Morgan Lucas Racing
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Tue, June 24th 2008
As lousy a weekend as I think I’ve had at a national event in a long time.
And to make matters worse, I drove down to E-town with my two sons, Will, age 18, and Sean, age 12, to enjoy the race. They don’t get to travel to many races with me during the season and we were having a great time—until Scott’s accident.
Talk about a major mood swing.
The energy at that track was utterly eliminated when word was received that Scott was dead. Nobody wanted to be there anymore, nobody wanted to talk about anything or make any attempt to hide their grief. It was impossible to go on as if nothing had happened.
Everyone just wanted to go have a beer and try to come to grips with the whole mess.
I was in the NHRA suite in the tower when Scott crashed. The suites have video monitors and when Scott suffered the initial explosion, it looked a lot like the same kind of explosions Tony Pedregon has experienced twice this year. At first, there’s not an immediate sense of dread. You instinctively think Scott will pull the chutes, get the car stopped, and climb out unharmed—like countless other Funny Car drivers have done in the past.
But Scott’s car never slowed down. The top end camera was feeding us the shot of his car screaming toward the sandtrap at a frightening speed. The video was cut off just as his car impacted with the camera boom so we didn’t see the horrifying impact until ESPN began showing replays from a different camera angle later in the day.
But we knew it was bad without actually seeing that top end video. Everyone who has ever seen racing at Raceway Park or has been to the track knows there’s not a whole lot of runoff area and a car traveling at 200 mph is in serious danger by the time it reaches the sand.
Morgan and J.R. were stunned when they were preparing for eliminations on Sunday. To have this miserable kind of accident happen at an event that the Lucas family sponsors added an extra degree of misery to what had transpired on Saturday. Morgan and J.R. both lost in the first round but—and this is just my opinion here—I really don’t think either driver had their heart completely in it on Sunday. Who could?
I spoke to John Force before leaving the track Sunday evening and his face said it all. Scott’s crash was rekindling memories of Eric Medlen’s fatal accident last year in Gainesville and John still feels the pain from it. He and his team have worked tirelessly on increasing the level of safety in the Funny Car class and he took Scott’s death very personally. You would, too.
And John has three daughters out there racing. Don’t think that something like Scott Kalitta’s crash doesn’t take on greater significance with a father who, himself, could have cashed in in Dallas last September. Every dad in drag racing was shook on Saturday and event winner, Tim Wilkerson, expressed what all of those dads had to have been thinking following Scott’s accident. Tim said he called his son, Danny—who is now embarking on his drag racing career—and told him he loved him. And I’m thinking, “I’m so glad I have my two sons with me this weekend so that they can see how much kids mean to their dads.”
We’ve been losing too many sons lately. John Medlen lost Eric last year. Doug Herbert lost his two sons in a traffic accident in February. The Russell family lost Darrell in 2004. (Did you recall that when Darrell had his fatal accident in St. Louis in ’04, Scott was in the other lane?)
And now the Kalitta’s are going through it. I know Morgan and his dad, Forrest, were probably drawn a little tighter after what they witnessed Saturday and they already had a great relationship. Time for all of us to be a little more grateful.
Let’s go to Norwalk.