John Force has people to talk to.

People who have died in racing, paying a price he hopes no one else will have to pay.

“I pray to about 30 people,” he says. “I pray to Eric Medlen, to Dale Earnhardt.”

And he prays to God.

Force, 59, has won more National Hot Rod Association events in his Funny Car than anyone in history, and he's looking for power.

It's not for the engine in his car; it's a power he knows he does not have.

It's the power to guarantee a safe run, every time.

“I am terrified …” Force says, his gravelly voice choked with emotion. “I can't even say it.”

Force fights tears as hard as he fights fears.

He thinks about Medlen, who died from injuries four days after his Force-owned Funny Car shook violently when a tire gave way on a test run at Gainesville, Fla., in 2007. He can't stop thinking about his daughter, Ashley, now also driving Funny Cars in the NHRA's Powerade Series, and the fear of seeing her get hurt – or worse.

“Ashley has to believe I have the power,” Force says. “She has to believe I have some kind of magic … to keep her alive.”

Force doesn't say it, but he needs to believe, too. He's spending millions, money he's not sure he has, to try to build race cars that prevent injury and death, knowing that can't be done.

“I watch her walk out there,” Force says. “My daughter looks at me and says, ‘Dad, will I be OK?' I have to look her in the eye and say, ‘I can't promise you that, baby.'”

So, before Force takes his car down the track Friday at the inaugural Carolina Nationals at zMAX Dragway @ Concord; before Ashley makes her first run, Force will bow his head to seek the highest power he can call on.

“I stand,” Force says, “before I run.”

John Force has people to talk to.

Force is at his racing headquarters in Brownsburg, Ind., taking Ford executives around the $10million complex, half a country from his home in Yorba Linda, Calif. Ford backs Force's racing efforts, but also helps fund the Eric Medlen Project.

After Medlen's death, Force's teams sat out the next race. They changed the roll cages surrounding the driver compartments. They worked on restraint systems, developing ways to limit the kind of side-to-side head movement that killed Medlen.

Force put up a second building behind the teams' shop to house the Eric Medlen Project. John Medlen, Eric's father and crew chief, helps lead that project, in addition to working as crew chief for Mike Neff.

“I know what John Medlen went through,” Force says. “I saw him on the floor, crying. And when he gets up and you say, ‘What do you want to do?'

“And he says, ‘Build.' So we build.”

Force says he sometimes walks to the front of the complex, to a statue erected after Medlen's death. It shows the young driver celebrating an NHRA victory, holding his trophy to the sky. Force talks to Medlen, and to God, asking them to give him a sign the work going on in the buildings behind that statue will make a difference.

“You ask yourself, ‘Are we going to go broke? How do we do this?'” Force says. “But then again, how do you tell a man who lost his son you can't do it?

“I go in there and I am not sure what I am looking at. I see guys and I have to ask them, ‘Do you work for me, or do you work for Ford?' They're going to keep working, and I am going to give them a place to work. John Medlen believes God will carry us. He believes God will make money fall out of the sky.”

The fans' love

John Force has people to talk to.

It's a Saturday in Indianapolis, the weekend of drag racing's biggest event, the U.S. Nationals. Force's left ankle, the one he broke in a crash in Texas almost a year ago, throbs.

Force limps noticeably on his way through the NHRA pits, but the fans can't resist stopping him to sign their hats, shirts and die-cast models of Force's Funny Car.

“The people say, ‘Can you stop?'” Force says. “You almost want to get mad and say, ‘Can't you see I am limping?' But they just love you so much. You are why they got out of bed. That's when I remember why I love this so much. I keep stopping and pretty soon we were all laughing. I love being part of this. I don't want to give it up.”

It took a while for Ashley to understand what the deal with Dad truly was. Earlier this season she got her first (and so far only) NHRA win, leaving her 125 shy of her father's record total.

“It wasn't until I was getting into high school and started understanding about competition and how tough it is to win,” Ashley says. “He was winning every week. I started to see how it affected the other drivers. Their lives were miserable because of Dad and he was just going around doing what he loved.”

Force has 14 Funny Car titles, including 10 in a row from 1993 to 2002. He's won 1,009 elimination rounds. He has been to 202 finals, winning 126. When the NHRA celebrated its 50th anniversary, it ranked the 50 greatest drag racers of all time. Force was No.2, behind “Big Daddy” Don Garlits.

“He wasn't just having a fluke year; he did well over such a long run,” Ashley says. “I finally understood how great of a driver he was. His championships and his wins are amazing.”

As his daughter's career blossoms, Force does what fathers do. He worries.

“She's still my little baby, I can see it in her eyes,” Force says. “They're the same eyes as when she fell off her tricycle at 2 years old.

“She comes in here exhausted. …She loves her team and loves the driving. But she says, ‘I love the fans but I don't know how to make them all happy. I keep trying to love them but there are so many.' I had to tell her, ‘You can't make them all happy. You just keep jumping in the crowds and keep signing.'”

Force has two other daughters, Courtney and Brittany, working their way up in drag racing. But Medlen was the son Force never had. Eric and Ashley were close, almost family close, and his death rocked her.

Ashley didn't want to stop racing, but she wasn't sure she wanted to race without Eric being there. Maybe, she thought, it would be easier to do something else.

“People would bring up pictures of me and Eric, and every interview you had to talk about it,” she says. “That was the hard part. I thought, ‘If I was a teacher, nobody would ask me or bring it up all of the time.'

“I'd had 24 years of great memories in racing, from when I was a baby. Fun times. To have Eric's death be my final thought about racing would have been sad.

“It wouldn't have been the right way to end the story.”

Safety first

John Force has people to talk to.

At a meeting of his sport's professional drivers' association, Force implores drivers and the NHRA to take a hard look at the work being done to make drag racing safer.

Medlen's death and Force's crash last year put safety on the front burner. The death of Scott Kalitta in a Funny Car crash at Englishtown, N.J., earlier this year brought it to boil. The NHRA cut its two fastest classes, Top Fuel and Funny Car, from quarter-mile to 1,000-foot races and took on other safety initiatives in the aftermath of Kalitta's death. It spent $100,000 improving the safety features in the runoff area at O'Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis, which the NHRA owns.

Force is glad to see progress. He's pushing for more. But in his house, Force says there will be no more compromises.

“If I ever see anybody on my team taking shortcuts on safety, after I whip their ass I will fire them,” Force says. “Then I am going to go to the media and I am going to tell everybody about how stupid they are. Our lives are about safety, not that run.”

It wasn't always that way.

“I used to scream, ‘Set me on fire, but make it run!'” Force says. “I didn't believe I could get hurt in a Funny Car. …Put her into the wall! Fearless! I used to intimidate the devil. ‘Come get me!' That made good TV. I couldn't win in the early days, so I thrived on being a warrior.

“When I started winning, (crew chief Austin) Coil would say, ‘I don't know what's wrong with it.' I would say, ‘Push it until it bombs! Get me to that next round.'”

Then Force “saw Elvis at the 1,000-foot mark” when Force crashed in a race in Memphis. He burned his hands badly.

“It was like, ‘OK, so you're not untouchable.'” Force says. “We started looking at safety and Coil said, ‘Wow, it's a whole new you.'”

Coil says racers too easily fall into the trap of thinking “safe” is the opposite of “fast.”

“The old adage is that safety rules are written in blood,” Coil says. “We have all been trained since birth, it seems, to learn how to make cars that make more power and more traction and are lighter and will go down the track faster. Drivers and most people don't spend much time thinking about safety until something terrible happens and slaps you and you think, ‘My God, how can we fix this?'”

Ayrton Senna's death in 1994 slapped Formula One.

“Then,” Force said, “Dale Earnhardt died and the world just stopped.”

Still, it took years after the seven-time NASCAR champion was killed at Daytona in 2001 for Force to begin wearing a head-and-neck restraint. He tried the HANS device but found it too restrictive, a common initial complaint. Friends kept urging Force to use one, if for no other reason than to set an example for his daughters and other young drivers. A Las Vegas sportswriter told Force he'd rip him in print every chance he got if Force didn't use the restraint. Eventually he relented.

Now safety is, Force says, “one and one with winning.”

That's a big change.

“Winning is what it was,” he says. “I did that and I was on top of my game. And then we lost Eric, and I felt like, ‘I've been going 33 years and I was wrong.'

“(Hall of fame NFL coach) Vince Lombardi said winning is everything. … I lived by that. I had his pictures and quotes on the walls at my shop. I read them every day. But you can't lose people. Vince Lombardi never lost a man on the playing field.”

So Force preaches safety with evangelical zeal.

“I told the other drivers, ‘I have been you,'” Force says about the meeting in Indianapolis. “I've lived it. I have been guilty of kissing things off because I convinced myself it won't happen again.

“But I've seen the light. I buried a man and I was almost taken out. They think John is over-reacting because he lost a son and I am because I am worried about my daughter. But now some of them are listening.”

Sign from God

John Force has people to talk to.

He needed to leave five minutes ago for a hospitality appearance, but he's getting wound up, and there's revival in the air.

“As much as I believed in God my whole life, I believed because I was told to believe,” Force says. “But I was a sinner, drinking my beer and saying, ‘Lord, you have to take me for what I am.' I said, ‘This is me, and I am a champion.'

“Then one day, He took Eric. And I said, ‘This doesn't make sense.' I stood in the parking lot in the rain and I cried and I said to the Lord, ‘You ain't talking to me. This is bull! You killed my driver. You gutted me. I am about broke and I don't know where to go.'”

Force wanted a sign, and says he got it in Texas when he crashed during a run against Kenny Bernstein in September 2007.

“At Dallas, He said, ‘This fool ain't listening.' And He crushed me,” Force says. “He broke my arms and my legs. …

“And I said, ‘Hey! You made me worse! I was dead already and now you really killed me.'

“But He made me believe. I said, ‘Stop!' I was in the hospital and I said, ‘I will never question you again, Lord.'”

This weekend Force begins the NHRA's Countdown to One playoffs in eighth place. His other cars, driven by Ashley, Robert Hight and Neff are also in the Countdown. But regardless of how that turns out, Force says this will be his most significant season.

He got his 126th win at Topeka, Kan., earlier this year. Ashley got her first win. Hight, who's married to Force's oldest daughter, Adria, won at the U.S. Nationals.

And despite a tough economy, Ford has stood by Force and the Eric Medlen Project. That work, Force says, matters most right now.

“You can't have somebody die for a trophy,” Force says. “There's has to be a balance here. After Eric died, I just couldn't look at a trophy. It made me ill. We needed a wake-up call as to what matters.”

Ashley now knows first-hand how hard things can be.

“When things are going good and you're on a roll, it's easy to do well,” she says. “It's when you go to one extreme and you try to bring it back from the toughest times to get back in there, that shows what you have in you.”

Or, when you don't have it in you, it shows you where to look.

“Did the Lord put me here to win championships?” Force asks as he gathers himself to leave. “Or did he put me here, in the big plan, to save lives?

“Maybe we are the ones he puts out here to do the work. It's how he gets the job done.”

Then, Force stands.

Before he runs.