We lost a champion the day Eric Medlen was killed, but our loss pales in light of the loss suffered by the Medlen family.  They lost a loved one, something from which it’s possible they may never recover.

But, John Medlen has not retreated into an emotional vacuum, nor has he disappeared from the track.  In fact, even though he’s no longer tuning a specific car, his position at John Force Racing is now undoubtedly more important now than it ever was in the past.          

The effort that Medlen is making towards making the cars safer for every driver certainly can’t be discounted, for the programs he’s heading will eventually pay huge safety dividends for every drag racing competitor.

We caught up with him recently to find out how his research is going, and how close we might be to seeing completely different race cars beneath the carbon fiber shells we’ve all come to know and love.

 

We lost a champion the day Eric Medlen was killed, but our loss pales in light of the loss suffered by the Medlen family.  They lost a loved one, something from which it’s possible they may never recover.

But, John Medlen has not retreated into an emotional vacuum, nor has he disappeared from the track.  In fact, even though he’s no longer tuning a specific car, his position at John Force Racing is now undoubtedly more important now than it ever was in the past.          

The effort that Medlen is making towards making the cars safer for every driver certainly can’t be discounted, for the programs he’s heading will eventually pay huge safety dividends for every drag racing competitor.

We caught up with him recently to find out how his research is going, and how close we might be to seeing completely different race cars beneath the carbon fiber shells we’ve all come to know and love.

 

COMPPLUS: John, tell us about the new safety efforts you’ve made with the Force race teams since the accident that claimed Eric’s life.

MEDLEN: The majority of what we’ve physically done to the cars involves the widening of the cages, the head padding and the helmet and trying to secure the driver’s head.  Now, all of that hasn’t been necessarily visible because of some constraints we’re still trying to discover, but more than anything else right now we’re working on data acquisition.

We’re trying to understand what the maximum frequency the body can deal with, that causes a driver to lose consciousness and possibly his life.  We’re trying to figure out what the vibration is that leads to permanent brain damage, and we’re gathering that information in leaps and bounds.         

As is the case with all information gathering, you perceive what you think is wrong, or what needs to be corrected, and after you begin gathering data you realize that’s not really the direction you need to be going in.  You suddenly realize that you need to be heading in a completely different direction.  We’ve placed a chassis accelerometer underneath the seat in the cars.  We’ve also placed sensors on the roof of the cars and even in the driver’s ears so that after a run the driver can see for himself just what type of body stress he’s gone through.

When we put all of the information we’ve gathered together it presents an interesting picture.  We’re building a new chassis for Robert (Hight) right now that has all of our current data incorporated into it.  We’ve addressed the construction of this chassis to take into account everything we’ve learned to date about what’s really happening to the drivers out there.  We think that’s going to be a big (safety) advantage.

We’re also helping Weld design a new wheel that will have a better bead seal to help hold the tire on the wheel better.  We’re also going to feed these different iterations of chassis flex into the new design to make it as safe as possible.

So, everything that we’re doing right now is more information gathering than anything else.  We’ve done the obvious, immediate things that all of the biomechanical guys have agreed makes common sense.  The padding on the roll cages, all of that can and has been done immediately.  Those were very positive changes (to the cars).

Robert (recently) hit the wall at 171 miles an hour and actually moved the concrete barrier one foot, and he didn’t have a headache or any other problems afterwards.  He had no blurred vision, nothing like that, and stayed completely conscious the whole time.  That was all the result of the changes we’ve already made to the cars.

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COMPPLUS:   Where did you come up with the concept of where to place this new instrumentation on the cars?

MEDLEN:  It came from a team of people that included me, John Melvin’s biomechanical people, and the engineers at Ford.  Data acquisition is a big thing with those people, and they’ve been tremendously helpful.

At that point Medlen opened up a series of chassis blueprints on the computer, blueprints that could be twisted and bent to simulate a car in action.

We’ve seen physical evidence of some failure points on the chassis, and these new drawings address those problems.  This computer program shows some harmonic separation in the chassis that we never knew existed before.  Every analysis company that we’ve had look at this information comes back with the same thing:  It’s all harmonics, and how we address that issue is what counts.

 

COMPPLUS:  If we visually inspect Robert’s new car will we be able to easily spot the differences between it and his current car?

MEDLEN:  It’s not the placement of the tubes; it’s the reinforcement points that are different.  The concentration of the tubing in those locations, both vertical and the diagonals, is important.  Our studies have shown that the harmonics problems terminate in the areas where the tubing comes together.  What we’ve done is to add mass in those areas.  We hope a change in the fusing shape of those welds will make a difference.  We’re trying to eliminate the possibility of a chassis failure in the event of a catastrophic tire failure.  There’s no one thing that will fix these problems.  It’s all a chain reaction that we have to be prepared for.  The more we look at it, the more we try to concentrate on the whole picture.

 

COMPPLUS:  How much more is likely to come down the pike after the new car is completed and evaluated?

MEDLEN:  The new chassis is just the start.  John (Force) is putting up a new building in Indy that’s about 40,000 square feet.  We’re heading towards expanding our machine shop to 12,000 square feet, and we’re also heading towards our own chassis fabrication (Hight’s new car is being built by Murf McKinney – Ed.).  We’re going to do our own body mounting and have our own paint shop, too.  We’re trying to control the complete evolution of what we’re doing.

Ford Motor Company is developing, with us, a shake fixture that will twist and shake these chassis to huge g-force loads so that we can destroy chassis and make them fail.  In that way we can make changes and build the next one to be even safer.  That’s our goal rather than to wait for another catastrophic accident that takes someone’s life.

It’s actually called a ‘frequency ring analysis.’  They actually ‘ring’ the chassis like you would ring a bell, and they look at where those harmonics come together on the chassis at the intersections (of the tubing).  What that shows us is some of the potential damage the harmonics can do.  So, we’ll address those problems with more (chassis) mass to counteract it.  We’re still trying to establish what the base line harmonic frequency of these chassis actually is.

Now calling up photos taken at Ford’s engineering department in Dearborn, Medlen points to a spaghetti-like pile of wiring that’s attached to what appears to be dozens of sensor pickup points on a Funny Car chassis that’s mounted on a stand.

This is the system that’s measuring those harmonics and making the chassis ‘ring.’  When the chassis is hit with these harmonics the sensors pick up the frequency information, and that helps us determine how things change when we make changes to the chassis itself.

These sensors are attached to what we believe to be the critical parts of the chassis, and after a test you can actually see, on the computer, how the harmonics move through the car as it goes down the track.  We want to learn what’s going on at every point on the track, because when we look back, these critical areas are the areas that failed in the accident.

There are eight people working on this project full time at Ford and three more at Delphi, plus our people.  You can’t get to where we need to get without that (kind of assistance).  We don’t have the manpower.  One guy can’t do it.  There are too many areas to be looked at.

We have to take the data we observed from Eric’s accident and go from that point to try and duplicate that data in testing, and then fix it to make sure that what we’ve done has some positive results, and doesn’t cause a failure somewhere else on the car.

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COMPPLUS:  When you started on this project did you already have some of the knowledge you needed?

MEDLEN:  Well, there were things we always worried about but never pursued.  We never had any (hard) evidence of these problems.  What we worry about are things like these engines, which used to make 4,000 foot-pounds of torque and now they make 5,000, 6,000, 7,000, and now it’s 7,800.  How much stress can the chassis tubing handle?  The amplitude of the harmonics just goes right through the roof.

We didn’t know that what happened to the tire (on Eric’s car) could ever happen.  Some people will say that was a freak accident, but not when you figure that with 40 fuel cars they run about 4.7 seconds, well, to make a long story short, it takes 13 years of drag racing to have the same amount of time on the tires that the NASCAR guys have in one race.  So, the instance of failures is much, much greater in what we do (than what they experience in NASCAR).  But, because these failures don’t happen that often we tend to discount the nature of them and truly, it’s there.  The more we looked, the more concerned we got about potential tire failures.

When the tire failed in the accident we didn’t know a tire could even come off that way, and that scenario could exist and be duplicated.  We never saw anything like that before, but looking back we could see signs of (the potential) failure in advance.  The burden’s on us now, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

 

COMPPLUS:  Do you think we’re going to reach a point some time down the road where a rule will be instituted that says something like you can’t run a chassis for more than, say, 123 runs?

MEDLEN:  What we’re lobbying for is much more SFI-mandated constraints on the construction of these cars, much more in the way of constraints on the construction of the wheel, things like that.  So, SFI becomes the lawmakers and NHRA becomes the enforcer. 

The level of technology and the pursuit of this information takes a whole other entity that needs to be devoted to nothing but that.  What we believe we’ll see happening as this new data becomes available are things like only certified welders will be allowed to weld these chassis together.  All of these welding intersections will have to be magnafluxed, and after a certain number of runs a chassis will have to pass some sort of sonic test to make sure everything’s as it should be.  We need more criteria in insuring that the chassis is what it’s supposed to be and the wheels are what they’re supposed to be, things like that.  Everything that can possibly fail needs to have some sort of certification on it.

Something will come out of this that will make these cars a safer environment for the drivers

 

COMPPLUS:  When all is said and done, what do you think all of this new technology will do in terms of increasing the cost of these cars?

MEDLEN:  I don’t think there’ll hardly be any increase.  It’ll just be a matter of how you weld (the chassis) and how you assemble it.  It may add a couple of pounds to the cars, which is nothing.

The other thing that we’re doing that’s really, really important is that we’re scanning the driver’s heads. (Calls up the image of a green head on the computer screen.)  This is Robert’s.  If you scan the drivers heads you can then machine the interior foam of the helmet to perfectly match the contours of the driver’s head because what we see from all the helmet manufacturers is that each one is slightly different on the inside.  Some of those helmets fit a particular driver better than others, and that fit is one of the primary reasons one helmet may be better than another.  These helmets are pretty much designed to fit a crash dummy, but there isn’t a driver out there whose head is shaped like a crash dummy’s.  One of the Ford engineers pointed that out, and a lightbulb went off in my head when I heard that, so we’re going to machine these helmets to fit each of our drivers

The helmet manufacturers could buy this software and the hardware to scan the driver’s heads for only $2,800.  If that stuff was available a driver could go to, say, the Simpson booth at the races and sit down and have his head scanned and a few weeks later they’d send him a helmet that would actually fit properly.

If you’re going to drive these race cars, and you have a tire failure like Eric had, where the oscillation was greater than 90.gs, do you want to be wearing a helmet that was designed to Snell standards as a single impact unit, you know, where it was dropped on the floor or something like that for testing?  You’re going to want a $3,500 helmet that fits you and only you, and perfectly.

The level of brain injury between a helmet that fits properly and one that doesn’t could mean life or death, or it could easily leave you completely immobile to the point where you couldn’t even move your eyes.  This kind of helmet could result in your having a much better quality of life at the very least.

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COMPPLUS:  Do you think that this new level of technology will be met with some resistance by the drivers?

MEDLEN:  Of course. There are guys out here who would drive in a pair of overalls, and don’t think a firesuit is even necessary.  It’s the responsibility of SFI and the sanctioning bodies to be the sheriffs out here.  If we didn’t have those sheriffs the speed limit would be 400.  Somebody has got to say, ‘This is what’s safe.’  We don’t want to ruin the sport with cars going in the grandstands and things like that just because of someone’s lack of knowledge.

I think if every driver could see what Eric’s race car looked like after that accident, none of them would resist any of these changes, not one.

 

COMPPLUS:  Do you think this kind of technology might eventually find its way onto the football field?

MEDLEN:  That’s one of the focuses of this whole thing.  That’s one of the big things that’s wrong with today’s football helmets – they don’t fit each individual perfectly.  They’re padded after the fact.  That padding is just a ‘comfort zone,’ and it shouldn’t be that way.  The brain wasn’t designed for side-to-side impacts, but it can take front and back impacts.  On the football field most of the hits are on the side, so this technology should be able to be utilized in every type of impact sport.

 

COMPPLUS:  Is this project going to be on going for the balance of your career?

MEDLEN:  I promised Eric that in my mind. Ya know, his image comes to me all the time, and he keeps saying, ‘Make these race cars safe, Dad, ‘cause these guys are going to keep on drivin’ ‘em whether they’re safe or not.’  So, I’m going to try and make these cars as safe as we possibly can based on the knowledge that we have right now.  I won’t quit, because I don’t want one more name added to that list (of those who have gone).

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