One year ago during qualifying for the NHRA U.S. Nationals, Funny Car driver Ron Capps’ NAPA Dodge sailed off the end of the track and into the sand trap deeper than he ever had gone in 19 years in the cockpit. It flipped into the catch net. One or both of the car’s extruding body latches became tangled in the net, and as he was suspended upside down in his seat, he said he feared a fire, despite the highly professional Safety Safari’s best rescue efforts.

“They couldn’t get those [latches] out of the net. They couldn’t pull me back, nor could they turn me over,” Capps said. “The bodies are latched so well on the front and the back that it stayed on the way it’s designed to stay on. Unfortunately, with our only way out [obstructed] and me being upside down, I was trapped. There’s no kicking a window out. There’s no unbuckling and trying to kick a side window out. The side window’s so small our helmet won’t fit.

“I was worried about fire. The fuel shutoff was off, but the engine was still crackling and popping. I kept saying, ‘Just get it flipped over.’ I was just worried about fuel or oil and something erupting, mainly oil for a fire. I could see them trying to tip it over, and it wasn’t moving at all. That was alarming,” he said.

“Then the air supply started to dwindle. I was still going to be OK. But at that point you start to panic a little bit, because they’re not moving the car at all and it’s been three minutes,” he said. “It’s upside down and the oil pan’s on the bottom of the engine and now it’s on top. And oil is dripping down on hot headers. Any old-school Funny Car fire you see on highlight were 99 percent of the time because of oil that got on hot parts.

“The worst-case scenario for a Funny Car,” Capps said, “is when the body stays latched and on and you’re upside-down. Any driver’s worst nightmare is being trapped with nowhere to get out.”

Todd Okuhara, DSR’s director of racing and crew chief for Leah Pritchett’s Top Fuel team, empathized but was reassuring: “It must have been such a helpless feeling for him. I can understand that. But everybody was around him. There were probably 10 or 20 guys surrounding him. They weren’t going to let him catch fire. It just took them awhile to figure out what was the best way to attack it. He was upside down and couldn’t see anything, but outside there a ton of people surrounding him. When you’re in a situation like that, I’m sure 10 seconds feels like 10 minutes. He was safe. He just had a helpless feeling.”

Safety expert Chad Head – today Kalitta Motorsports’ Safety Director but a Funny Car driver last September – was in Capps’ pit that day at Indianapolis before Capps himself returned, seeking information about the situation. Like Okuhara, he gave the Safety Safari high marks.

“They’re prepared to do whatever it takes. You have to assess the situation. Is he on fire? He’s not on fire. Is he hurt? He says he’s not hurt. You’re not going to run out of air. I’m not saying you’re not going to be uncomfortable. Hanging upside down is not cool. But are we in any immediate danger right now? It didn’t look like it was the case,” Head said. “If he was on fire, if he was hurt, if he was knocked out, they’re going to cut the net, cut the side of the body . . . they’re going to go into a different mode. That’s what you do. I feel that if he was on fire, they would’ve done something different. They’ve got saws. They have the Jaws of Life. I think they did a good job.”

Capps believed so, too, but still had questions. And so did many observers. Cutting the net was an issue. “Why wasn’t that the first solution?” many wondered.  

But the catch-fence is netting, but it isn’t lightweight or flimsy like a badminton or volleyball net. It’s powerful, reinforced, rather bulky, and heavy. So what seemed obvious was obviously not the immediate solution.    

Okuhara only guessed why it took longer than usual to flip Capps’ car right-side-up. “The only thing I can think of is it was such an abnormal circumstance that they weren’t prepared for it,” he said. “In most cases, whatever happens, they seem to have a way to attack it.”

By the October 2016 race at Dallas, Capps said team owner Don Schumacher “has our shop working on a breakaway window, a bigger piece of our side windows, that we can knock out if we had to,” he said.

That idea stalled.

Okuhara said, “There’s been talk about it, and we had a talk with the Chrysler engineers about it, to see if they can put something into the bodies. But it hasn’t gone further than that. There’s been talk, but nothing more has been done yet.”

If the chassis relies on side rails to protect the driver, that leaves little room to accommodate a side escape panel. Monkeying around with the frame rails would compromise the security of the driver.

“That’s what it came down to,” Okuhara said. “You can’t give up any safety from what we have. It’s a great idea, but as of right now, the way everything’s configured and built, there’s no way to do it right now.”  

In the year since the incident happened to Capps here, Okuhara said DSR hasn’t introduced any other safety measures on the NAPA Dodge or any of other three company-operated Funny Cars: “Not yet. We talked about it, but we never came up with a good idea.”

Graham Light, the NHRA senior vice-president of racing operations, said Schumacher’s initial design idea sounded intriguing. “If it’s something that’s doable, we’d certainly be interested in looking at that. The way [Capps] got into the net was very challenging, so creating another exit is probably a good idea.”

Challenging, too, is the choice of options, Light said: “It’s a Catch-22: you’ve got to surround them with a roll cage, and that’s going to limit the amount of exits they have.”

Gary Densham, whose car was totaled in a tangle with the net last year at Pomona, Calif., cautioned against a hasty solution.

Remembering that “[John] Force had, for quite a while, side windows that you could knock out,” Densham said, “We have a problem now that if something happens, nothing is resolved or they [NHRA decision-makers] overkill the problem. Then we end up with a situation in that we either didn’t really get it fixed or it is so over-fixed that it’s too expensive and the average person can’t afford it. It’s almost impossible for a human being to argue against safety. Yet on the other hand, some things get over-engineered.”

Light changed the course of the conversation, saying, “We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of runs down the racetrack at 300-plus miles an hour. We’ve had multiple ‘chute failures, and these cars stop. And that one didn’t. The real question is: Why didn’t the car stop? That’s the thing our people focused on the most. It should have stopped, regardless if the parachutes opened, with the braking efficiency these cars have today. Funny Cars have four-wheel carbon-fiber brakes we mandated after the Scott Kalitta crash. You’ve got a lot of braking power there. You really do.”

Emphasizing that he was in no way criticizing Capps, Light said, “There was no evidence of those brakes locking up and [sending the car] skidding. There was no bouncing, no black tire marks when the Tech Department looked at it. There’s no reason why that car shouldn’t have stopped. It’s my understanding there’s no apparent reason as to why that car couldn’t have been stopped. The brake systems worked.”

Capps hammered on the safety aspect.

He said, “Here’s the bigger issue: If I was physically hurt, my neck was hurt, or something where time was of the essence to get to the driver, that would have been an issue. That’s three minutes or so longer than it needed to be if they needed to get to somebody who was hurt. Thankfully I was fine. Not hurt a bit. Everything did its job. But if we had somebody that was hurt inside there and incapacitated and ‘out’ and unconscious, maybe slumped over and losing their air, whatever it may be, then you have an issue. I got out on my own. They got it flipped over enough that I unbuckled and was out like a rabbit. If I’m hurt and somebody’s [unable to scramble out], they can’t get out, they have to wait until they can flip it over and get the body off of it and open it up and unbuckle and get them out. They’re not going to be able to pull them out of the roof hatch if they’re hurt. So that was a big issue.  . . . What if somebody was in there that was hurt bad and they were at the mercy of being pulled out of the car instead of being able to get out on their own?”

A year later, no clear answers have emerged to Capps questions.

But Head did have a suggestion:

“They [Safety Safari emergency personnel] have a good game plan. As racers and owners, we really need to have a good game plan. I think it’s about working as hard as we can. We work so hard to go faster. We need to work just as hard or harder to slow down and stop. If that means better brakes, if that means better parachutes, you’ve got to do it.”