NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

While Matt Hagan was blasting to the No. 1 qualifying spot Friday night at the NHRA 4-Wide Carolina Nationals, Paul Lee was exploding a few lanes over, but in a bad way with a massive fire. It’s not an uncommon sight for Hagan, who has experienced both glory and grief at zMAX Dragway over the years.

Hagan’s signature zMAX moment, of course, was making the first three-second Funny Car run at the 2011 event, a milestone memorialized by the track renaming Lane 2, where he made the run, “3.995 Hagan’s Way.”

He’s collected four wins in Charlotte — two each at the spring four-wide event (including his 50th career win) and two in the fall — plus a trio of runner-ups, all at the fall event.

According to his team, Hagan has won more quads (22) and advanced to more final quads (15) than any other driver, regardless of category, and his three wins (two a zMAX Dragway and one at Las Vegas Motor Speedway) are the most four-wide wins by an active Funny Car driver.

But as Hagan reminded everyone in the media center Friday night, “As much as this place has shown me some love, it's kind of kicked me in my ass a little bit too.”

At the first 4-Wide Nationals in 2010, Hagan rode out a massive boomer that actually lifted both rear tires off the racing surface. In 2011, he also backfired a blower and damaged the body. On Friday the 13th in 2012, a broken valve spring led to the destruction of his Aaron’s Dream Machine Dodge body

The jinx returned in 2018 with another body-devastating boomer.

And at the spring race in 2023, his parachute didn’t deploy, and he ended up putting a special-edition car into the zMAX sandtrap.

Flashbacks to all of that keep coming, as recent as two weeks ago, when he destroyed another body at the NHRA Reading Nationals.

“We've had some pretty bad boomers here lately, and they've been giving no warning,” he said. “You're trucking along, the cars running great, and then boom, and so you go back, and you go, ‘Something's wrong with our valvetrain, with our cylinder heads, or something like that.’ The guys spent 15 hours here yesterday going through everything, flying in early, doing all the measurements, making sure the [valve] lash is right, all that kind of stuff. They never really found anything. I think sometimes you have six little things that add up into one big thing sometimes.”

But for Hagan, it’s all part of the job. Funny Car drivers joke about “having the heater on” or being “heat-treated.”

“Anytime you turn the ignition off on one of these fuel cars and they're loaded full of fuel, you’d better have your [face]shield on tight,” he explained. “I think that's part of driving a fuel Funny Car. We're going to blow them up, you know? People on the internet say, ‘Just detune to where you won't blow up and then there's no issue,’ but that’s not it. Our last two blow-ups have been parts failures. It's not because the tune-up’s off, it's not because we're trying to push too hard. They just break. That's just the evolution of the sport. They've blown up for decades, and they're going always going to blow up as long as there's nitro in the tank. So that's just part of being a Funny Car guy.”

The four-wide format in play this weekend, where you can advance to the next round even if you cross the finish line second, makes hanging in with your foot on the floor there even more crucial.

“You don't know if the other two cars have even left the starting line on race day, so you just come in here with a handful brake, a mouthpiece in, a solid helmet on because you have to make them go to the end whether your stuff is happy or not. We're going to the end on Sunday.”