Did Goodyear tire kill Medlen?
Eric Medlen, 33, died March 23, four days after he crashed in testing at Gainesville, Fla. He died from a brain injury, which Melvin said came from a violent side-to-side shaking of Medlen's head after a flat tire caused the car to vibrate uncontrollably. The injury occurred before the car hit a concrete retaining wall at approximately 120 mph.
"I've been involved in racing safety since 1992 and I've never seen anything quite like this," said Melvin (an engineer from Wayne State University in Detroit and an expert on racing safety whom Force has hired to help analyze crash data, who helped pioneer crash-data recording devices for race cars and in recent years has been a safety consultant to NASCAR.
Force was told the shaking of the car after the tire blew was comparable to what would happen to a helicopter if a blade came off. He received a report Tuesday from Goodyear blaming the tire's failure on a puncture. Excerpts from the Indy Star
04/08/07 In a drivers meeting prior to the Houston event, NHRA senior vice president of racing operations Graham Light relayed information attributed to Dr. John Melvin, a biomedical research scientist before his retirement from General Motors. In a Sirius Satellite Radio interview on March 30, Melvin told John Kernan that he and a group of NHRA officials, including Light, had examined the remains of Medlen's chassis and concluded that Medlen had probably "shaken" to death. That is in line with a JFR statement that indicated the tire shake was beyond anything ever recorded in the sport. sbsun.com
04/01/07 Eric Medlen, according to reports today, wasn't killed by the impact with the wall. From what we're gathering, Medlen was literally shaken to death, shaken so hard that the brain tissue was ripped apart. Something happened to the Goodyear tire, and the car shook more violently than anything previously recorded by the NHRA on its black boxes. Medlen was mortally wounded before he hit the wall.
"Eric suffered from a traumatic brain injury with diffuse axonal injury, or DAI," said Dr. Joseph Layon, professor of anesthesiology, surgery and medicine and the chief of critical care medicine at Shands UF. "Survival rates associated with DAI are low.
"Despite receiving the most aggressive treatment, Eric continued to have uncontrollable intracranial pressure. His body lost the ability to manage its salt and water levels and he began displaying the complicating factors associated with DAI.
While it is possible that Medlen's head bounced between the roll bars, it is also possible that the vibration alone did the damage. It will be interesting to hear what Bell, Simpson et al say about this situation.
At any rate, SAFER barriers wouldn't have helped here. Given the diverse nature of drag vehicles (from motorcycles to top-fuel to bracket racing rental cars) we're not sure how they'd tune the system anyway.
[Editor's Note: Goodyear Tires are known to blow out in other race series as well, most notably NASCAR. After learning what happened to Eric Medlen we remembered that Mark Donohue's wife sued Goodyear over tire failure in his death. Might we see the Medlen family sue Goodyear sometime in the future? Could John Force and the NHRA be party if a lawsuit is filed? Goodyear seems to have more than its share of tire failures.]
03/29/07 The tragic death of Funny Car driver Eric Medlen last week may yet produce a noble legacy: an accelerated look at the feasibility of installing SAFER Barriers on NHRA drag strips.
“The SAFER Barrier wall is something that should be looked at," said Billy Meyer, owner/promoter of the Texas Motorplex in Ennis, popular fall stop on the National Hot Rod Association’s 23-race tour. “It’s certainly one of the options out there. I’m willing to look at whatever it takes. But you’ve got to sit back, take a deep breath and try to study it. It’s not something you do on a knee-jerk reaction because one of the nicest guys in the sport got killed." More at Star Telegram