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.

The top eight points-earners in each class at the completion of the ADRL
Eastern Race Fuels DRAGSTOCK IV event, Sept. 14-15, qualify for the AlphaTrade
Battle for the Belts championship eliminators, Oct. 12 at the AlphaTrade ADRL
World Finals.

It would seem that Camp
Stanley and I have
established something of a tradition. I’m not sure if doing something three
years in a row makes it a tradition, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and
say it does. In any case, me and the irrepressible Mr. Stanley recently made our
annual pilgrimage to the Southern Hemisphere to take in a major drag racing
event.

In 2005 we went to Western Sydney International Dragway for
the Nitro Champs event, and last year we went to Brisbane – Willowbank Raceway
in Ipswich to be exact – for the
Winternationals. This is the season finale and the biggest event of the year in
Australian drag racing. We had a great time last year, so when it came time to
plan the 2007 version of our trans-Pacific journey, the “Winters” was our
destination of choice.

Logistically, the trip was a bit of a challenge. A ride from
my home in Greenville, South Carolina, to the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina,
with Roger Richards, then on to Los Angeles. From there it’s a 12-hour
overnight run to Auckland, New Zealand, before boarding another plane for a
4-and-a-half-hour jog across the Tasmin
Sea and into Brisbane. Victor Bray’s PR and web guru
Richard Smith was kind enough to pick us up at the airport and take us to our
motel. (The less said about that the better. Suffice it to say that there were
places to sleep, and a place to shower. And no one was bitten by anything).

What a weekend.  What
a weekend!  Seldom – make that never, as
far as we’re concerned – has a first-time NHRA national event scored as highly
with the fans and participants as did the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals at
the track that now bears the high-performance parts company’s name.  Simplified to “SREMP” from the incredibly
cumbersome “Summit Racing Equipment Motorsports Park,” but already being called
“Summit Motorsports Park” by many, the majority of those at the facility
continued to refer to the edifice as merely “Norwalk,” and that’s probably what
it will forever be called by the cognoscenti. 

Okay, we’ll acknowledge that the elapsed times and speeds
weren’t what we’ve seen at other facilities under other weather circumstances,
but has the fact that the numbers produced at the Mopar Mile-High Nationals in
Denver ever detracted from the overall ambience of the event?         

While it will come as a surprise to some, fans and racers
are more adaptable than we sometimes give them credit for. Yeah, we’d all like
to see every fueler running 4.4s, but when they’re all running a tenth or two
slower but they’re glued together from the start to finish lines the numbers
become less important.  The “show” is
determined by the competition more so than the numbers, and at Norwalk the show
was everything – and it had something for every taste.  From Kenny Bernstein’s first appearance in a
final round since I-don’t-know-when (okay, it was in Seattle in 1989), to Erica
Enders’ slicking Greg Anderson into a timed-out redlight, this was a race from
which everyone could take away some kind of special memory.

If you’re attending the Summit Nationals we
have a hint for you on Sunday: Arrive early. The traffic on Saturday
was pretty intense, with even NHRA president Tom Compton being a
“victim” of arriving a little later than he’d planned. He neared the
track around 10:00 AM, and then sat largely unmoving for quite a
while. “I’ll be heading out a lot earlier tomorrow,” he told us, a
sentiment that was echoed by many others.

It’s that kind of race. Walk the pits and you’re going to bump into
people you haven’t seen for a while. Case in point, former IHRA Top
Fuel World Champion Paul Romine, cruising around with 1974 IHRA Spring
Nationals champ Dale Funk (I remember because he beat our car, the Jade
Grenade, in the finale. They shut us off with an oil and fuel leak, and
Funk ran Low E.T. and Top Speed of the Meet on a single!).

We asked Romine what he’s been up to, and he told us, “I’m workin’ more
than I have in a long time. I’m fishing a little bit, I’m buildin’ a
couple of airplanes, one of which is a float plane so I can go fishing
in Canada next summer. I’ve also just finished building a Harley, and
I’m here in Norwalk just to see how much nicer this facility is today
than it was when I was racing.”

Romine admitted he’d race again “in a heartbeat,” and also admitted
that he’s working on a program for an A/Fuel Dragster, or, as he put
it, “a fuel car without a top!”

The
comparisons were inevitable. After four years at Bowling
Green, Kentucky’s Beech Bend
Raceway, the switch to National Trail Raceway in Hebron, Ohio,
left many lamenting the loss of the venue where the popular NHRA Hot Rod
Reunion made its first East Coast appearance in 2003. Beech Bend, with its unique covered grandstands and
park-like expanse of rolling, tree-lined grounds seemed the perfect compliment
to a show which featured the best in nostalgia drag racing and vintage hot
rods.

By the
time the winner’s photos were snapped late Sunday afternoon, however, memories
of the weekend near Columbus,
Ohio, were more than likely
replacing those of the first four years in the minds of many. The logistical
and political wrangling that forced officials of the Wally Parks NHRA
Motorsports Museum, promoters of the event, to find a new home mattered little
to the fans who came to see the cars, and stars, of drag racing’s venerated
early years.

Once
the sensory assault began it was just like old times. For three days a non-stop
parade of Gassers, Super Stockers, Funny Cars, Top Fuelers, and everything in
between rolled two by two to the starting line, putting on an awesome display
of smoke, fire, and thunder, much to the delight of the gathered faithful.

If Chuck Samuel fails to
make an impression on you, you’re obviously dead to the world. Coming out of
the tough Chicago street racing scene, this Sycamore, IL resident has
repeatedly proven that he’s totally unafraid of a challenge, be it from
competition or technology, and time hasn’t changed the fighting stance of a
hardcore street racer. Tenacious and pugnacious, he’s conquered various race
series over the past two decades, from

NMCA Super Street

to Fun Ford Weekend,
and along the way hasn’t been shy about expressing his opinions: “People are
afraid of change,” he once said regarding a hard-won technical innovation. “If
they want the manifold, get the fuel injection.”

I remember that occasion
distinctly. It was June 29, 1997, during a qualifying round at the National
Muscle Car Association’s Dixie Nationals in Dinwiddie, VA.
At the time I was serving as editor of the old NMCA magazine and was wandering
through the pits at the Virginia
Motorsports Park
taking pictures when announcer Al Tucci came over the PA declaring that Chuck
Samuel’s purple ’92 Camaro had just broken into the sevens – a 7.95 later
backed up with a 7.96. I remember my amazement – and my shock. Samuel wasn’t
just the first driver of a 10.5” tire car to break into the 7s; he absolutely
shattered the previous elapsed time record of 8.33. No one could touch
him. 

It’s
been just about 16 months since the Northwind dragster was found in Canada, a
deal made, and the car brought back to the USA. After that, things got a lot
tougher than anyone could ever have imagined at the time. There were lots of
missing items, the chassis was extended longer with a completely different roll
cage, body parts needed working over, there was no front axle and no steering
wheel, and the biggest problem of all was that there was no tail section for
the full body. There wasn’t even a way to figure out where and how it all had
to be mounted.

Now,
after all these months the car is complete, and what an exciting journey it has
been. The support from those who wanted to see this car come alive again was
downright overwhelming. Most of them had heard about the reasons the car was
being rebuilt, and that’s what pushed them into helping however they could.

The terrible cancer scare that Ed McCulloch endured in 2005 was a rallying
point for everyone as the project got wings and flew over all the hurdles in
its way. There were many, many memories relived during the reconstruction of
the car; memories of “Ace” McCulloch and his impact on drag racing in the
Northwest. The farmer from Forest Grove, Oregon, has undoubtedly touched a lot
of lives.

Head is truly the Last of
the Mohicans among full tour Funny Car independents ...

 

Jim Head admits there’s no
rhyme or reason why he does what he does. The Columbus, Ohio-based engineering
wizard describes his role as being the “David” that keeps the “Goliaths” of the
NHRA POWERade Funny Car world in check.

Stone-slinger is a title
Head proudly carries into battle. He’s a throw-back to the old days when an
unsponsored driver could effectively duke it out with the giants.

Nothing brings pleasure to
this seasoned veteran more than sending the big ones hobbling back to the pits.
Head says the nature of modern Funny Car actually affords him a better
opportunity to compete than Top Fuel – a class that he admittedly just doesn’t
like. “No offense,” says Head, “I just love the Funny Cars.”