Ominous optics aside, Ron Capps’ spectacular engine explosion and crash into the opposite-lane wall during Sunday’s first round of Funny Car eliminations of the NHRA’s Arizona Nationals had an eerie element to it.
The motor in the NAPA Toyota Supra detonated, shattering the body and spewing shrapnel in all directions. The three-time series champion careened across the track and slapped the wall in the opposite lane. It came on the 18th anniversary of John Force Racing Funny Car driver Eric Medlen’s death at Gainesville, Florida, which led to safety improvements that Capps said helped save him Sunday, nearly two decades later and thousands of miles away at Chandler, Arizona.
The wreck also came nine months to the day after John Force’s vicious wall-banger at the Virginia Nationals, near Richmond, that still has the 16-time champion and 157-time winner sidelined with the lingering effects of a traumatic brain injury.
Capps had just clocked a 230.61-mph speed by the 660-foot mark on the 1,000-foot course when the chassis, as Capps put it, became “a convertible.” The ferocity of the blast split the body in two behind the supercharger. The car, listing to the right, spun around and sideswiped the wall.
He was uninjured, despite the equivalent of a blowtorch blasting by his face, and opponent Blake Alexander was not involved. But it triggered a flashback for Capps to last June 23 at Richmond, where Force’s catastrophe unfolded in front of him.
“I’m just, I’m living Force’s accident, right?” Capps recounted. “I know it’s coming. I had no control. Moving pretty fast, and I know it’s going to be bad. And sometimes when it’s coming, it’s going to be bad – and other times you feel like you’re in control.
“But I just kept picturing John’s accident that was right in front of us in Richmond. So I just hung on, and just tried to brace myself. And when it hit, I honestly didn’t expect to be awake afterwards, it was going that fast – and then I was still awake.”
That, Capps said, was because of the safety upgrades that resulted from extensive and collaborative research by a collection of companies following Medlen’s testing crash that claimed his life several days later in 2007, along with a pair of devastating wrecks for Force (one at Dallas six months after Medlen’s incident, the other last June).
Capps expressed gratitude for “padding, all the stuff that Eric Medlen’s and Force’s accidents and all those things over the years have thankfully been fixed and upgraded so that I could be OK right now. I feel fine,” Capps said. “No issues at all. You want to thank chassis builders and Toyota and the bodies and all the work that we do.”
Nevertheless, Capps said he wasn’t eager to watch the video of his incident: “Man, I am sure I’m not going to want to watch it. It was just ‘hang on’ and ‘this is going to be bad.’”
He said one of his first thoughts was “to get out as quick as I can and wave the camera” to signal to parents John and Betty Capps, who were following the action from home at San Luis Obispo, California, and wife Shelley and children Taylor and Caden, who were on hand at the racetrack, that he was unhurt.
The misfortune ruined a weekend in which Capps broke his 28-race winless streak with Saturday’s victory in the $10,000-to-win Mission Foods #2Fast2Tasty bonus race. He will head into next week’s Winternationals at Pomona, California, with a 29-race national-event winless streak, seeking his first victory since the September 2023 U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis.
Capps said, “I don’t know if I just didn’t catch it at the time, just didn’t expect to smoke (the tires), and then didn’t see Blake. But then it’s just blurry. It bangs so quick, so violent, and then it was a convertible again. But I had fire in my face when it did it. It just started going left.”
The cause of the explosion wasn’t immediately known.
One thing was, though.
“I’m bummed we lost, and I’m really bummed (about the expense to repair it),” he said.
Capps even joked, “Anybody want to throw some money as a partner? Want to come in? That’s the second new car. And I feel so bad for Guido and the guys (tuner Dean Antonelli and the crew). It’s a lot of money. Thank God we got NAPA Auto Care and Toyota to help us, but we’re a single-car team, and we’re just doing our best out here. So we’ll be OK. We’ve got a week (until the season’s third race, at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip), and I’ve got the best guys in the world. So the NAPA Boys will get it fixed. We can fix the car.”
