I’ll go ahead and admit that I don’t expect a whole lot out of a pre-playoff media call. They’re a necessary part of the deal (no offense to anyone involved), but more often than not you hang up with a notebook full of drivers telling you they’re excited, the guys are working hard and they’re going to take it one round at a time. So when Matt Hagan dialed into NHRA’s Countdown to the Championship call on Monday from Michigan, where he’d already landed for a full week of Dodge plant visits, ride-and-drives and media stops ahead of this weekend’s Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals presented by Mopar, I figured we’d get the four-time world champion’s version of the same. “We had a long week at Indy, and then come back out here, go home for a couple of days, and then right back after it again,” Hagan said, and that was about the last routine thing to come out of his mouth.
What followed was, in my opinion, as honest an explanation of what it takes to win a nitro championship in 2026 as I’ve heard from a driver in a good while, and the interesting part is that hardly any of it had to do with driving. Hagan is the No. 1 seed in Funny Car, the regular season champion and a guy chasing a fifth title in a class where only John Force has ever had that many, yet when he looks at the next six races what he sees is a parts shelf. “This year is really a war of attrition,” Hagan said. He’s talking about inventory, and whether the stuff you bolt on in Dallas is the same stuff you bolted on in Michigan, or whether you blew it up somewhere in between and had to reach for the next-best thing you had.
To explain why that matters, Hagan started with the team he figures he has to beat. “Nobody has a $30 million machine shop right now, other than Force,” he said. “You have DSM and all those other guys that are doing that, but you can buy all that stuff. They sell everything to everybody. So they’re the only camp right now that really has that technology and can do that kind of stuff.” If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same conversation stock car people have been having about Hendrick’s engine shop for 30 years, and the same one Formula 1 has about works teams and customer teams. Everybody races to the same rulebook, but the guy who makes his own parts is the guy who never runs out of them.
Hagan’s case study was Austin Prock, who won two championships in a John Force Racing Funny Car before he and his dad, Jimmy, and brother, Thomas, moved on. “You move them into a different team with different parts and pieces and rotating parts and pieces and clutch discs and heads and valves and all that stuff,” Hagan said. “As much as you try to and want to make it the same, it’s just hard to replicate that.” He went out of his way to say it with respect (“Jimmy is just top of the top. He’s top of the class, man.”), but he didn’t back off the point, either. “We’re buying clutch discs by the pallets, right? And so when you run out of some of those parts and pieces that these cars go through on a weekly basis, it’s hard to replicate some of that stuff. So I think running into this Countdown, you hope that you have a lot of your stuff saved up and you have enough to get to the next six races, and you’re hopefully not blowing up a lot of stuff.”
Hagan would know a little something about blowing up a lot of stuff. By his count the Tony Stewart Racing Dodge grenaded five or six times last season, all of it valvetrain-related, and the team spent the winter trying to make that end of the Hellcat live. Some of the help came from a place I wouldn’t have guessed. “We’ve been working a little bit with the Elite Motorsports team,” Hagan said. “Those Pro Stock guys, they don’t know nitro motors, but they know motors. A lot of those engine guys have come over and kind of peeked their head in the door with what we’re trying to do.” Full disclosure, Richard Freeman and Elite are partners of ours at the DI World Series of Pro Mod, but you don’t need me to tell you that Pro Stock engine builders make their living finding power a fraction at a time. Nitro, as Hagan put it, is the opposite problem: “We just kind of kick the door open with power all the time.”
Which got him onto the subject of whether any of these crew chiefs are sitting on a Countdown tune-up, some secret combination they’ve been saving for the playoffs. Hagan has lived that movie. Back when Tommy DeLago was making the calls, they struggled through a regular season, pulled a set of cylinder heads off the shelf when the playoffs started and, in his words, “really kind of set the world on fire.” He doesn’t see it happening now, and his reasoning is about as good a two-minute education on nitro racing as you’re going to find. “I’ve never had a crew chief go like, hey, I don’t know where we’re going to get our next run from because we can’t make enough power,” Hagan said. “It’s always the application of power, or the lack thereof. It’s always either too much, or how do we apply it, or how do we pull it back.” Then, like the Virginia cattle farmer he is, he put it in tractor terms. “When you think about these race cars, they’re 12,000 horsepower, 8,000 foot-pounds of torque. When you think about your diesel truck, it’s spooled up, it’s got 600 pounds of torque. That’s wide open, black smoke rolling out of those things. That’s 600. These are 8,000.”
He also believes he’s settled the oldest argument in his own pit area. Hagan is a big ol’ boy, and he’s had crew chiefs telling him for years that 10 pounds would change everything. “My old crew chief, Dickie Venables, is one of the baddest dudes out there. We set a lot of world records with Dickie,” Hagan said. “Now he’s got a driver that’s a hundred pounds lighter than me. Why isn’t Dickie outrunning everyone? Weight on a nitro Funny Car is like throwing a feed sack on a locomotive. It just doesn’t know it’s there. These crew chiefs want to tell you it does, but I got the weight to prove it.” I don’t know about you, but I could listen to that all day.
These days the guy telling Hagan what to do is Mike Knudsen, with Alex Conaway and Phil Shuler alongside (you radial-tire folks will remember Shuler from Stevie Jackson’s orange Mustang and “The Shadow”), and if I were one of the other nine cars in this Countdown, the way Hagan describes a Knudsen race weekend is the part that would bother me. “Sometimes I’m like, why didn’t we run harder?” Hagan admitted. “And I got to always remind myself that Mike’s got a plan, man. Let’s get in the show. Let’s get down the racetrack. Even though it’s not going to be the best the first one, we got data to work off of. We’re playing chess and not really trying to play checkers.” Before Indy, Knudsen even pulled his driver aside with instructions you don’t often hear given to a guy with four championships: don’t pedal it and don’t blow it up, because the combination is massaged in, the blowers are seasoned and none of that survives a big explosion. “I thought that was really a lot of good foresight for my crew chief to pull me aside and say that kind of thing,” Hagan said. “Take care of your stuff, but run it as hard as you can. Just make sure that your combination doesn’t change along the way in this next six races.”
There’s something else in it for Hagan, too. “I’ve been able to win championships with two other crew chiefs, and I’m really digging really hard to try to win Mike a championship,” he said. “To get a new guy a championship, or have the opportunity to do that, would be huge.”
Now, for the part nobody had to ask him about. Hagan locked up the regular season title at Indy in a semifinal where Ron Capps smoked the tires in a right lane that had been giving people fits all day, and Hagan didn’t pretend otherwise. He called it a one-lane racetrack. “It helped us win the regular season championship against Ron, and you had to feel for Ron about that,” he said. “The way it came down there, and just knowing that you’re stuck in that right lane and not really have an opportunity to run real hard.” Then he drew the right lane himself in the final against Jack Beckman and found out how the other half lives. “It’s like, man, we really don’t have a shot at this unless the guy beside us messes up.” So his wish list for the Countdown is short, and it’s two good lanes. “Hopefully we’ll get to a racetrack that’s got some parity and really get an opportunity to let our tongue hang out with these cars.”
He thinks Michigan might be the place. Hagan rolled in Monday morning to 60-degree weather, talked with Brian Lohnes about the surface and came away with a scouting report you won’t find in the official release: “The track’s bitchin’ and it’s ready to go run.” Rockingham, a week later, is personal. He won his first nitro race there back in his IHRA days, and Paul Lee recently reminded him of a detail he’d completely forgotten. “The last nitro cars that went down that, as far as Funny Cars go, were me and Paul Lee, and I beat him in the final,” Hagan said. “And I didn’t even realize. Paul brought it up to me. He’s like, dude, we were the last fuel cars to go down that track.”
Near the end of the call, Kelly Wade asked how the stomach feels going into all of this, and Hagan, who says there’s a lot of hunt left in this old dog, gave an answer that ought to be hanging on the wall of every race shop in the country. “When that excitement and that nervousness goes away, then that’s when I need to quit driving,” he said. “You’re calling on that fight-or-flight feeling, right? You’re asking yourself to open the door and there’s a grizzly bear standing there. When you’re not nervous the first round and you don’t have that knotted-up gut sensation, it’s probably time for you to stop, because you don’t care anymore.”
For my two cents, the bear isn’t going anywhere. Six races, two of them at tracks the NHRA tour has never seen, and a parts shelf Hagan’s team spent all winter filling. We start finding out on Friday in Martin.
The post CLUTCH DISCS BY THE PALLET: Matt Hagan Says This Countdown Is a Parts War first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
