{"id":17291,"date":"2018-06-25T09:18:09","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T13:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dodgegarage.com\/news-api\/?p=17291"},"modified":"2024-03-25T11:25:04","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T15:25:04","slug":"hagans-hemi-knocks-them-down-at-norwalk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/racing\/2018\/06\/hagans-hemi-knocks-them-down-at-norwalk.html","title":{"rendered":"Hagan’s HEMI®<\/sup> Knocks Them Down at Norwalk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Hagan\u2019s HEMI\u00ae<\/sup> Charger R\/T Funny Car destroyed the competition this past weekend with a thunderous one-two knockout during the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio. For Hagan and his Mopar\u00ae<\/sub> Express Lane machine, he grabbed his second victory of the season.<\/p>\n

Hagan\u2019s triumph was also the second consecutive and fourth overall this season that a Mopar Dodge Don Schumacher Racing (DSR)\u00a0Charger R\/T Funny Car\u00a0has visited the winner\u2019s circle. Hagan also leapfrogged into a tie for second in the Funny Car standings with DSR Dodge teammate and fellow Charger R\/T Funny Car jockey Jack Beckman<\/p>\n

Hagan was seeking a bit of redemption after first-round exits in the previous two events and was ready to right some wrongs when he lined up next to his opponents. During Sunday\u2019s eliminations at Norwalk, Hagan had to get past Mopar Dodge Funny Car DSR teammates Tommy Johnson Jr. and Jack Beckman.<\/p>\n

In the semifinals, Hagan squared off against J.R. Todd\u2019s Toyota and won. This set the stage for Hagan to earn the all-important lane choice against No. 1 qualifier Courtney Force, whom he\u2019d face in the finals. When the Christmas tree blinked green, Hagan\u2019s Charger R\/T blasted off the line first and ran a solid 4.094 seconds at 288.21 MPH to Force\u2019s losing 4.220 at 227.54 MPH effort.\u00a0This victory was Hagan\u2019s second of the season, 28th of his career and first-ever at Norwalk.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSuper proud of my guys,” said Hagan. “These cats have been working hard and we\u2019ve obviously had a track prep change that we needed to adapt to and it took (crew chief) Dickie (Venables) a few runs to get there, but that\u2019s why I love him and I\u2019m glad he\u2019s in my corner. He always figures it out. We had a good, solid car all weekend. Qualified well, went down the race track pretty much every lap. It hazed the tires out there and I was legging it out, but it\u2019s the finals, man, and I didn\u2019t care if it was going to blow the body off of it or what. All I knew was I didn\u2019t see her (opponent Courtney Force) beside me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Top Fuel, Leah Pritchett faced Doug Kalitta in the opening round of eliminations on race day, and after beating him to the stripe, advanced to the quarterfinals with a stellar 3.794-second effort that ended up the second-best of the session. The six-time Top Fuel winner powered to her best run of the weekend in the quarterfinals to claim the upset win over No. 1 qualifier Clay Millican and earn lane choice over semifinal opponent Blake Alexander. Pritchett was first on the throttle but encountered traction woes just past halftrack. The 2018 Atlanta winner pedaled the throttle and harnessed her Dodge\/\/SRT\u00ae<\/sup> Mopar FireAde dragster enough to recover before giving way to a fireball, enabling Alexander to claim the win with his clean pass.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe started race day with all new information,” said Pritchett. “We weren\u2019t able to take a lot from qualifying. We made wholesale changes on Saturday night, and with that confidence coming into Sunday, the FireAde team output exactly what we input. We had two awesome and consistent, clean runs, and tight racing. It\u2019s been a while since we had some real tight racing like that where the car was on point, I was on point, the team was on point, and we had no mechanical malfunctions. Unfortunately, we spun (the tires) in the semis against Blake (Alexander), who\u2019s a great driver. We\u2019re getting to that time, it\u2019s halfway through the season. Everybody\u2019s best is starting to shine and right now this FireAde team is starting to shine really bright. We needed that momentum. It\u2019s good to end this swing on a semifinal finish. Of course, we wanted to finish with a win, but to see the adversity this team has gone through over this weekend \u2013 limited runs, runs that didn\u2019t really count for us for anything, and taking a shot at it on Sunday and going some rounds is what we needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our Dodge\/\/SRT Mopar DSR Top Fuel and Funny Car teams will get next weekend off before heading to New England Dragway in Epping, New Hampshire, for the NHRA New England Nationals July 6-8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Hagan\u2019s HEMI\u00ae Charger R\/T Funny Car destroyed the competition this past weekend with a thunderous one-two knockout during the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals in Norwalk, Ohio. For Hagan and his Mopar\u00ae Express Lane machine, he grabbed his second victory of the season. Hagan\u2019s triumph was also the second consecutive and fourth overall this season that a Mopar Dodge Don Schumacher Racing (DSR)\u00a0Charger R\/T Funny Car\u00a0has visited the winner\u2019s circle. Hagan also leapfrogged into a tie for second in the Funny Car standings with DSR Dodge teammate and fellow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":17339,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[575],"tags":[528,849,615],"class_list":["post-17291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-racing","tag-drag-racing","tag-dsr","tag-nhra"],"acf":[],"custom_fields":{"post_thumbnail_image":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/nhra-summit-nationals-sportsman-thumbnail.jpg","icon_selection":"article","external_link":"","featured_article":[],"upload_background_image":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17291"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59201,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17291\/revisions\/59201"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}