{"id":104813,"date":"2026-09-17T21:44:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T21:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/drag-racing\/uncategorized\/clutch-discs-by-the-pallet-matt-hagan-says-this-countdown-is-a-parts-war\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T21:44:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T21:44:07","slug":"clutch-discs-by-the-pallet-matt-hagan-says-this-countdown-is-a-parts-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/drag-racing\/uncategorized\/clutch-discs-by-the-pallet-matt-hagan-says-this-countdown-is-a-parts-war\/","title":{"rendered":"CLUTCH DISCS BY THE PALLET: Matt Hagan Says This Countdown Is a Parts War"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll go ahead and admit that I don\u2019t expect a whole lot out of a pre-playoff media call. They\u2019re 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\u2019re excited, the guys are working hard and they\u2019re going to take it one round at a time. So when Matt Hagan dialed into NHRA\u2019s Countdown to the Championship call on Monday from Michigan, where he\u2019d already landed for a full week of Dodge plant visits, ride-and-drives and media stops ahead of this weekend\u2019s Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals presented by Mopar, I figured we\u2019d get the four-time world champion\u2019s version of the same. \u201cWe 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,\u201d Hagan said, and that was about the last routine thing to come out of his mouth.<\/p>\n

What followed was, in my opinion, as honest an explanation of what it takes to win a nitro championship in 2026 as I\u2019ve 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. \u201cThis year is really a war of attrition,\u201d Hagan said. He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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To explain why that matters, Hagan started with the team he figures he has to beat. \u201cNobody has a $30 million machine shop right now, other than Force,\u201d he said. \u201cYou 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\u2019re the only camp right now that really has that technology and can do that kind of stuff.\u201d If that sounds familiar, it should. It\u2019s the same conversation stock car people have been having about Hendrick\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Hagan\u2019s 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. \u201cYou 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,\u201d Hagan said. \u201cAs much as you try to and want to make it the same, it\u2019s just hard to replicate that.\u201d He went out of his way to say it with respect (\u201cJimmy is just top of the top. He\u2019s top of the class, man.\u201d), but he didn\u2019t back off the point, either. \u201cWe\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019re hopefully not blowing up a lot of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t have guessed. \u201cWe\u2019ve been working a little bit with the Elite Motorsports team,\u201d Hagan said. \u201cThose Pro Stock guys, they don\u2019t 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\u2019re trying to do.\u201d Full disclosure, Richard Freeman and Elite are partners of ours at the DI World Series of Pro Mod, but you don\u2019t 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: \u201cWe just kind of kick the door open with power all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Which got him onto the subject of whether any of these crew chiefs are sitting on a Countdown tune-up, some secret combination they\u2019ve 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, \u201creally kind of set the world on fire.\u201d He doesn\u2019t see it happening now, and his reasoning is about as good a two-minute education on nitro racing as you\u2019re going to find. \u201cI\u2019ve never had a crew chief go like, hey, I don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going to get our next run from because we can\u2019t make enough power,\u201d Hagan said. \u201cIt\u2019s always the application of power, or the lack thereof. It\u2019s always either too much, or how do we apply it, or how do we pull it back.\u201d Then, like the Virginia cattle farmer he is, he put it in tractor terms. \u201cWhen you think about these race cars, they\u2019re 12,000 horsepower, 8,000 foot-pounds of torque. When you think about your diesel truck, it\u2019s spooled up, it\u2019s got 600 pounds of torque. That\u2019s wide open, black smoke rolling out of those things. That\u2019s 600. These are 8,000.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also believes he\u2019s settled the oldest argument in his own pit area. Hagan is a big ol\u2019 boy, and he\u2019s had crew chiefs telling him for years that 10 pounds would change everything. \u201cMy old crew chief, Dickie Venables, is one of the baddest dudes out there. We set a lot of world records with Dickie,\u201d Hagan said. \u201cNow he\u2019s got a driver that\u2019s a hundred pounds lighter than me. Why isn\u2019t Dickie outrunning everyone? Weight on a nitro Funny Car is like throwing a feed sack on a locomotive. It just doesn\u2019t know it\u2019s there. These crew chiefs want to tell you it does, but I got the weight to prove it.\u201d I don\u2019t know about you, but I could listen to that all day.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s orange Mustang and \u201cThe Shadow\u201d), 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. \u201cSometimes I\u2019m like, why didn\u2019t we run harder?\u201d Hagan admitted. \u201cAnd I got to always remind myself that Mike\u2019s got a plan, man. Let\u2019s get in the show. Let\u2019s get down the racetrack. Even though it\u2019s not going to be the best the first one, we got data to work off of. We\u2019re playing chess and not really trying to play checkers.\u201d Before Indy, Knudsen even pulled his driver aside with instructions you don\u2019t often hear given to a guy with four championships: don\u2019t pedal it and don\u2019t blow it up, because the combination is massaged in, the blowers are seasoned and none of that survives a big explosion. \u201cI thought that was really a lot of good foresight for my crew chief to pull me aside and say that kind of thing,\u201d Hagan said. \u201cTake care of your stuff, but run it as hard as you can. Just make sure that your combination doesn\u2019t change along the way in this next six races.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something else in it for Hagan, too. \u201cI\u2019ve been able to win championships with two other crew chiefs, and I\u2019m really digging really hard to try to win Mike a championship,\u201d he said. \u201cTo get a new guy a championship, or have the opportunity to do that, would be huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t pretend otherwise. He called it a one-lane racetrack. \u201cIt helped us win the regular season championship against Ron, and you had to feel for Ron about that,\u201d he said. \u201cThe way it came down there, and just knowing that you\u2019re stuck in that right lane and not really have an opportunity to run real hard.\u201d Then he drew the right lane himself in the final against Jack Beckman and found out how the other half lives. \u201cIt\u2019s like, man, we really don\u2019t have a shot at this unless the guy beside us messes up.\u201d So his wish list for the Countdown is short, and it\u2019s two good lanes. \u201cHopefully we\u2019ll get to a racetrack that\u2019s got some parity and really get an opportunity to let our tongue hang out with these cars.\u201d<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t find in the official release: \u201cThe track\u2019s bitchin\u2019 and it\u2019s ready to go run.\u201d 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\u2019d completely forgotten. \u201cThe 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,\u201d Hagan said. \u201cAnd I didn\u2019t even realize. Paul brought it up to me. He\u2019s like, dude, we were the last fuel cars to go down that track.\u201d<\/p>\n

Near the end of the call, Kelly Wade asked how the stomach feels going into all of this, and Hagan, who says there\u2019s 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. \u201cWhen that excitement and that nervousness goes away, then that\u2019s when I need to quit driving,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re calling on that fight-or-flight feeling, right? You\u2019re asking yourself to open the door and there\u2019s a grizzly bear standing there. When you\u2019re not nervous the first round and you don\u2019t have that knotted-up gut sensation, it\u2019s probably time for you to stop, because you don\u2019t care anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

For my two cents, the bear isn\u2019t going anywhere. Six races, two of them at tracks the NHRA tour has never seen, and a parts shelf Hagan\u2019s team spent all winter filling. We start finding out on Friday in Martin.<\/p>\n

The post CLUTCH DISCS BY THE PALLET: Matt Hagan Says This Countdown Is a Parts War<\/a> first appeared on Drag Illustrated<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll go ahead and admit that I don\u2019t expect a whole lot out of a pre-playoff media call. They\u2019re 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\u2019re excited, the guys are working hard and they\u2019re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racepages.com\/Videos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}