Matt Hagan didn’t arrive in Funny Car polished. He arrived intact.
He had plans early on to climb the ladder like everyone else. But somewhere between broken parts, bad racetracks, and moments that didn’t slow down when they should have, the move out of Pro Modified started to look less like ambition and more like survival.
Hagan followed Scotty Cannon and Mike Ashley into Funny Car, and the results speak for themselves. Four championships. More than 50 wins.
That part looks clean now. It wasn’t then.
South Georgia Motorsports Park has a way of bringing that version of Hagan back. Not the champion. The guy still figuring out whether the next step up was actually any safer.
“And I actually had a test session there when I first started racing for Schumacher,” Hagan said. “And I remember the biggest thing that sticks out is Tommy DeLago when we were testing and it was getting dark and we had to make runs to get some in and the windshield was cover up and I couldn’t see. And he was like, ‘Hit the gas and it’ll clear up.’ And I was like, ‘What? There’s no way.’ And in the fuel car, it’ll do that. You know what I mean? The defrost comes on as soon as you hit the pedal, but it was kind of crazy.”
That didn’t feel like progress. Not in that moment.
For a driver coming out of Pro Modified, where the danger is obvious and constant, this was something different. Same stakes. Different rules. Now you had to trust something you couldn’t see.
That sticks with you. It stuck with him.
“The Pro Mod stuff, man, it definitely brought back some memories,” Hagan said. “And it’s one of those things where being able to race there again and make full circle, man, you know what I mean? It’s crazy. You think 20 years and then here we are again. So it definitely brought back some great memories and being able to … Thinking about I remember racing Shannon Jenkins and all those guys and Howard Moon and just so many different guys that I don’t even know if they race anymore. You know what I mean? It’s kind of wild, you know?”
If you want to understand Hagan, you don’t start with the championships. You start there.
Pro Modified didn’t ease him into anything. It threw him in and let him figure it out.
“Yeah, I’ll tell you, those Pro Mods, they wreck every lap,” Hagan said. “It’s just a matter of whether you hit something or not, you know?”
That isn’t exaggeration. It’s instruction.
Hagan’s first car wasn’t something you’d call refined. It was something you survived.
“I remember we bought a old Trans Am, man,” Hagan said. “It was a old Firebird and it looked like you took my kid’s swing set and cut it up and put it together. And it’s just like it had a 632 Eagle motor in it with two systems of spray on it. And dude, I thought I was big s***, man. I mean, it was one of those things where I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
It didn’t take long for that car to prove exactly what it was.
“Well, the second run was the absolute scariest thought because the steering wheel came off in my lap,” Hagan said. “And I’d have give anything for a pair of vice grips, you know what I mean? It was just like I tried to put it back on two or three times and then chucked it over to the side and hit the parachutes. And thank God I didn’t beat the car up too bad.”
The tracks didn’t help. Most of them barely qualified as forgiving.
“We were running these Quick 8 Outlaw races and all this stuff,” Hagan said. “And you know what? It was kind of wild, but we were at such bad racetracks that it truly were still competitive because nobody could get down the racetracks.”
You didn’t chase perfection there. You chased the finish line.
Somewhere along the way, the equipment got better. That part did feel like a step forward.
“Going from that car that was so junk or beat-up or just wore-out and just one of those things into a brand-new Bickel car was like, oh my gosh, man,” Hagan said. “You felt like you were in a Rolls-Royce, you know what I mean? Just unreal.”
Better didn’t mean safe. It just meant different problems.
Those lessons followed him whether he wanted them or not.
“We said, ‘Wow, man, we know what we’re doing. We’re going to have our own race shop and our own chassis shop and everything’s going to be great,’” Hagan said. “So we had these two guys to be welders and put up a jig and built my first race car, primetime race car. It was old ’68 Camaro. And I thought, ‘Man, this is great.’”
Even that didn’t stop the pattern. It just added to it.
“It was in the finals too, man,” Hagan said. “And it’d been shaking and I short-shifted it and get it through the shake … and this thing squared up and hit the guardrail. And I thought it was going to flip over top of the guardrail, but it sat back down and it started to roll.”
What happened next probably doesn’t happen today. Back then, it was part of it.
“Before I could even get out of the car, people were jumping over the track and they were ripping parts of the car off and saving them,” Hagan said. “And then come back … there was a line out of the pit. I bet you there was a hundred people would put stuff on my car to sign where it had been obliterated.”
He laughs about it now. Not because it was funny. Because it’s over.
“One guy brought one of my headlights up,” Hagan said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I could still use that. I need that back.’”
That’s Pro Modified. That was his version of it.
It didn’t make him careful. It made him ready.
“Yeah, yeah,” Hagan said. “We’ve had some stories, man. That’s for sure.”
