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Speed Talk Live for 03-13-08: With co host Riley Clermont. The ‘Force’ was with us this week…NHRA PowerAde Series driver Ashley Force co-hosted Speed Talk Live Thursday.
To a capacity, standing room only, crowd Force talked about making her living driving cars upwards of 330 mile an hour and about this weekends Gatornationals in Gainesville.
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Mark DeCotis from Florida Today visited with Ashley just prior to the 03-13-08 show. Here’s his article:
NHRA has another Force to reckon with
By Mark DeCotis,Florida Today, March 13
LAKE BUENA VISTA –– There's one number that says more about Ashley Force than anything else: She drove a 7,000-horsepower, nitro methane-burning beast of an NHRA Funny Car 324.12 mph.
That's four times as fast as the last 80-mph (10 mph over the speed limit) excursion you last made on the interstate, and it allowed her to cover a quarter-mile drag strip in 4.494 seconds. That's right: one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, one-thousand four, one-thousand ... never mind, she has already come and gone.
So where does the 5-foot, 7-inch, 125-pound, 25-year-old get what it takes to do that? For beginners, her father is John Force, the irrepressible 14-time Funny Car champion. So it's in her genes.
But there's more to it than strapping in behind what in essence is a bomb (the engine) and driving hellaciously fast. There's the learning process, especially from the mistakes Force admits she has made, and absorbing as much wisdom as possible from her father - as long as it doesn't come moments before she begins her run.
And despite the DNA, she just didn't step into a Funny Car ride, opting to take the slow and careful approach, graduating from Cal-State Fullerton with a communications degree and advancing through the ranks before reaching the elite level in 2007 and being named rookie of the year.
Now, two races into the 2008 season, she's eighth in points and heading into a race and a race track that holds deep meaning for her, her father and the entire John Force Racing team. It was at Gainesville last March where their teammate, Eric Medlen, was fatally injured in an accident during testing. The death could have derailed the entire effort, but the team rallied - only to see Force himself seriously injured in a wreck at Dallas in September.
So, with a fresh start in 2008 - Force himself is fourth in points after a long and arduous recovery - the team would love nothing more than to win in Sunday's elimination round.
"It would make something good come from this weekend," Ashley Force told reporters over coffee and unsweetened tea at Disney during a promotional stop for the 39th annual Gatornationals that go full bore beginning today at Gainesville Raceway.
"We love racing, and we love each town we go to, but this one, of course, is a tough one because we are thinking of last year, everything that happened. John Medlen (Eric's father) has actually been the one to talk to all of us and say, 'Let's go in there and we're just going to race. That's what Eric wants us to do.' ... He wants to go up there, put these cars together safely, and focus on our driving and maybe get to the winner's circle, and then we can say we did it in honor of Eric."
From Steven Cole Smith of the Orlando Sentinel who also visited prior to the show:
NHRA's Force family returns to where crewmate Eric Medlen died last year
By Stephen Cole Smith, Senitnel Staff Writer , March 13
John Force laughed and joked around when he first saw video of the drag race crash that nearly took his life last year. He was in a hospital bed in Dallas when his longtime public relations man, Dave Densmore, showed him the video via a laptop computer.
It showed Force's Castrol Ford Mustang Funny Car cross the finish line at more than 315 mph. A tire failed, the parachutes deployed, and the car essentially broke in half and hit the concrete wall.
Somehow he survived.
His daughter, Ashley, finishing out her own rookie season in Funny Cars, remembers watching her father watch the tape of his own crash. "He was making jokes about it. I know he was on medication, but he was laughing, doing a commentary on it, and I went out in the hall and started crying.
"Everyone wondered where I'd gone. I came back in and said, 'It's really upsetting. It might not upset you because you were probably blacked out, but from the outside, those of us who saw you go through that . . .'
"He apologized. He said, 'The only way I know how to deal with it is make a joke of it.' But to the people who were there, and love him, it'll never be easy to watch that video."
It was the second tragedy to hit their drag racing team. The first is what will make this weekend's 16th annual NHRA Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway a profoundly emotional experience for all the members of the Force teams.
After last year's Gatornationals, some of the Force crew stayed over to practice on Monday. Eric Medlen, 33, a longtime Force crewman, had a tire fail on his car during a practice run and the car crashed. After five days in a coma, Medlen, whom Force once described as "the son I never had," died. It was six months to the day before Force's own crash.
After Medlen's death, John Force himself, along with Eric Medlen's father, John, a crew chief for the team, began a safety initiative in Eric's name that likely resulted in changes that may have saved Force's life in his own accident. In July, the NHRA will mandate an updated chassis for all Funny Car drivers.
"Every time I watch that tape," Ashley said, "I can't imagine how he came out of that car alive. It was -- seriously -- it was a miracle. But things happen for a reason, and I think it took that, and the crash with Eric, to make this push for safety. Dad has won all the championships. But I think he'd like to be remembered for what he did for safety."
Ashley, 25, had her own bad crash last year in Seattle. "We've all benefited from what we've learned," says Ashley.
But John Force is back in the cockpit, and he'll be in Gainesville this weekend, as will Ashley.
The Force family is the best-known bunch in drag racing, and they became well known even to non-fans with the hit cable TV show, Driving Force, a reality program that followed perennial loose cannon John and his patient family.
Production had just resumed when Medlen was killed last year, and the show sort of went away, thought there is talk of reviving it, especially since Ashley's younger sisters, 19-year-old Courtney and 21-year-old Brittany, have started drag racing, too.
Meanwhile, the just-engaged Ashley -- to Danny Hood, a crewman with the team -- would love to make Gatornationals her first pro Funny Car victory.
"It would help make something good from what happened here. No race is easy, but this is going to be a tough one," she said
It was John Medlen, Eric's father, who Ashley gathered the team together and said, "Let's just go in there and race. That's what Eric would want us to do. He wouldn't want us to be crying, to be reliving everything that happened here last year. He'd just want us to race, and maybe get to the winner's circle, where we can say we did it in his honor."
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