Aaron Polburn called it The Superman Mentality. “Whether it’s a drag racer or a Cup driver or a sprint-car racer,” he said, “they all pretty much think they’re indestructible.”
Long ago, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits divided drag racers into two categories: those who have crashed and those who are going to crash. And Bill Miller, a National Hot Rod Ass’n Top Fuel team owner, said that no matter what safety measures a sanctioning body mandates, “these cars are still going to go 300 miles per hour or more. They’re still going to crash, burn and blow up. The only way to stop that is to never start the thing. Men are always going to race. That’s the way we’re made.”

DRAG RACER: John Force Racing driver Robert Hight (left) helps physical therapist Robert Ortmayer understand Funny Cars. (Brandon Baker Photo)

Drivers don’t worry about danger. That kills the thrill. But somebody has to think about it.
The pressure To Do Something has ratcheted up since the testing accident at Gainesville, Fla., last March that claimed Funny Car driver Eric Medlen and the ensuing chassis-failure accidents of each of his teammates: Robert Hight at Topeka, Ashley Force at Seattle and John Force at Dallas. Hight and Ashley Force walked away, but 14-time champion John Force continues to mend from a compound fracture of the left ankle, dislocation of the left wrist, broken bones in the right foot and hand, a severe laceration of the right knee with ligament and tendon damage and mangled fingers and toes.
The sport had plenty of warning signs in 2006 with severe injuries to fully recovered Top Fuel drivers Doug Foley and Bruce Litton in IHRA action and an ugly NHRA wreck in which Cory McClenathan escaped with no worse than bruises and soreness. Before the 2004 on-track death of Darrell Russell, fellow Top Fuel drivers Larry Dixon and Tony Schumacher each had two frightening wrecks. Then Schumacher’s car broke in half at Seattle in 2005. And Gary Scelzi, who said a normally functioning dragster rides “like a tiger with a rag doll in its mouth,” left for the Funny Car class after several scary Top Fuel crashes.
“We don’t have crash dummies [for testing]. We learn by accidents,” Scelzi said.

Ford's Blue Box (Ford Motor Company Photo)

The NHRA is finding less sacrificial ways to learn. It has absorbed input from various nitro-class teams and has proceeded, with major contributions from safety-restraint engineers Trevor Ashline of Safety Solutions and Kris Van Gilder of Innovative Safety Products, biomedical research scientist/auto racing safety consultant Dr. John Melvin, Ford, Delphi and Roger Good of SFI, a non-profit organization established to issue safety standards for racing equipment.
Under the direction of Dan Olson, its director of Top Fuel and Funny Car Racing, the NHRA in late November issued strengthened-tubing mandates for the dragsters that must be in compliance no later than the start of the April 24-27 Summit Racing Equipment Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway. The sanctioning body still is working to finalize Funny Car specs that Olson said likely would be enforced by the July race at Denver.
Top Fuel chromoly tubing will increase in diameter from 1 3/8 inches to 1 1/2 and its wall thickness will bulk up from .058 inches to .095. Teams will be required to send a sample from each piece of the frame rail to be analyzed for strength and elongation.
While that information might seem dry or boring, it is proof that chassis load and driver protection have top priority in these stricter safety measures.
The IHRA improved its tubing regulations in late 2006 after Foley suffered a broken foot and leg, four cracked ribs, a separated shoulder and a concussion in a nasty accident at Toronto.
Ashline and Van Gilder have led the driver-protection campaign with seat design and improved harnessing.
The seven-point harness, with proper positioning and mounting that’s designed to stabilize a driver’s pelvis in the race-car seat, is Ashline’s masterpiece. His design makes the upper torso and head movement easier to control.
“You can fix arms and legs, but you can’t always fix the spine or head if it’s injured,” said Ashline, who invented the Hutchens Device and is an expert in trying to reduce damage in multiple-impact crashes.
Perhaps the most significant among the nitro-class mandates in 2008 is the addition of the so-called “Blue Boxes” that Ford Motor Company generously has supplied for free to every Top Fuel and Funny Car entry. Each box, equipped with four crash sensors that fit in each ear with one mounted below the seat and the fourth attached above the helmet, costs about $13,000.
The John Force Racing Ford Mustangs used the Blue Boxes in 2007. One was mounted on Ashley Force’s Castrol GTX Mustang when she crashed at Seattle. Don Prudhomme Racing also participated in the experiment, attaching the device to Larry Dixon’s dragster for the final two races of the season.

INSIDE LOOK: Computer models like this one of an NHRA Funny Car cockpit are used in tests for Ford Racing's NHRA Safety Initiative. (Ford Motor Company Photo)

Most recently, Ford Blue Boxes were mandatory on all cars in the Champ Car World Series from 1996-2006. 
General Motors is absorbing the cost for all the NHRA Pro Stock cars to be equipped with Blue Boxes, Olson said.
The Blue Boxes will help NHRA develop its own FEA models, by which a chassis designer can bend, twist and load the mock design to test loads and torque. It would help identify high-stress points, or “hot spots,” when framing tubing takes on diagonals and uprights. “We can learn how to calm those hot spots,” Olson said.
In a Jan. 7 meeting, NHRA officials defined parameters for use of Blue Box data. Officials will collect it only in the case of “incidents,” said Olson, “if a car goes out of control or experiences bad tire shake or if something breaks.” He said some teams have offered him access to the data on their Blue Boxes at any time. 
So, while special considerations were on the table, Olson said, “We went light years ahead” with the safety improvements. “We didn’t want a knee-jerk reaction. Sometimes you can make a change really fast, but it makes things worse. We didn’t want to do that.
“Things will happen still,” he said, “but with all this knowledge that we didn’t have before, our response will be a lot quicker.
“We wanted to base our specs on facts, engineering and real data — not by the seat of our pants and not ‘That looks good’ or ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it.’ We are stepping up,” Olson said. “We are taking a major step.”     
Bill Miller, back in 2004, likened racing to mountain climbing. He said, “Every man who climbs Mount Everest and makes it to the top has to step over 70 dead bodies of guys who didn’t make it.”
That’s blunt, but the ruthless truth is that racing can be cruel.
But hear John Medlen’s words. He said of his son’s accident that sparked this intense research and action, “It would be a catastrophe in its own right, [but] the largest catastrophe would be to not use it to better the sport and to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
A huge consortium in the drag-racing industry is doing its best to make sure it doesn’t.

THE FORCE FACTOR

Immediately after Eric Medlen’s funeral, the 33-year-old driver’s father and crew chief, John Medlen, dived into a fact-finding mission on behalf of John Force Racing that analyzed the highly irregular crash that spawned severe tire shake that’s blamed for the fatal injuries. Medlen’s efforts led to padding-fortified roll cages, which Force and others credit for saving him from head injuries in his Sept. 23 tangle at Texas Motorplex.
The effort has grown into the Eric Medlen Project and its 48,000-square-foot annex to the team’s Brownsburg, Ind., shop that John Force and his organization dedicated in late August. Force said he plans to build the Funny Car of the Future, develop every race car component for his team and perform every step of the preparation process (including engine building — and a Ford-branded nitromethane-powered motor — and chassis fabrication). Force called the facility “more important to me than all my championships” and said that whatever safety information he acquires, “we’ll share it with the entire racing community.”
With three daughters racing, Force said the Eric Medlen Project is “for all the mothers and fathers and their children who are out here with us. To make the sport better for them, better for the future, that’s why I’m investing my money and why the sponsors are investing their money.”

BEYOND TUBING

Gary Scelzi, the 2005 Funny Car champion, three-time Top Fuel champ and outspoken safety proponent, called Ford’s Blue Boxes “outstanding,” saying he commended Ford “for stepping up and doing something like that. They’ve been very good about working on safety things for the NHRA drag races.
“But I’d like to see NHRA take more of a stand on it, since I think it’s not really Ford’s issue. I appreciate them doing it, but I still think it’s NHRA’s problem.  
“I guess my feeling,” Scelzi said, “is you can build the safest race car you want that you can crash and drivers can walk away from, but if you don’t move the scoreboards, and you don’t the move the light poles from next to the guard rails, then I think it’s all for naught. You can’t wear a helmet and not wear a firesuit. All these things go together. Hopefully, they’re going to look at everything and not just make everybody change their cars to make them safer, but also make these race tracks safer, and not run on tracks that are unsafe when they’re badly lit.”
NHRA’s Dan Olson, director of Top Fuel and Funny Car racing, has acknowledged that track preparation and conditions certainly are areas of constant concern. A rough surface and bumps put extra, often dangerous, loads on Top Fuel cars.
“We’re trying to get our tracks as smooth as possible,” Olson said, although he said it’s a constant-vigil exercise because of expansion and contraction with the changes of seasons.