Photos by Ron Lewis, Mike Burghardt, NHRA
Competition Plus’ Water-Cooler Topics From The Arizona Nationals at Firebird Motorsports Park at Chandler, Ariz.
1 – PAUL LEE FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH – Paul Lee has a lot of achievements in life. He owns successful automotive aftermarket companies. He is an expert poker player. He has earned a law degree – one of three college degrees, to be exact. He won several alcohol Funny Car races. He even survived a widowmaker heart attack several years ago. So, no one could say he has been unfortunate.
But he never won an NHRA Funny Car Wally trophy – until Sunday at the Arizona Nationals at Firebird Motorsports Park in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler.
He joined Greg Anderson (Pro Stock) and Shawn Langdon (Top Fuel) on the winners podium.
Lee’s first triumph, at the expense of reigning class champion Austin Prock, was a tremendously sentimental one, for it came 18 years to the day after Eric Medlen’s passing. Eric Medlen’s father, John Medlen, is Lee’s co-crew chief along with tuner/builder/racer Jonnie Lindberg.
“I had a feeling about today,” Lee said as he received his trophy. “We prayed about it today. John Medlen says the team prayer every Sunday, and he asked Eric to watch over us. There was just a calm in our pit. We’re blessed. Today was surreal. This trophy is going straight to John Medlen. He’s the strongest man I know. He’s a blessed man, and he has blessed us with his presence on our team.”
Moments after watching Lee clinch the victory, John Medlen said of his son, “I think he pushed that car right into the winners circle.”
Lee also credited Lindberg, a Top Alcohol Funny Car champion turned Funny Car racer turned crew chief. Lee likened him to drag-racing legend Don Garlits for his analytical thinking, driving skill, and leadership.
Curiously, Lee’s only final rounds in Funny Car competition have come in the past eight months, including at Seattle last July and at Las Vegas in November 2024. In all three, Lee has had to face Prock. On Sunday, he denied Prock the chance to record the 300th victory for John Force Racing (JFR).
Prock had a lot of emotion attached to this final round, as well. Prock grew up around the beloved Eric Medlen and looked up to him when Medlen competed at JFR with John Medlen tuning the car. Moreover, the JFR group still is dealing with the grief of losing longtime, but retired, crew chief Bernie Fedderly last week. Along with John Force’s performance guru Austin Coil, Fedderly and John Medlen formed the trio who helped orchestrate the Funny Car legend’s glory years.
In one of the Funny Car semifinals, Prock raced against teammate Jack Beckman. And even after Prock eliminated him, Beckman said, “We’re racing in memory of Bernie Fedderly. There’s a lot on the line (in the final round) against Lee. That 300th is up there. If NHRA would let me push on (Prock’s) car (to help him down the dragstrip), I would.”
One more curious connection to this story involves Chad Green. Two weekends ago, in the season’s only other event to date, Green defeated Lee in the first round. The two found themselves paired once again in the opening round at Phoenix. Green won that Gainesville battle and went on to earn his first Funny Car victory. This time, Lee won their match and went on to win the first of his career, as well.
2 – CAPPS HAS FLASHBACK TO FORCE CRASH – 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.”
3 – ANDERSON WINS UGLY PRO STOCK FINAL – Drag racing has no start-finish line. It has a starting line, and it has a finish line. For the Pro Stock class, those two lines are a quarter-mile apart. But Sunday evening in the Pro Stock final, the starting line pretty much was the finish line. That sounds strange, but it’s completely fitting.
It was as though neither Pro Stock driver wanted to win the final round, but both wanted nothing more than to triumph in this rematch of the season-opening Gatornationals. And even when Anderson was declared the winner, he said he had no idea what he had done or why he won or what Glenn, who beat him at Gainesville two weeks ago, had done. Anderson is 64 years old and constantly wisecracks about being a graybeard. Glenn, too, fondly gets in his digs to his mentor. But Anderson was not going crazy Sunday. The final round was the weirdest even the experts have seen in the sport’s history.
Both Anderson and Glenn committed foul starts, and both cars lost power immediately.
Anderson saw his win light come on, and he said later that he didn’t know how he could red light – and have his car quit on him, to boot – and still win. He said he knew he had red-lit at the Christmas Tree – jumped the gun – but didn’t have any idea what Glenn, his KB Titan Racing teammate, was doing. So he figured he needed to try to get his HendrickCars.com Chevy Camaro to hook up again and was supremely frustrated he couldn’t do that. “I had no chance of winning that race,” he said, but little did he know he already had won it. Glenn, too, was frustrated for his own reasons.
“We both blew it,” Anderson declared. “We wanted to put on a good show, and that wasn’t much of a show. They say there’s no such thing as an ugly win. Well, that was an ugly win. But a win is a win is a win. We’ll forget about the details of it. The Great Lord shined on me today.”
Only two of the scheduled 20 races are in the books so far, but Anderson’s dubious victory put him seven points ahead of Glenn in the early standings.
4 – STAVRINOS DOUBLES IN PRO MOD – Mike Stavrinos hauled his race car across the country, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But it was worth the trouble, for he ended the weekend as winner of not only the Arizona Nationals but the first two events of the Congruity Pro Mod Series season. On Saturday, he claimed the victory in the rain-postponed Gatornationals. He defeated veteran Rickie Smith both times.
5 – LOTS OF DISAPPOINTED, SELF-CRITICAL DRIVERS – In Top Fuel, Shawn Reed called his weekend “disappointing” and said, “It’s like a déjà vu of last year so far. I think this team is a lot better than what we’ve shown these past two weekends. Me as a driver, I feel like I’ve taken a step back again. I don’t know why or how to get my brain back into it. We’ve got to make it down the track to get the data. I need to get better and get my head straight. I’m looking at the Tree, and I can see people in the stands moving. And it’s crazy, subconsciously, what that does. At least we don’t have to wait long to do it again.”
Like Reed, Ida Zettertröm dropped out Sunday in the first round of Top Fuel, and she said, “It’s hard to lose again. I feel like I’ve gotten good at losing, and I don’t like it. But at the same time, I feel like we made really good progress. We had great turnarounds. We made good runs with the car and good data. So, I feel very good moving into Pomona because this was the kind of progress we wanted to see in Gainesville but couldn’t find because of the tricky conditions. Now I feel like we got the right start to the season to keep going. We are rolling into Pomona with some newfound confidence. We had some brand-new stuff in the car this week that I’d never used before, and I feel like it’s getting better and better. I just need some more runs to dial it in.”
Gatornationals Top Fuel winner Antron Brown disparaged his own reaction times but balanced his critique of the weekend by recognizing that his team gathered a lot of useful data about hot tracks that will come in handy in the summer months.
Funny Car’s Daniel Wilkerson said he was “very disappointed in myself. My team deserves better, SCAG deserves better, our dealers we have every weekend deserve better. I’ll be over it after we hit the gas Friday at the Winternationals. But this one hurts, because the guys gave me a bad-ass car.”
Matt Hagan took responsibility for his quarterfinal exit, saying, “It was a tough weekend to go out second round when we’re used to going some more rounds than that. We qualified 10th, so we want to work on our qualifying position as a group. The loss fell on the driver today. We got beat on a little baby holeshot. I’m sure (Austin) Prock had a hole out and we did, too. We got to the stripe before he did as far as the E.T. says. He had a .070 light to my .078 light, so I didn’t get it done. And it falls on me. I have to dig deeper.”
Funny Car driver Buddy Hull offered some encouragement: “No one had their best day at this race. Everyone struggled a bit, including us. It’s good to keep that in mind, because otherwise it’s very easy to be hard on yourself when you’re dialed into competing at such a high level.”
6 – WATCH OUT COME LAS VEGAS – Top Fuel’s Josh Hart says he has seen flashes of success that should provide direction to make his team a championship-contending one. But he’s being patient, understanding he isn’t quite there yet. “We tested three different combinations at this event, and we found one that we like for the long season ahead,” the R+L Carriers team owner-driver said. He said he’s “prepared for the endurance NHRA challenge of 2025, and we feel that we will be a real contender by Vegas.” That four-wide event is April 11-13.
7 – LANGDON REMEMBERS CREW MEMBER, THANKS CROWD – After winning the Top Fuel final, Shawn Langdon gave another shout-out to clutch specialist Jeff Leister.
“He had a health scare coming back from Gainesville,” Langdon said, “so hopefully he’s watching and has a smile on his face. This Wally’s for you, Jeff. We miss you and can’t wait for you to come back.”
Langdon also thanked the Phoenix crowd, which delivered a third straight announced Saturday sellout and turned out in droves Sunday. “We appreciate everybody coming today. The sold-out crowd speaks volumes about all the great fans here in Arizona,” he said. “We thank you guys very much.”
8 – YOUNG GUNS LOOK TO TURN PRO – For those who fret that the nitro-class pipeline isn’t getting filled, it’s going to be alright. Dylan Winefsky, 20, and McKailen Haddock, 18, will be returning Monday to Firebird Motorsports Park to pursue their licensing procedures for the Funny Car class.
Haddock is the son of former Top Fuel and current Funny Car driver Terry Haddock, and he has served on his dad’s crew since he was in junior high school.
Julie Nataas, 28, has been testing in Del Worsham’s Funny Car that Bobby Bode has raced in the PRO Superstar Shootout and the first two NHRA national events. Her plans for the rest of this season are unknown at this point.
For right now, Maddi Gordon will continue to pursue a Top Alcohol Funny Car championship, hoping to add one to the family mantel to complement father Doug Gordon’s three. But by the start of next season, she’ll be stepping into a Top Fuel dragster for Ron Capps Motorsports.
Melanie Johnson, daughter of 13-time Top Fuel championship tuner Alan Johnson, is starting her driving career in the Top Alcohol Dragster (TAD) class with the McPhillips Racing entry. Her immediate goal is to earn a championship in that class, following in the footsteps of her father and her late uncle, Blaine Johnson. Together the brothers recorded four consecutive TAD titles (1991-94).
9 – BRITTANY FORCE GETS SEMIFINAL SURPRISE – Having posted a commendable start to her weekend, Brittany Force’s Monster Energy dragster let her down at the starting line as she lined up against eventual winner Shawn Langdon in the semifinal round. The crew shut off the car and she didn’t get the chance to go for her first victory of the season. Crew chief John Collins said, “It looked like something failed in the valve cover in the burnout, leaking a little bit of oil. We didn’t want to take a chance to run the car. Safety first.”
10 – DID YOU NOTICE? – Veteran NTT IndyCar Series racer Graham Rahal was one of Jack Beckman’s associate sponsors this weekend. Beckman’s PEAK Chevrolet Camaro Funny Car sported the decals from Graham Rahal Performance, one of the businesses in his portfolio. It makes sense that Rahal would be associated with John Force Racing, given that the NHRA legend is his father-in-law. Rahal attended drag racing’s Gatornationals two weeks ago, but was competing this weekend in the IndyCar Thermal Grand Prix “next door” in Southern California. He finished 11th. Beckman advanced to the semifinals Sunday at Firebird Motorsports Park.
