Three years ago, John Medlen was leaving home for another drag race, happily ready to tune a Funny Car for Don Schumacher Racing. 

His wife, Martha, made a pivotal observation: “We’ve been dragging that suitcase around for 35 years. How much longer do you want to do that?” 

The longtime NHRA drag-racing tuner for the sport’s top teams and elite, champion drivers said, “Well, I've been gone from you, half the days of the year for 35 years. So when you say enough is enough, I'll park that suitcase. I'll move anywhere you want to move. I'll do anything you want to do, because you deserve to spend part of our lives together doing what you want to do. So when you say enough is enough . . .” 

And time – and racing – went on. 

Then this September, after Medlen helped guide Funny Car’s Ron Capps to his long-awaited first U.S. Nationals victory, the crew chief and his wife spent some quiet time at their cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of Northern Georgia, soaking in the silence and fresh air, a seeming universe away, literally and figuratively, from the nitro-laced, noise-polluted atmosphere of the Camping World Drag Racing Series. Up on Little Cherry Log Mountain, on peaceful Misty Mountain Lane, they could trade the world’s chaos for a view of natural splendor. “Probably not one car down there in two months. You can see 100 miles in either direction,” John Medlen said. 

Eventually, they had to re-enter the rat race, from tranquil Ellijay, Ga., to the bustling workshop at Brownsburg, Ind., preparing for Countdown to the Championship battle. And this time, as they did, Martha Medlen asked her husband, “You know what time it is?” Easy question: “2:30,” he replied. She said, “No. It’s time to park it.” She meant the well-traveled suitcase. 

“I said, ‘Why is it now?’” John Medlen wondered. And her answer was “Well, I was going to wait for the end of the year to tell you, but you said it's only fair to tell the owners now so they can find somebody and give them a chance to shuffle it the end of the year, not to be left out.” 

And “so,” he said, “I came back out and I told Ron [Capps] and a lot of the [crew] guys, ‘I'm going to be at the cabin at the end of the year.’ And they said, ‘OK.’ 

“So the quest is to find peace there because of quietness. I like being around people to an extent,” John Medlen said.” So that's what she picked. That's what she wanted to do. And I told her, ‘Anywhere you want to go, whatever you want to do, you get to pick. Just point. OK, so she’s picking, and I'm going.” 

Capps broke the news to the drag-racing community when he won the Texas FallNationals, near Dallas, two weeks ago. It raised eyebrows then, but Medlen said, “It’s no closely guarded secret or anything. I’ve been out here 36 years.” 

And those 36 years have brought triumph and tragedy, happiness and heartache: championships with both John Force Racing and Don Schumacher Racing. For Medlen, that includes the joy of working with son Eric, who became one of the sport’s most beloved Funny Car drivers – and the unfathomable sorrow of losing him in 2007, as the result of a testing accident. From that grief grew The Eric Medlen Project, dedicated to driver protection and safety solutions. 

But now it’s time to step aside from the complex jumble that is elite drag racing. And Medlen said, “It's actually joyful for me, because it kind of takes the burden. I kept getting more and more burden that I would leave half the days of the year. My daughter got engaged, so it’s just her there now. That's not right. And she works, so she can't really travel to the races. We got married because we wanted to be together. Just so happened that this is what I do for a living.” Now, he said, “she gets to pick, and she picked it and I'm going.” 

He isn’t abandoning the world he has helped shape through the years, not entirely. 

“I'm going to do some consulting work. I'll dabble in it. Maybe six races a year or four races a year. It just depends,” Medlen said. “She gets to pick. That's only fair. That was my agreement, and I keep my word.” 

But “if need be,” he said, he’ll continue to help with The Eric Medlen Project. 

“One of the things we need to do more with that project is get those things that we have discovered implemented, mandatory implemented. So that's a quest,” Medlen said. “That will keep going. There will always be a need for safety and implementation and new safety things.” 

But he gained satisfaction from the progress the initiative has made. 

“It's migrated so much better than it was that the safety in that driver's seat is exponentially better than it ever has been,” Medlen said. “There's some little things that can help. The tire was the biggest thing. The change in how they construct the tire and then just the roll cage and all the padding and everything. It's a package that's so much better. I feel comfortable now that we've done pretty much everything humanly possible that we know of to protect the driver in his office.” 

He said, “What you can't fix is that what you don't know exists. So if we have another component failure or another incident, then we have another can of worms to look at. But right now, knock on wood, it’s all been very good. We've had very few invasive things happen for the driver, and so we got to make sure we keep it there, make sure that we don't say, ‘Well, nothing's really happened’ so you kind of mitigate the importance of that. We got to keep the level of importance of driver safety at the very top of the page, and we have. Everybody has.”