It’s a bit of a long shot, but entering the 13th annual IHRA World Finals next week    

 (Oct. 17-10) at Steve Earwood’s Rockingham Dragway, Matt Hagan has shot at becoming the first rookie since Cruz Pedregon to win a major Funny Car drag racing championship.
 
Pedregon won the 1992 NHRA Funny Car title as a rookie.  Hagan, 25, still has hopes of becoming the first Funny Car rookie to win an IHRA Nitro Jam Series championship.  He returns to The Rock, the track on which he won his first pro race last April, trailing veteran Terry Haddock by 65 points.
 
Ironically, Hagan has won more Funny Car races this year than anyone else including Haddock and he’s done so, literally, from coast-to-coast.  After beating Paul Lee to win the Spring Nationals at Rockingham, the resident of Christiansburg, Va., won again at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada before claiming his third victory at Tulsa, Okla.
 
He also owns the distinction of qualifying for the NHRA U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis, Ind., the world’s biggest drag race, in a season when John Force missed the starting lineup for the second straight season.
 
Although this is his first season in a 320 mile-an-hour Nitro Funny Car, Hagan spent one season in the Pro Modified class where he finished seventh in points in 2007.  This year, at the wheel of the Shelor Motor Mile 2005 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, he has turned heads thanks in large part to the mechanical skills of co-crew chiefs Paul and John Smith.
 
The Smiths, who operate a drag racing skills school in Florida, also provide the mechanical muscle on the Top Fuel dragster in which another 2008 Spring Nationals winner, rookie Spencer Massey, is leading the IHRA points.