NHRA Rookie-of-the-Year contender and nearby Virginia resident Matt Hagan qualified the Shelor.com
Dodge Funny Car in fourth place for the NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals today, recording his quickest
lap of 4.139 seconds at 295.66 during the cooler Friday night session.
His other passes included a 4.216/274.00 (No. 2), a 4.270/267.27 and a 6.846/98.72 which produced a
shot of flame out of the car in the final pass. He will face his nemesis Tony Pedregon in the
opening round of Sunday's eliminations, against whom he has an 0-3 round-win record this year.
"I absolutely want more," said Hagan, an Angus Cattle farmer in Christiansburg, Va. "We're in front
of our home crowd, at our home track. We want to do well for them. I would have loved to have been
No. 1, but it just keeps eluding us. We have lane choice, though, and that's always good.
"It's a tricky track out there right now. We're having a hard time figuring it out, but it's going
to be what it's going to be tomorrow. We have Tony Pedregon again and we'll go up there and
hopefully get past that jinx of getting beat by him and move forward into round two."
As for the burst of flame in his final attempt: "It was a little weak off the starting line," he
said. "It was a like a weak shake and I thought I could drive through it and by the time it came
out of the shake it was spinning the tires pretty hard and it knocked the panels out of it. We had
a hole (cylinder) out at the start, I think. It was so sluggish it was hard to tell what it was
going to do off the starting line."
