Who could have imagined history playing out the way it did last Sunday at Rockingham Dragway?
Certainly not Matt Hagan, who arrived there in 2008 as a Funny Car driver still trying to figure out how to keep the engine together, the body attached and himself out of the fire. Probably not Paul Lee, either, who was driving somebody else’s race car and appeared headed toward an IHRA national event victory until a broken part changed everything.
Eighteen years later, Lee and Hagan found themselves back at Rockingham, strapped into Funny Cars and facing each other in another final round. The two drivers were the same, and so was the racetrack, but almost everything about their lives in drag racing had changed.
In 2008, Lee was driving Paul Smith’s Funny Car and had qualified No. 1 for the IHRA national event at Rockingham. He marched through eliminations and reached the final against Hagan, who was still looking for his first victory in a nitro Funny Car.
Lee appeared to have him beaten, only to have the race turn in the closing moments.
“We were ahead, and the throw-out bearing broke,” Lee said. “And then, Matt Hagan passed us at the finish line for his first win. That was against me. That was 2008. And a matter of fact, I still have the track record here driving Paul Smith’s car in quarter-mile. We raced quarter-mile back then.”
The record Lee remembers was a 4.79-second run at approximately 318 mph. Hagan’s memories of those days aren’t nearly as tidy, because he spent an uncomfortable amount of his rookie season trying to keep a Funny Car from destroying itself.
“I was on fire a lot,” Hagan said. “I felt like John Force back then. I was earning my stripes early on and we blew the steering wheel off the car and we pulled the heads off of it and the crank would fall off of it out of the bottom.
“And I really sat down and was like, ‘This thing might kill me. I don’t know if I want to keep doing this.’ It was some real thought processes of like, this is really cool, but this is really dangerous.”
There is something almost comical now about comparing that version of Hagan with the one who rolled into Rockingham in 2026. Back then, surviving the run could occasionally qualify as a successful afternoon; this time, a camera crew followed him around the grounds filming a mini-documentary while Hagan arrived as a four-time NHRA Funny Car champion chasing a fifth.
The kid trying not to burn the body off a Funny Car had become one of the defining nitro racers of his generation. That first Rockingham victory helped convince him there might actually be a future in all this madness.
“It was just special, man,” Hagan said. “To come back here now that we’re racing and what we’ve accomplished in NHRA and looking back to trying to get that first win in a Nitro car is pretty wild, man. It’s definitely a feeling that when you did that, we’re like, ‘Oh my God, we just won a Nitro race.'”
Hagan didn’t stop with Rockingham in 2008. He won two more IHRA races that season, more than anyone else, but finished third in the championship after repeatedly losing points because of oil downs and engine failures.
The victories were coming, but unfortunately for Hagan, so were the fires.
“Won more races in IHRA than anybody, but had more oil down points and penalties than anybody too,” Hagan said. “So lost the championships to Terry Haddock basically on being on fire points, you know what I mean? So not taking anything away from Terry. Terry did a great job and he was super excited about that.
“But I was just like, my gosh, how humbling is it to win three races more than anybody else at your first year doing this and then to lose it all on blowing up and being on fire?”
Lee’s road traveled in another direction. When IHRA eliminated Funny Car after the 2008 season, Lee moved into Top Fuel and drove for the Lagana family in 2009, becoming the first driver outside the family to drive one of its dragsters.
Eventually, Lee built a successful business career while continuing to find ways to race Funny Cars. The guy who once drove Paul Smith’s car eventually reached the point where he could field his own operation and make the most of the opportunities it provided.
Lee doesn’t race the entire NHRA schedule, but his operation functions like one that does when it shows up. He has learned to make fewer appearances count, applying some of the same discipline that helped him succeed away from the racetrack.
That is what made Rockingham 2026 considerably more interesting than two names appearing on the same final-round ladder. Both had survived long enough for a racetrack from their past to give them another shot at one another.
Hagan didn’t initially realize what was happening until the possibility of another Lee-Hagan final became impossible to miss.
“I didn’t know until we were right there to the final and then I was just like, oh man, that’s kind of some wild stuff that me and him, we won together here at the Rock or in the finals together in the Rock and I won then and here we are and win again,” Hagan said. “And it’s stuff that kind of makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”
Lee hadn’t forgotten. In fact, he was the one who had to remind Hagan exactly what had happened between them in 2008.
“Paul’s the one that reminded me about it,” Hagan said. “He says, ‘Hey, me and you got to run in the finals.’ He said, ‘You beat me.’ And I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Yeah, think about that.’
“I said, ‘Man, that was my first race out there at IHRA. And heck, that was a hundred years ago.’ You know what I mean? It feels like anyway.”
Hagan beat Lee again, although this victory came from a driver living in an entirely different racing world than the one who had chased him down in 2008. This one wasn’t his first nitro victory; it was his 59th NHRA Funny Car win, and Hagan left Rockingham leading the championship battle with another title squarely within reach.
The surroundings told the rest of the story. Instead of wondering whether he could survive long enough to make a career of Funny Car racing, Hagan had a camera crew documenting one, and instead of fighting an unpredictable race car, he climbed into one he believes can win every Sunday.
“I know that every time I sit in that car, every Sunday morning, I have an opportunity to win,” Hagan said. “And that’s huge. There’s a lot of guys that just, they would love to have that opportunity and we have that.”
Eighteen years earlier, neither driver could have known what waited beyond that Rockingham finish line. Lee couldn’t have known the Funny Car class he raced in would disappear from IHRA after that season, sending him searching for another place to race, while Hagan couldn’t have known that first trophy would eventually be surrounded by dozens more.
They certainly couldn’t have known Rockingham would disappear from their national-event lives and then, nearly two decades later, put them right back where they were. Somehow, after all the different roads they traveled, it came down to Lee and Hagan in Funny Cars with a Rockingham trophy waiting at the other end.
Hagan could laugh about the absurdity of it because the young man who once wondered whether this sport might kill him stayed around long enough to see where the road went.
“To think from going from out there being on fire and blowing stuff up and burning bodies up and IHRA days to here we are now leading the points in NHRA and trying to win our fifth championship within this next five races,” Hagan said. “If you’d have told me that, I’d have laughed at you, man. I’d have been like, ‘You’re full of s***.’ You know what I mean? But here we are.”
