Nine years later, Bobby Lagana can look at the numbers from one of the wildest nights he and brother Dom ever had at U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, MI., and see something considerably different.
He sees what they weren’t trying to do.
Dom Lagana thundered through the quarter-mile at 338.35 mph during the Funny Car Nationals on Sept. 9, 2017, with Bobby tuning their “Nitro Ninja” Top Fuel dragster. They came to Martin looking for a good, clean quarter-mile run, not something that would make people stare at the scoreboard and start doing math.
They got both.
“I mean, it was just the air was perfect, and we had just made some really good runs on the NHRA side,” Bobby Lagana said. “So we had the car backed off to run quarter mile, and it just ran clean. And it ran much better than expected.”
Then Lagana gets to the part that makes the run even more ridiculous.
“Believe it or not, it ran 338 miles an hour,” he said. “Here’s the really scary part. It ran a 3.83 at 323 miles an hour [1000 feet]. So that should give you a perspective into what the potential is today. So that’s scary to hear that, isn’t it?”
The final numbers were 4.48 seconds and 338.35 mph.
There was a little Lagana symmetry at Martin this weekend, too. Nine years after Dom Lagana went the 338.35 mph over the quarter-mile here, Billy Torrence drove the Top Fuel dragster Bobby Lagana tunes to 341 mph over 1,000 feet.
The distance was shorter and the number was bigger, but the family connection remained intact. A Lagana wasn’t in the cockpit this time, yet one was still responsible for helping send a Top Fueler through the Martin speed traps at a number few could have imagined when Dom made his run in 2017.
Nitro racing had already been competing at 1,000 feet for nearly a decade when the Laganas made their 2017 run, but Martin was different. The family had been running quarter-mile match races there for years and knew what they were dealing with.
There was no attempt to turn the Nitro Ninja into a loaded gun and chase some ridiculous number. In fact, Bobby said their target was considerably more conservative.
“Yeah, we just wanted to run,” Lagana said. “We had run some 4.50s at 330, and we wanted to run a 4.52 to 4.56 at 334, and it outpaced that.”
The weather helped. So did a blower combination the Laganas had been working with while racing on the NHRA tour.
“We were running on the NHRA side, and we had a little bit different blower program going, and the air was really cold that night, and we had a good fuel curve,” Lagana said. “And that extra blower piece that we were running with that we don’t normally run was definitely made a big difference, and the car carried through.”
Carried through might be underselling it. According to Bobby, the engine dropped a cylinder at approximately 1,100 feet and still reached 338 mph. His belief is that a clean pull through the finish line would have produced another number entirely.
“So believe it or not, it put a hole out at, it was at like 1,100 feet, so it would’ve went 340 quarter mile,” Lagana said. “But that was more than what we expected, and we were happy. And that’s usually how it goes. When you’re not trying to run really hard, something really good happens.”
The Laganas didn’t catch any grief for stretching a modern Top Fuel dragster to 1,320 feet, either.
“Never heard anything negative,” Lagana said. “Everybody knew we always ran quarter mile for the match races here at Martin.”
Eventually, they changed with the times.
“And we switched to 1,000 feet, I think four years later just to… It’s better for everybody else,” Lagana said. “But we were confident with our quarter mile, that we were running the car backed off, 3.83 [1000 foot], and that it would always make it clean.”
The Martin facility had earned that confidence over years of runs, milestones and plenty of Lagana family history.
The brothers began racing there in 2002. Bobby initially recalled their first four-second pass coming in 2005 before correcting himself to 2003, the same weekend they recorded their first 300-mph run at the track.
The list kept growing.
“We ran our first 4.80, our first 4.70, our first 4.60, our first 4.50 quarter mile,” Lagana said. “Those were all… And me and Dom got to race each other here 2014, side by side.”
For the Laganas, U.S. 131 became considerably more than another place to unload a race car.
“This place is like… Jason, Stephanie, and Samuel [Peterson], and all the kids, they’re family to us,” Lagana said. “We’ve raced here every year from 2002 until 2024 when we decided to sell the Ninja. So there’s a lot of memories.”
It is also where Bobby met his wife, Kim. With family living nearby, he considers Martin one of his home tracks.
“We got Kim… family’s up here this weekend,” Lagana said. “And it’s 40 minutes from home, so it’s a home track. And the arcade that me, Kim, and our nieces and nephews go to that I have a large investment in because we play there all the time, it’s literally 30 minutes down the road. So this truly is another home track for us.”
But the 338.35 remains the number that jumps off the page.
Nine years of Top Fuel development also creates the inevitable question: If 338 was possible with a backed-down car in 2017, what could one of today’s Top Fuelers do if somebody had enough racetrack, enough shutdown area and enough nerve to let it eat for another 320 feet?
Bobby isn’t convinced his 2017 combination had much more available that night. Knowledge has changed considerably since then, and hindsight can make yesterday’s race cars look easier to tune than they actually were.
“I mean, we probably could have ran closer to quarter mile ET record in 340,” Lagana said. “But honestly, that was nine years ago, so we didn’t have the knowledge that we have now. And maybe we couldn’t have run harder.”
“You always make that statement. If you only knew then what you know now, you could have had a lot of different things,” Lagana continued. “Like I said, we didn’t know as much as we know now, so we probably couldn’t have run any better really, to be honest with you.”
Today’s cars are another discussion. Give a modern Top Fuel team the proper conditions and enough room, and Lagana believes the numbers could get uncomfortable in a hurry. His estimate lands somewhere around 4.26 to 4.30 seconds for the quarter-mile.
The speed?
That is where even Lagana isn’t quite sure.
“If a guy with a clean setup and a good enough shutdown area and good enough conditions, I believe you could run a four… I think you would run a 4.26 to 4.30 ET,” Lagana said. “And the mile an hour is debatable because you’re just not sure how much more it would pick up. You’re running so hard to 1,000 feet.”
Modern Top Fuel cars are already carrying enormous speed through the back half of a 1,000-foot run. Extending that acceleration another 320 feet doesn’t guarantee the same rate of gain because, as Lagana points out, eventually the combination quits pulling.
“There’s been a couple of guys that have had amazing splits from half-track to the 1,000 feet,” Lagana said. “But at some point, the car stops pulling. So you would say 4.26 to 350.”
Three hundred fifty miles per hour.
Even for a Lagana, there is one requirement that comes before finding out whether the math works.
“Better have a good shutdown.”
