#4 Matt qualifies 4th and will face #13 John Force first round.

The Results:
Q1: 4.789 E.T. at 162.78 MPH
Q2: 11.371 E.T. at 57.45 MPH
Q3: 3.877 E.T. at 333.66 MPH
Q4: 3.874 E.T. at 333.00 MPH

Matt Hagan, the cattle farmer from Christiansburg, VA, no longer wears the high speed badge of 335 mph.

He wears a faster badge.

When fellow Funny Car racer Robert Hight upped Hagan’s signature showcase speed to 337 mph during qualifying at Heartland Park Topeka last week, the cowboy hat and boot wearing two-time world champion hit an even more impressive stride.

Hagan raced down the runway of high horsepower fashion with the fastest run in drag racing history, 338.85 mph.

Equally impressive, Hagan also garnered the quickest elapsed time in NHRA Funny Car history with a 3.802-second time pass.

Hagan admitted, “This one actually had a lot of really fast shaft early and almost didn’t make it. It was fast early and then Dickie had the timing coming out of it. It settled down and then the clutch came to it and then it got back up on the tire and was floating around, like it let loose. Loose is fast, but it was definitely one of those floating feelings. It just felt fast.”

Hagan quickly learned what his crew chief Dickie Venable had referenced time and time again, about “truly getting all of it.” Hagan, who once tried his hand unsuccessfully at circle track racing, likened the experience to a dirt track car gliding along the top of the racing surface.

Unlike his signature 335-mph record from 2016, where his Mopar-sponsored Dodge Charger dropped two cylinders in the last 200 feet and lost 13-degrees of timing, this time Venables kept all of the candles lit all the way until the last 50 feet of the run.

“We had a crosswind, and then it put a cylinder out down there because it hit the rev limiter, so it was still a handful down there on the big end because of what was going on,” Hagan revealed. While the cynical critics of modern-day fuel racing are already declaring a change to the 8,250 NHRA imposed rev-limiter will go even lower, Hagan believes such a move would be detrimental to a big picture which is already facing many challenges.

Read more: Hagan believes 338 mph proves drag racing's the ultimate extreme sport

NHRA Funny Car speedster Matt Hagan has six tandem skydiving jumps to his credit, and is working on a solo. 

Hagan, a cattle farmer from Christiansburg, Va., has climbed aboard a 1,700-pound wild bull. 

In the gym, he's bench pressed more than 400 pounds. 

And, as much machismo as those acts of manly-manness exudes, they pale in comparison to what he pulled off on May 20, 2016. 

Hagan from a dead start, in one-thousand-feet, ran 335.57 miles per hour. 

"There’s just nothing that compares," Hagan said. "It’s just a pure adrenaline rush."

Hagan's speed was and remains the fastest of any Funny Car or Top Fuel dragster in NHRA history on the current 1,000-foot track, and faster than any Funny Car has ever gone at the end of the former quarter-mile. Only Tony Schumacher has been faster, albeit to a quarter-mile in a dragster, with a 337.58 mile per hour clocking in 2005.

Sometimes crew chiefs will allude to some performance not being fully exercised, but this time last year championship tuner Dickie Venables left nothing to the imagination.

"I remember Dickie saying, “Man, we got all of that race track that time," Hagan said."A lot of it is not so much the car; it’s the race track. What it can hold, what the grip is, how good the rubber is. Honestly, to make a really fast, good run is sometimes harder than a beat up, sloppy run. The thing about those fast runs is that they’re so on the edge of coming loose. Loose is fast, but as long as it still stuck." FULL STORY