Long before he became as muscular as an NFL Linebacker and as talented as a nitro-burning Funny Car driver, Matt Hagan was as green as a race car driver could be and began his march to stardom behind the wheel of full-bodied race cars. 

A little over two decades ago, Hagan was finding his way into drag racing's upper echelon as a Pro Modified driver. The road to stardom wasn't exactly an easy one for the driver of Tony Stewart's Funny Car. 

When Hagan started drag racing, the idea of racing a fuel Funny Car was about as far from his thought processes as it got. 

"I had a Chevy II/Nova that I foot-braked for a while, and then I had an old Firebird that had a 632 Eagle [Mike Hedgecock] motor in it with two stages of nitrous, and that's really kind of where I got into it all," Hagan recalled.

Well, not really. Hagan was 13 years old when he got the itch for competing on the straight line with a four-wheeler he bracket raced at the strip close to his Christianburg, Va.-home.

"Beginner's luck or whatever, I won 130 bucks; went to the final," Hagan said with a smile. "I didn't win the event, but I was just hooked after that."

Hagan's father, David, was about as proud of his kid as a dad could be. 

"He thought it was cool as could be my doing that," Hagan added.

The cool factor wore off when Hagan started "borrowing" cars from David's Shelor Motor Mile dealerships to fill his need for speed. Hagan is running a Shelor Motor Mile-sponsored Funny Car at this weekend's NHRA Carolina Nationals. 

"Then I started stealing cars off the car lot and bringing them back with the transmissions out of them and tires burned off of them, and this is stuff that he had to resell," Hagan admitted. "So he's like, 'We got to find a different way of doing this."

David found a capable alternative with a nitrous-injected Corvette. But before he would allow his son to take a spin in the Pro Modified machine, he had to undergo a bit of training. After all, this doorslammer was much more than the cars he took from the dealership. 

A family friend had a fast '69 Dart, a 4-speed car, that wheelstood and did all kinds of crazy stuff like the Corvette was capable of doing. He took the first run in the Corvette to shake it down before the anxious kid climbed behind the wheel. 

"He went out there; it ran really good. I forget what it ran, but it ran good for that little eighth-mile track that we were at," Hagan recalled.

The mentor didn't tell Hagan that he'd unhooked one of the carburetors under the guise of fine-tuning the machine. He wanted to keep the kid reeled in. 

Hagan made his first run and returned with what he felt was important feedback.

"This thing is running like a turd," Hagan said as the makeshift crew rolled with laughter. Everyone knew about the carburetor but Hagan.  

"They said, 'Well, maybe you're just not pushing the gas hard enough." 

"So I come back, and I had pushed the gas pedal through the floorboard. I broke it off, and they said, 'Oh no, no, we unhooked one of the carburetors just so it wasn't too much for your first run or two." 

They hooked the carburetor up, and the kid, in the first pass, ran just as quick as the instructor proving he could drive. 

It didn't take long before Hagan was racing at every eighth-mile backwood track he could find and keeping it between the guardrails. Yes, some of those tracks still had Armco guardrails. 

"I started running these outlaw tracks as pretty much quick as safe to show up, get to race, and just one of those things where I started doing that, and it didn't really matter how fast your car was," Hagan explained. "You just had to get down these rough racetracks, and so started doing some of that and started winning.

"You'd sometimes win $10,000 to $12,000 in cash on the weekend on Saturday, and it's like, 'Wow, I can do this." 

"I remember one time in Kinston Dragway, we shut down in a cornfield. You'd hit the brakes on the asphalt as hard as you could and get the parachutes out, and then you'd slide into a cornfield to finish shutting down. So just tracks that you probably had no business being with some of these race cars that we had."

Those days were just a training mission for what would lie ahead. 

Hagan, who was once a Rookie of the Year in the former NHRA AMS Pro Modified Series, was given the opportunity to go into the Nitro Funny Car ranks. 

Then IHRA sponsor Evan Knoll was helping the series to field a nitro Funny Car class but was short on teams, so he asked Hagan if he'd be interested in running one of the floppers. 

"So next thing you know, I'm trying to get a license to drive the IHRA deal," Hagan said. 

Hagan admits he had no idea it would turn into what it is today. 

Hagan eventually got on Don Schumacher's radar as the team started to run some NHRA events with their independent operation. 

When word got out that Gary Scelzi was looking to retire, Hagan made his way over to Schumacher's bustling pit area full of fuel Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters. 

"He was like, 'Who are you? What's going on?" 

Schumacher gave the kid his shot, and just when it looked like Hagan was ready for the big time, the economy tanked. 

"As soon as I signed the contract with him, the economy fell apart in '08, and I was supposed to drive the Mopar/Oakley car, and Don calls me up and says, 'Well, Mopar and Oakley are pulling out," Hagan recalled.

Schumacher still went ahead with the deal, seeing promise in the young Hagan. 

"We signed a contract for a three-year deal with him; Don put a lot of money into it. My dad, through Shelor Motor Mile, put a lot of money into it and kept me out there for that first year until we found new sponsorship," Hagan said. "And then it just, it's tried to fall apart as much as it's ever tried to come together. 

"I think that's just drag racing down here. I think everybody kind of sees you been out here for a long time, but I've seen a lot of people come and go, and a lot of good people come and go and I'm just very blessed to still be here and be a part of this."

Hagan will be the first to admit the breaks kept coming his way, and they still do. 

"Then Tony Stewart scooped me up and kept this thing going," Hagan said. "It's crazy because there are so many chances for things to fall through or the economy gets bad or sponsorship pulls out, and you just always have to be hustling behind the scenes and trying to put some new stuff together and doing new things. The days of one car, one sponsor, there's very few of them out here. So you just blessed every run that you get to get in a car and that you pull a helmet on, put a mouthpiece in, and get to go 300 miles an hour, man."

And even better, have both carburetors hooked up.