She told him to give her some space. She said he only would add to her stress at that moment.
Ashley Force Hood was trying to calm herself down and gather her thoughts following a supercharger explosion at Reading, Pa., that blew the body of her Castrol GTX Mustang Funny Car high into the night air during Friday qualifying for the NHRA’s Toyo Tires Nationals. Rather than pacing aimlessly, her father, John Force, who had been in the opposite lane on that run at Maple Grove Raceway, surveyed the car damage.
What he found was encouraging.
“The body went airborne because it unhinged. It didn’t break in half. That is what is most important,” Force said, “because when they break in half, you lose all your aero on these Ford Mustangs. The strength of these bodies comes from Ford engineering.
She told him to give her some space. She said he only would add to her stress at that moment.
Ashley Force Hood was trying to calm herself down and gather her thoughts following a supercharger explosion at Reading, Pa., that blew the body of her Castrol GTX Mustang Funny Car high into the night air during Friday qualifying for the NHRA’s Toyo Tires Nationals. Rather than pacing aimlessly, her father, John Force, who had been in the opposite lane on that run at Maple Grove Raceway, surveyed the car damage.
What he found was encouraging.
“The body went airborne because it unhinged. It didn’t break in half. That is what is most important,” Force said, “because when they break in half, you lose all your aero on these Ford Mustangs. The strength of these bodies comes from Ford engineering.
“It is just good to see that a lot of the safety we have on these cars will hold them together,” Force said. “We have seen cars explode and come in half and pieces go flying. She was early when she blew up instead of in the lights. The body was damaged, but it wasn’t broken in half. That means the structural strength was there.”
This incident looked like Force Hood’s 2007 Seattle wall-banger and the explosion she experienced at Maple Grove last year in qualifying. It also was a preview of the blow-up she would have in Sunday’s first round of eliminations. More importantly, it certified all the research and development the Eric Medlen Project has been doing. Those safety changes are working.
In the long run and in another sense, John Force actually relieved his daughter’s stress — by making sure race cars are built safer than ever.
Laurie Force, Force’s wife and Force Hood’s mother, said Ashley and younger daughters Brittany and Courtney, ultimately make the choice to compete, “but I think they have faith that their dad is going to put them in the safest car that he can.”
Performance can trump safety worries
Few in any discipline of racing concern themselves with safety engineering and vehicle structure when all is proceeding smoothly. That usually fades into the subconscious as performance returns to the forefront.
Night conditions in Eastern Pennsylvania were perfect for potential record-setting performances. Matt Hagan set the Funny Car national elapsed-time record, and Hector Arana captured the top Pro Stock Motorcycle spot with the second-quickest run in class history.
Those cool temperatures at tracks with great hook, tracks such as Maple Grove and Englishtown’s Raceway Park, only encourage tuners and drivers to be aggressive, capitalizing on the chance to shine. Force Hood said that factored into her decision to stay on the throttle when she sensed something amiss. Because it happened early in the run, she said, she wasn’t sure if her instincts were correct.
“I was excited for the run, because it was cool with good conditions,” she said. “It gave me a little warning to lift. I was thinking these are the best conditions we have seen in a while, [that] maybe I am just feeling it go so hard. I didn’t want to make the wrong choice and lift. As soon as I was thinking that is when it went. I just made the wrong judgment call.”
She said her head hit both sides of the roll-cage padding. That she had no head or neck troubles was another victory for the Eric Medlen Project.
Outlaw drag racing safer now
Chassis builder Nicky Montana understands. The previous weekend, at The Shakedown at E-Town premier outlaw drag race at Englishtown, N.J., Montana’s handiwork saved Benny Alfonso’s life, like it spared Joe Newsham’s at the previous Shakedown.
Pro Modified driver Alfonso is recovering from a compression fracture of a vertebra following a frightening crash in a Montana-signature race car.
Newsham walked around at the scene of his fiery, flipping, wall-ricocheting Outlaw 10.5 wreck before a trip to the hospital revealed minor foot injuries and a compression fracture in his back that did not require surgery.
After race-testing his own designs for three years before he would sell one to anyone else, Montana (MBRC/Pro Chassis Design) constructs his cars with tubing at the car’s stress points thicker than SFI specs require.
The difference between the SFI-mandated 83-thousandths of an inch thickness and his own 95-thousandths, Montana said, is about the depth of a matchbook cover. But when Alfonso rammed the guardwall at about 215 mph, he had no injury, not even a scratch, besides the damage to one disc. The car was intact. (Emergency crews cut Alfonso from the car to remove him properly because he was mentioning leg pain, but the car was relatively unscathed.)
Montana, alluding to the chassis-builders’ pressure by saying, “It has to work right every time, said that in drag racing “everything is jeopardized for the sake of weight. They become inconsistent, which is never good for a race car. When you build a car that’s lightweight, you take away the possibility of consistency. Then again, you don’t want a 335-horsepower race car going 300 mph, either, because then it’s just an unstoppable mass that would self-destruct in an impact like that. There’s got to be a happy medium between weight and speed. It’s a double-edged sword.”
He echoed the point that Austin Coil made following Darrell Russell’s fatal accident in 2004. In all the talk generated about slowing down the cars, Coil conceded that such a move would make the cars look like tanks rumbling down a dragstrip, killing fan interest.
Still, the chassis-maker from Port Jefferson, Long Island, said he joins his counterparts throughout drag racing in trying to find that necessary balance.
“The 10.5 cars are getting a little bit out of hand, because they’re 3100 pounds,” Montana said. “They go in the 6.20s in the quarter(-mile), 230 miles an hour. They have a very small patch of tire on the ground. They’re unstable. The next thing I see is probably going to be some rules in the 10.5 class to slow them down or minimize the weight. They’re just rolling tanks. They’re just heavy, heavy cars with tremendous potential to go fast, with these turbochargers.
“They’ve got to mandate all that safety stuff that’s in those Funny Cars — head restraints and padding — in all those cars,” he said, agreeing with Funny Car driver Bob Tasca III. “It cost several thousand dollars. It seems to be a lot at the beginning, but it’s worth a lot when you get upside down at 200. I’m sure a lot of these guys think, ‘I should’ve …’ or ‘I would’ve …’ When you’re upside down going 180, you think about a lot of things you could have done.”
One thing Montana advocates is a tighter harness — he favored a six-point version — “so the driver can’t move left to right — all he can do is scoot forward a little bit.” Said Montana, ‘You can’t have that ability for them to move. That’s compression of the back that we don’t need.”
He said almost everybody always has thought of seat belts as something that comes in a box and the crew installs them. However, the more he has analyzed Alfonso’s accident, he said he has realized that a number of parts that have been considered stock, buy-it-and-bolt-it-in fixtures just might need another look.
“His seat belts could have been tighter. He could have had a six-way harness on that would have definitely made him not slam his seat against the floor in the front where the pedals are. There are other ways to change this around. It’s changed my mind about certain things,” Montana said.
“The amazing thing about this crash is that Benny’s got no other injuries besides this back injury,” he said. “Normally, in an accident of this stature, you have bloodshot eyes from the impact, seat-belt marks on your chest, sore muscles and broken bones. He didn’t have any of that. It was amazing that he was almost unscathed in the accident. I have no idea how that happened. I have no idea how he got away with that. I think luck has a lot to do with it.”
FireIce had a little something to do with it, too. FireIce, a patent-pending fire suppressant that can be used with a basic hand-held extinguisher or can be effective in industrial applications from such sources as pumper trucks and aerial units in wildfires, is Alcohol Funny Car ace Jay Payne’s corporate sponsor. But it was much more in the aftermath of Alfonso’s fiery wreck.
“The EMS crew found Benny awake and alert, trapped in the vehicle, with back pain and numbness in both of his legs,” first responder Russ Hedge said. “A fire was present in the now-open engine bay inside and around the fuel cell. There also was fuel pooling in front of the vehicle.
“The fire was attacked with FireIce gel applied with Intelagard’s Macaw CAF Backpack unit. A two and a half gallon pressurized water can with FireIce gel also was deployed to cover the driver in the event fire spread toward him,” he said. “Water was not used due to the rapid knockdown of the fire with the FireIce gel, which also formed a thick, protective barrier over the fuel spill that eliminated the chance of ignition. Because of this, we were immediately able to begin extricating the injured driver.”
While a substance such as FireIce can be a tremendous help, how the cars are built still is at the top of the sport’s safety agenda.
Another successful outcome
“You build a car the way we thought was proper for the speed that it was going to travel, and we abide by the rules,” Montana said. “But I still was amazed by the lack of damage that was done to him [Alfonso]. I watched Benny’s crash — and it terrifies me to watch it now, because the impact was so tremendous. Joe took a pretty decent beating (the previous year at The Shakedown), but he seemed to come out pretty good. That was important.”
Though sore and hobbling on tender feet, Newsham lobbied hard the day after his crash for doctors to release him from the hospital so he could return to the track to watch eliminations.
Alfonso’s and Newsham’s cars had the same chassis, with modifications to satisfy the requirements of their different classes. “Basically it was a double-frame-rail, Pro Mod-style chassis from the firewall back in Joe’s car. It was very, very similar to Benny’s car,” Montana said. “Joe’s didn’t have the heavier tube. Don’t forget that those 10.5 cars have to have steel bodies. So they have that extra bit of protection from the factory steel body. The car could take a good, strong beating if it had to. It obviously worked.”
Montana joins call for broader safety mandates
Like Tasca, Montana said sanctioning bodies have no reason not to insist that the safety measures from the nitro-burning cars — the sport’s headliners and most powerful race cars — trickle down to the other classes. He has studies all forms of motorsports to glean any safety-improvement ideas he can apply to the cars he builds and races.
“If you look at NASCAR, those guys throw those cars around the track at 220 miles an hour. They’re 3500-pound machines. If they hit a wall, no matter how they hit a wall, they hit a wall hard. Their deal is to take the cage away from the driver,” he said. “They want the driver’s head nowhere near the cage. They actually take the bar out on the passenger’s side, away from his head. They want everything away from the driver so the driver’s head can’t come in contact with anything.
“We are totally the opposite, our sport. We wrap the cage directly around his head. The truth is — my opinion now, just makes sense to me — the further away you have the driver from any obstacle he can come in contact with, you could harness him in the center and you’d be able to crash him any way you want and he’d be floating in that cage. If you put an egg inside a foam and you put that foam inside something and you drop it, the egg, if it doesn’t hit the side, it won’t crush. In our sport, we have the cage around the driver. We have to keep his body and the cage from coming into contact with something that doesn’t want to move.
“You’ve got to ask, ‘ How can I keep the driver floating in this cockpit?’ You either cushion him from the outside by surrounding him with something soft that can absorb the energy of his body or suspend him in the car in some manner in which he never touches anything,” he said. The latter, he said, “seems to be more difficult than putting him in something soft.”
Considering championship cars (“Indy Cars”) are designed to break apart and disperse the energy, Montana acknowledged that “there is a double standard there, why we want everything so close to the driver and the driver’s actually cocooned inside the metal cage.”
Just as Trevor Ashline and Kris Van Gilder have worked to perfect positing in a driver safely in the cockpit with advanced harnessing and seat inserts to stabilize him/her, Montana has given much thought to that idea. What alerted him to that aspect of safety changes was an outlaw Pro Stock car that blew an engine in third gear, traveling about 130-140 mph. The car slid into the wall on the driver’s side, flat against the driver, darted across the track, and hit that opposite wall head-on. He driver sustained broken ribs on his left side and broken toes.
“What we determined had happened,” Montana said, “was that he actually
slid in the seat and all he had was the fiberglass body and the inch of bars that are on that side. That was what between him and the cement wall. So even though the bars took the load and they smashed and stayed where they were supposed to stay, his body transmitted all his energy to the inside of
the bars against the seat and that’s how he broke his ribs. There was no way to maintain him in the center of the seat. He did not have a seat insert. That’s what first told me that every car that has a bucket-type seat should have an insert that has a side on it. That would have kept him from breaking his ribs and he would have gotten right out of there.”
Montana said, “I’m not big into crashing cars. I’d rather a guy drive my car and wear it out.” He knows that’s how every chassis builder feels.
As for whether he could offer the Eric Medlen Project any ideas, he indicated that he doubted it: “They’re doing their job scientifically. We’re doing ours kind of by the seat of our pants. We’re working within the rules and saying, ‘Hey, if I were driving this car — and I am a driver — I would like this. We want the driver to be comfortable in the car. Our cars are not cookie-cutter cars. I would like to feel that everything that’s bolted into the car, welded into the car, in the driver’s area is fastened properly and can’t get loose.
“I try to build them like I’m going to sit in them myself. That’s pretty much the way I always think about it,” Montana said. “I come from a background where I was the driver most of the time. The early cars were built for ourselves and they just spread out to other people. So I build it like I’m going to get into it — if I’m safe with it, then I can put somebody else in it.”
A few years ago, he and brother Chris built a car that was two-thirds titanium. “The chassis was actually titanium,” Nicky Montana said. “The front half of the car was titanium, the rear was titanium, and it bolted together to the SFI centerpiece, which was chromoly. Everybody wanted to know what we did and if they could buy the technology. But I didn’t want to sell it because I didn’t know if it was going to work. So we ran the car for three years ourselves. I was the driver. We found out what it liked and what it didn’t like and how it worked. Then I was willing to put it into production with some minor changes in engineering. If anybody wanted it, then the technology was right and I could say, ‘Yes. This is what it does. This is its longevity. This is what’s safe about it. This is what I don’t like about it.’ We tested it on ourselves.
“John’s spent millions of dollars doing this scientifically,” Montana said of Force. “I may not be able to tell them anything they don’t know already. I just want to make sure we have the same kind of safety in these cars. These Pro Mods are running as fast as the Alcohol Funny cars. There’s no reason why they should have any less safety [precautions].”
Still, Montana recognizes, like surely Force does, that nothing is guaranteed.
“No matter what we do, no matter what you figure out, no matter how safe you make it, somebody will find a way to get killed in one of these cars,” Montana said, “because that’s just the nature of the beast.”
Human element still reigns
“I don’t believe that it’s going to happen, because if so, I ain’t worth nothin’ — because I believe that what we’re doing is we’re making these cars better and 
safer,” Force told ESPN.
The body-wrecking episodes at Reading triggered what became a touching conversation between Force and Dean “Guido” Antonelli, Force Hood’s crew chief. Force fretted about his daughter being in danger in these predictably unpredictable nitro-burning monsters called, paradoxically enough, Funny Cars.
He already knew that Antonelli “gets it.” The young man from Tucson brought to John Force Racing a better-than-average understanding of ill-tempered race cars and of vehicle structure and breaking points.
His late father, Joe, drove the Nanook and other fuel altered, as well as Funny Cars. Moreover, Antonelli worked in his hometown as a “destruction engineer” at the U-Haul Technological Center and Test Laboratory. He told Force’s Castrol marketers, “We’d take trucks designed to carry 2,000 pounds and fill them with 6,000 pounds of concrete, then try to roll them over.”
But Force learned just how deeply Antonelli cares about Force Hood’s security.
“John, I tune her car,” Force recalled Antonelli telling him. “I knew her since she was a baby, running around the shop. We wiped her runny nose. You don’t think I fear for her?”
Force said he challenged Antonelli a bit, asking the crew chief, “Where do you come from, Guido? You run that car — where is your fear?”
He said Antonelli told him, “The fear is that we do everything to keep them safe. And when we saw that we didn’t feel they worked, you spent money. Everybody worked. That’s why we came back [from Eric Medlen’s crash that proved fatal and from Force’s destructive accident at Dallas, both in 2007] — because everybody believed it was better. But we never believed we could stop the problem.”
Asked Force, “Well, how are we going to live with it?”
Antonelli’s answer was simple: “Quit.”
At that point, Force wondered out loud if he ought to quit drag racing, to make sure his daughters would be safe in life.
“Maybe I ought to quit,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of money. Maybe I ought to take my kids home and create other businesses.”
And that’s when Antonelli opened up to Force and told him something Force never had known.
The crew chief told Force, “I lost my little sister. She was 19 years old. She was killed in a car wreck, in a car that she loved and she wanted. What do you do? Never let your kids have a car? John, think about what you’re saying. If we do everything we can to keep ’em safe, then that’s all we can do.”
Force wrestles with the angles constantly. He wants championships. He wants his family to be happy. He wants his drag-racing legacy to continue. He wants everybody, not just his team and family members, to be safe. But he has a line he will not cross.
“Nothing’s worth my kids. Nothing,” the 14-time champion said. “If God walked right in today and said, ‘Somebody’s got to go,’ He wouldn’t have to ask me twice. I’d walk right out that door with Him, because my children are my whole life. Them I will die for — and I won’t say that about anybody. That’s how it ought to be.”
That is how it ought to be. And drag racing ought to have race cars that never break or hurt anyone. But the latter, of course, is impossible to ask.
Until someone invents a failproof chassis, though, the sport has to be grateful for the work of every individual who contributed to the Eric Medlen Project and to thoughtful car builders such as Nicky Montana.
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