SNOHOMISH, Wash. — Across the 84,000-square-foot John Force Racing shop in Brownsburg, Ind., away from the museum filled with colorful and meaningful Funny Cars and connected by a catwalk that stretches above the team’s four race haulers, is a refuge.
It’s a room dedicated to the memory of Eric Medlen, the spirited and skilled young Funny Car driver and popular teammate to John Force who passed away 15 years ago after suffering a closed-head injury during a testing accident at Florida’s Gainesville Raceway. (He was a victim of the violent force of unprecedented side-to-side shaking that slammed his head into the roll bars inside his cockpit.)
The room is more than a collection of Medlen’s car and fire suit, it showcases photos and memorabilia that also give a nod to his rodeo days as a calf roper back in his northern California hometown.
Curiously, it’s a comforting place, a sanctuary, something almost sacred for Force.
It floats above the fab, chassis and machine shops that hum robustly as part of the Eric Medlen Project. Those shops manufacture parts and pieces for the everyday grind of the NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series, and those parts and pieces carry an extra sanction for safety.
It’s a place the Southern California-based, 16-time Funny Car champion makes a point to visit as soon as he gets to the Brownsburg facility. It’s a place where he can smile at the barrage of fun memories (“You’ve got to remember happiness,” Force said) and reflect on the fact that Medlen’s accident that March in 2007 led to safety improvements in Funny Cars that saved Force’s life when he was seriously injured that September at the Texas Motorplex.
So the Eric Medlen room is a place where Force can wrestle with his torments and try to understand why Medlen, with such promise, was such a meteor across the NHRA sky and why he himself was spared.
The answers aren’t in there … but maybe they are.
“That’s why we keep the room upstairs, to never forget. That’s a special room up there,” Force, now 73, said. “Every time I come here, I walk upstairs. It’s a great feeling to be there, but yet it’s also … that shadow still hangs over. The parents (Mimi and John, who is co-crew chief for Ron Capps today), how they handled it, I don’t know. I can say I believe I’m here because of him, which doesn’t make any sense to me.
“That’s why I can’t leave the sport. I’ve got to stay and I’ve got to help build it any way I can.”
“The Eric Medlen Project” is emblazoned in bold lettering on the John Force Racing shop in Brownsburg. But Force is quick to give all the credit for establishing it to John Meden.
Force said Eric Medlen’s death “put his dad on a mission. He’s the one that did it all. PRO, the chassis builders, just everybody (became) involved to try to make it safer. John Medlen was the guy who led the charge. Everybody wanted to be part of it. We saw things were going wrong.”
Immediately, the sport adopted stronger chassis, roll-cage padding and a seven-point driver harness — and paid attention to more protective helmets — and that — what Force called “a lot of people working together” — is what kept Force from his young protégé’s fate.
His car broke apart during an elimination round against Kenny Bernstein at Texas Motorplex on Sept. 23, 2007 — exactly six months after Eric Medlen was removed from life support in a Florida hospital.
Bernstein was unhurt, but Force was airlifted from the race track to a Dallas trauma center with a compound fracture of his left ankle, a broken left wrist, a deep cut to his right knee and several broken fingers. After extensive rehab and in defiance of doctors’ predictions that he never would race and might not even walk again, Force was back in his Funny Car in February 2008 for preseason testing.
Force was on his way again, on his way to what has turned into 155 victories and 16 championships.
But Force never has forgotten the impact Eric Medlen had on his life. At both his Brownsburg shop and his Yorba Linda, Calif., facility stands a statue of Medlen. Fans decorate the statue, leave flowers and even come and eat ice cream at its base.
Medlen had once told a racer pal who was sad to eat ice cream. “You can’t ever be sad when you’re eating ice cream,” he said. Sonoma Raceway hosts an ice cream social in Medlen’s honor following its NHRA event.
The statues are there, Force said, “because I care about him and when you love somebody, you don’t just let it pass. Got another statue of Eric at the Yorba Linda, Calif., headquarters. Have it in the front lobby. Got him right by Ronald McDonald.”
The fun-loving Medlen would have loved that; he would’ve thought it was perfect.