Drag racing has a way of delivering its biggest moments when nobody quite planned for them. Sunday evening at Pomona, after a day full of weather delays, Matt Hagan piloted the Johnson’s Horsepowered Garage Funny Car to the winner’s circle for Tony Stewart Racing – and in doing so, became the driver who won NHRA’s 1,000th Funny Car race.
The number lands hard when you sit with it. One thousand races. Decades of passes, countless careers made and broken, John Force in the news week after week for thirty-plus years, and now – at the end of a long Sunday in Southern California – Hagan’s name is written into that record permanently. Nobody can take it away, and Hagan knew the weight of it the moment he crossed the finish line.
“A thousand Funny Car races, right? Like, that speaks for itself,” Hagan said. “We’ve had a thousand races so far. I mean, I’ll be dust in the wind probably when 2,000 rolls around, you know?”
What made the moment even more fulfilling was who happened to be standing nearby when it happened. Moments before, Hagan’s team owner Tony Stewart had just won in the R&L Carriers Top Fuel dragster, a win that itself represented a historic milestone for the newly formed Elite Motorsports nitro program. Two winner’s circle celebrations in the same weekend.
“To finish the day at 8:00 in the evening, and not only to be standing there with a Wally in my hand, and seeing my car owner [Richard Freeman], and seconds later you see your teammate Matt Hagan come around the corner with arguably – most definitely, in my eyes – the bigger of the two victories, winning the 1000th NHRA Funny Car race,” recalled Stewart when asked what it felt like on the top end immediately following the victory.
But here’s the thing about moments like this that the broadcast cameras can only partially capture: the driver doesn’t get to fully live it. Hagan was still in his helmet when the celebration broke out around him. The crew guys, teammates, family, everybody falling over each other. Meanwhile, the man who made it happen was sprinting around trying to talk to everybody at once.
“I wanted to see everybody,” Hagan said. “I was trying to talk to [Ron] Capps and then I was trying to talk to Tony and then Leah [Pruett] comes up, then you got Richard up there and it’s just like, you know, you don’t have time to get undressed man.”
That image – Hagan still helmeted, running from person to person, not wanting to miss a second of what his team had just accomplished together – is as honest a portrait of what this sport is about as anything you’ll see at a drag race this year.
For Hagan, now four NHRA Funny Car world championships deep and tied for the points lead heading into the rest of the 2026 season, the goals haven’t gotten smaller. Championship number five is squarely in focus.
“People remember who won championships,” Hagan plainly stated. “And that’s really kind of what we strive to be a part of and to set that bar.”
With four titles to his name, Hagan is tied for second on the all-time list with names like Kenny Bernstein and Don ‘the Snake’ Prudhomme, trailing only 16-time champion John Force. A fifth championship puts him in a category by himself. He knows exactly what that means, and after what happened at Pomona, he and the TSR Nitro team look every bit capable of getting there.
