Just when the drag racing community, and sometimes those covering it, start looking elsewhere in the Funny Car championship conversation, Matt Hagan has a habit of forcing his way back into it. Winning a national event in convincing fashion usually gets the job done.
Hagan delivered the reminder Sunday, beating Jordan Vandergriff in the final round of the NHRA Brainerd Nationals and leaving Minnesota with something he didn’t have when the weekend began: the Funny Car points lead.
The four-time champion drove the Tony Stewart Racing Dodge to a 3.946-second pass at 320.13 mph, pulling away after Vandergriff slowed to a 4.038. The victory was Hagan’s third of the season, 58th of his career and second at Brainerd International Raceway.
It was a Sunday when anyone with racing sense would have preferred to line up against anyone but Hagan, who took down Jim Campbell, Chad Green, and Austin Prock before handling Vandergriff, running 3.94 seconds in each of his final three rounds.
“We definitely could have bracket raced this car,” Hagan said. “It just shows what our team is capable of.”
That consistency changed the look of the championship standings in four rounds. Hagan entered Brainerd in fifth and left in first, holding a seven-point advantage over Vandergriff heading into the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis.
Ron Capps sits 12 points behind Hagan, J.R. Todd is 22 back and Jack Beckman trails by 74. In a Funny Car field capable of shuffling the order with one bad round – and with Indy awarding points-and-a-half – Hagan doesn’t need anyone to tell him how little those margins guarantee.
There is a reason Hagan rarely gets bothered when his name drifts out of the championship discussion. He has spent too much of his career eventually working his way back into it.
“I think I’ve been very blessed in my career that we’ve always been in the hunt,” Hagan said. “We’ve always had a chance for a championship. I mean, look at last year even with Prock dominating the majority of the whole season. We had a real opportunity to win a championship.
“Unfortunately, the weather didn’t allow us to do that in Pomona and shake it out. I was kind of jumping up and down. I was like, ‘Let’s just truck these things over here to Vegas and unload them and let’s go,’ but it just didn’t work out that way. But with that being said, as dominant as [Prock] was last year, we still had a mathematical legitimate opportunity to win one of those things.”
Hagan has been around long enough to understand what can happen when Funny Cars, championship pressure and elimination rounds get mixed together. One round can move a contender several positions, as Brainerd demonstrated again.
“And it reminded me when we rolled in there against [John] Force my first year or second year driving the car and had a chance to win a championship,” Hagan said. “I just had to go second round and Force had to win the race. And that’s kind of the way the deal was with flip-flop with me and Prock. And that’s why we show up and race them, man – you just never know. So I don’t think you can count anybody out here. … You look at how tight these Funny Cars are stacked in here. I mean, Jack went from No. 2 to No. 5 off of one round. … It can happen to any of us at any time.”
Hagan’s final-round victory wasn’t as tidy from inside the cockpit as the 3.946 on the scoreboard suggested. The engine dropped cylinders and he had to drive the wild horse beyond the finish line.
“In the final down there, it had, like, two or three holes out, and I was trying to keep it off the center line,” Hagan said. “I’m thinking like, ‘OK, it’s still after the quarter-mile,’ you know what I mean? It’s like you’re still trying to reel that thing back in and trying to keep it in the groove. These funny cars are a handful. To watch Jack and to watch Capps do that today, I know it’s super-disheartening, but that could be any of us. There’s no one out here that’s just some phenomenal driver. We’re all trying to do the best job we can out there.”
For Hagan, Brainerd was also evidence that crew chief Mike Knudsen’s approach is beginning to pay dividends. Instead of chasing the quickest run on the property, Knudsen gave Hagan a car capable of getting down the track repeatedly.
“But the reason we went down the racetrack all the time this weekend was because of him and because of the decisions he’s making,” Hagan said. “And sometimes it’s better to give yourself a shot than it is to smoke your tires at the hit. And he races like that. … At the end of the day, we turned four win lights on, so … three times this year. And that’s a lot of because of the way he races and the calls that he’s making.”
Hagan credited Stewart for allowing Knudsen to develop from within the organization rather than searching elsewhere for an established name. He also pointed toward Phil Shuler and Alex Conaway as important parts of a combination that has steadily developed its own identity.
“And to be a young guy to come into a sport like this with the pressure and the amount of what it takes to be a crew chief out here,” Hagan said. “There’s a lot of guys that have been crew chiefs, and they’re still trying to win their first race. … It shows that you have to promote within. You got to give these young guys a shot. And I’m so glad that Tony did.”
The result also carried some staging awkwardness. Hagan acknowledged that he accidentally lit the top bulb before Vandergriff was staged and made a point to find the younger driver afterward to offer an apology.
“Obviously, we would never have turned the top bulb on, but off the rip, I just got in there and my crew chief brought me up there. And I’m pumped up and the crew chief’s pumped up,” Hagan said. “The next thing you know, the first light’s on and then I’m up there thinking, I’m like, ‘Stop thinking and just sit there.’ And then he did a great job of just taking his time and doing what he needed to do, and we raced straight up.”
Hagan’s respect for Vandergriff went beyond the final round. The No. 1 qualifier reached his third final of the season after beating Alexis DeJoria and Todd, another weekend that kept him squarely in the championship picture.
“Vandergriff, man, that kid’s doing great,” Hagan said. “He’s very trained for media. He’s doing a great job behind the wheel. Everybody kind of expected him to – a big learning curve, but I mean, I’m proud of him. As an older guy out here that’s been doing this for 20 years in a funny car, the kid’s doing great.”
Now comes Indianapolis, where the points available at the U.S. Nationals can rearrange the standings before the Countdown to the Championship begins. Hagan will arrive with the lead, but he isn’t confusing first place in August with anything more than an advantageous starting point.
The pressure, he said, isn’t reserved for Indy or the Countdown. With the money required to operate a nitro team, Hagan sees an obligation to produce every time the transporter door opens.
“Well, I mean, all of them are huge, right?” Hagan said. “There’s not one that you go like, ‘Oh man, I’m probably not going to try as hard up there.’ You know what I mean? They’re all so important. And I think what people don’t realize is that these sponsors, it takes… You can buy a small home to what it costs to run one of these races out here. I mean, you can go out here and buy a nice four bedroom house somewhere for one of these races. So when people say, ‘What’s the pressure?’ And this and that, I was like, ‘No, it’s pressure every weekend, man. You want to perform. If you don’t go out there and you don’t do well, you feel like you’ve wasted their money.’”
For one weekend in Brainerd, Hagan’s team gave those sponsors a return that could be measured in four win lights, another Wally, and the top line in the Funny Car standings. It also provided another reminder for anyone inclined to build a championship list without him.
Hagan has been doing this too long to demand anyone’s attention in August. He’d rather take it with a race car.
“So to have a group of people that you work really closely with, you gel with, your energy’s great with, you’re happy to show up for work every day. It’s everything,” Hagan said. “And Tony Stewart has created that within this environment that everyone comes to work with a smile on their face. And that’s something that I’ve never had in my career. And we have that now. We have no drama, no BS behind the scenes. Everybody’s just working hard and they’re doing what they’re supposed to. And that’s what happens when that comes together. You win Wallys, you win races, you get points, you do all the things you’re supposed to, but it’s having a group that meshes well.”
