REACTION TIME

By Susan Wade

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A freakish Top Fuel accident took an innocent life Feb. 21 at Firebird International Raceway near Phoenix during a National Hot Rod Association event. Antron Brown, the popular driver of that dragster, was a powerless passenger as the wheel assembly ripped off the left rear, hurtling him over the wall, on his side and on fire. A woman in the pits was struck and killed by the tire.

Brown, a man of faith, found solace through it all from the classmates of daughter Ariana, 8, and son Anson, 5, at Bethesda Christian School in Brownsburg, Ind.

The two oldest of Brown’s and wife Billie Jo’s three children understood fully what happened. Bravely they answered questions from classmates when they returned to school the next day.

(“My kids knew very well what happened,” Brown said. “They weren’t sheltered from it at all. It was all over the news. When they went to school, they got questioned about it. Their school’s very open.”)

The community’s interest in what happened to Antron Brown was human nature, yes, in part. But it took on a divine overtone as the staff and students at Bethesda Christian School reached out to Brown in a way more powerful and meaningful than perhaps they ever could have known.

A charismatic personality with his playful laugh and his boundless enthusiasm, Brown has spoken at the children’s chapel services, encouraging their spiritual growth. This time they returned the favor.

In talking this past weekend about the first major incident he ever had experienced, Brown said, “For the first time in my racing career, I was in something that you couldn’t control. You’re in a situation where it happens so fast. I was trying to do things and it [the car] did not want to respond to my correction. The last thing I remember was I opened my eyes and I saw the wall coming to me.

‘I’m a true believer in faith. The Good Lord always has a time for all of us. It just wasn’t my time,” he said. “It still weighs heavy on my heart a lot, that that incident occurred from that accident. It’s been a trying time for me and my family.”

As he prepared for last weekend’s Tire Kingdom Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway, in which he was No. 1 qualifier and runner-up to teammate Tony Schumacher, Brown told reporters where he received encouragement and wisdom that changed his life.

“What picked me up,” he said, “is that every single classroom in that school, all the way up through eighth grade, every single student, wrote me a card. They put different Scriptures in them. That deal right there, it was like God talking to me through those kids. These were kids ministering to me.”

Their unified message was about “being strong and going on,” Brown said. Each card or correspondence cited a verse of Scripture from The Bible, some, for example from the book of Timothy and others from the Psalms.

“I remember one distinct one that one kid gave me that was Philippians 4:13. That Scripture was that you could achieve anything through the strength that Christ gives you. These kids are telling me this type of stuff.,” Brown marveled.

“That’s when I knew it was going to be a day-to-day process now — it’s going to be all right. Everything happens for a reason, and sometimes there’s some strange reasons. But it just uplifts us and carries us to a different place for all of us.”

When Brown came back from Phoenix, he eased back into his routine at the gym as much for normalcy as for working through the physical bumps and bruises. “I feel back to my normal self,” he said of his physical state.

His Don Schumacher Racing personnel have worked hard to assure him that his dragster once again is safe to drive at 320-plus miles an hour in sub-four-second bursts. So they have tended to his psyche.

And the students of Bethesda Christian School helped heal his aching heart.

“All those kids in that school inspired me, and all the letters that I got and e-mails that I got from them that actually woke me up a little bit,” Brown said.

“I was more of a guy who planned out his life for long periods of time. I never thought about day to day. We need to live day to day and live (life) to its fullest and actually cherish things that are around us,” he said. “That’s one thing I’ve really changed, the structure of my life.”

What hasn’t changed, though, is the faith he demonstrates in crew chiefs Mark Oswald and Brian Corradi and crew, as well as the Lee Beard-led brain trust: “I feel confident. I feel secure in everything that’s happening around us. I have one of the best teams in drag racing. I feel very confident getting back in a race car.”

He said he gets “butterflies” in his stomach any time he straps in the car — “not because you’re scared but because you’re excited, amped up.”

Part of the healing process sometimes is helping others, Brown knows. “And that’s why I’m using that –  to build off of, to do something strong and doing something positive after it,” he said. ” I don’t know what we’re going to do as of yet. We’ve haven’t got all the particulars pinned down yet. But we’re going to try to work on some kind of charity that brings a little bit of awareness about safety.”

He said he and his project might become more involved with fellow Top Fuel driver Doug Herbert a little bit more with his B.R.A.K.E.S. (Be Responsible And Keep Everyone Safe) Foundation. Herbert started the initiative after sons James and Jon were killed in a high-speed auto accident in January 2008, in North Carolina. The program, which began in the Charlotte area has expanded to California, New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida, and partnered with the Richard Petty Driving Experience, aims to educate and train teenage drivers and their parents about the importance of safe, responsible driving.

The NHRA, naturally, cannot predict what sorts of safety issues might arise in conjunction with its events, but when something unfortunate does happen, it has been quick to analyze the situation and try to prevent it from recurring. Brown agreed.

“When you have things like this that happen, a lot of things have got to go wrong,” he said, indicating that no one ever has quick fixes. However, he said, “There’s always a way to make something better. And our sport has always been on the leading edge of that, making things better with all the parts on our race car.”

John Medlen, who just last week left John Force Racing to join DSR, has brought his expertise in race-car safety even closer to Brown. (Medlen spearheads the Eric Medlen Project that’s dedicated to his own son, who died from injuries from a unprecedented type of crash in a March 2007 test at Gainesville Raceway.)

Brown, speaking about Medlen, said he is amazed “to see what he endured and how he’s still out here, making this sport safer, because that’s what he wants to do. It makes me feel at ease at heart.”

Furthermore, he pointed to DSR teammate Cory McClenathan’s 2006 qualifying crash at Bristol, Tenn, That dragster bent and broke and bruised up McClenathan, but he raced the next day. Said Brown, “That just tells you how safe our vehicles are. A car back in the ’70s or ’80s, you wouldn’t have been able to do what you did — you’d be dead. Our sport’s definitely always been taking leaps and bounds, and safety has always been an issue in every form of motorsport.

“When you look at our track record for fan safety, when was the last time you ever saw a fan get hurt in NHR drag racing? It’s one of those freak deals,” Brown said. “Who would ever think about a wheel coming off a car going at that rate of speed, going that far down the racetrack, going down there by the finish line? It’s almost like the girl who got killed by a hockey puck [13-year-old Brittany Cecil, at a Columbus Blue Jackets NHL game in 2002]. How do you change that?

“There’s always going to be something that is going to occur that is out of our realm. So we’ve just got to work on it together,” he said.

“The NHRA, they’re always about safety. And they’re going to be very proactive. That’s not my department. You have engineers and different people who do all different kind of stuff. I can be a critic like everybody else — it’s so easy when you’re on the outside looking in — and say, ‘You should just do this.’ It’s not that easy. You never know until a freak deal happens on how to . . . what’s the next step, what to think about.”

“His accident was fluky, just like mine,” Darrell Gwynn said. Gwynn, one of the NHRA’s rising stars, crashed April 15, 1990, at England’s Santa Pod Raceway, and the wreck left him paralyzed from the chest down. (He soldiered on, establishing the successful Darrell Gwynn Foundation that serves individuals and families affected by spinal-cord injuries and debilitating diseases and champions awareness about spinal-cord injury prevention.)

Seven-time and reigning Top Fuel champion Tony Schumacher said of teammate Brown, “The first run [after the accident], he was a little gun shy like we all are. When you go upside down a couple of times, you are. It’s a tough thing to overcome. It’s a tough thing for someone who has never been through that. You hope that he can make it through that, because he is the future of racing. He really is. He’s just a great driver. He’s going to be around for a long time. You hope that it doesn’t affect him the wrong way, and it didn’t.”

Said Brown, “That’s one unique thing about drag racing. Our whole community comes together, no matter what race team you’re from. We all work together. Everybody’s been giving their input, and everybody’s working together to formulate something that’s going to be different. And things are going to be better.”

The engineers can sketch, the fabricators and manufacturers can produce, the sanctioning bodies can regulate, and the teams can remain diligent.

But the children at Bethesda Christian School in Brownsburg, Ind., proved that stronger than ghastly circumstance, sorrow, and confusion are the power of prayer, the power of reaching out, and the power of caring.

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