Maybe NHRA Top Fuel driver Tony Schumacher, who has flown over a wall at more than 300 mph and has survived his U.S. Army Dragster breaking in half more than once, figured it out, this macabre fascination with racing accidents.

“Nobody wants to see anybody get hurt, ” he said. “They want to know that somebody had a worse day at the office than they did.”

If that’s the case, workplace flunkies, whipping boys, and the poor slob who made a clerical error that cost the company 100-grand found something that made them feel better last weekend. They could watch reigning Funny Car champion Matt Hagan have yet another miserable day at his life-in-the-fast-lane office — and millions of people around the globe did.

Hagan’s spectacular engine explosion at the Four-Wide Nationals at Concord, N.C., that detonated the body of his Aaron’s Dream Machine portended another disastrous race in the young 2012 Full Throttle Drag Racing Series season. He had won just one elimination round in the first four races and ultimately did not qualify at zMAX Dragway.

But the Don Schumacher Racing driver got more attention worldwide by enduring the 260-mph fireball than he probably would have if he had won the race just south of his cattle farm in Christiansburg, Va.

An estimated 30 million saw the ESPN footage and YouTube video of Hagan’s explosion, his third at zMAX Dragway in as many years in the four-wide format.

ESPN, which airs broadcasts of all races but seldom includes any footage of any kind from the drag races in its own SportsCenter updates, was the proud distributor of the Hagan footage, not only on SportsCenter Sunday night, but also to its affiliates in England, Northern Ireland, Spain, Australia, the Middle East and Africa.

The incident lived on Wednesday in NBC “Today Show” and ABC’s “Good Morning America”. The former reached 12,343,454 households, and the latter had an audience of  4,742,400 households.

BBC TV and Radio interviewed Hagan Thursday, and the YouTube viewing tally hit more than 400,000 through Thursday afternoon.

The DSR team determined that a $36 engine-valve spring that’s about the size of a D-cell battery is what turned the $75,000 body — a bullet-proof, carbon-fiber piece of aerodynamic art — into expensive shrapnel . . . On Friday the 13th, no less. The spring dropped into one of the engine’s eight cylinders while Hagan was going about 260 mph.
It was not Hagan’s first engine concussion on zMAX Dragway’s Lane 2. In 2010, he christened the Four-Wide Nationals with a massive concussion that lifted both rear slicks a foot or more off the pavement.

But in Lane 2 last fall, he produced the Funny Car class’ first three-second elapsed time (3.995 seconds) and a 322.27-mph speed that’s the fastest ever by a flopper.

In that inaugural Four-Wide Nationals race, Hagan was not the only driver to have trouble, times four

Hagan’s bomb and Jeff Diehl’s body-blowing concussion in the same qualifying foursome first gave proof that this non-traditional pageantry was more than bit perilous. Cory McClenathan lost a tire at high speed during eliminations, and a piece of it punctured the front wing of Rhonda Hartman-Smith’s Hartley Family Dragster in the next lane. And in Funny Car eliminations, Robert Hight’s Mustang crossed the lane and banged into Jeff Arend’s Toyota at the top end. The concussions, tire explosions, and line-crossing runs, of course, can occur and have occurred in the traditional two-lane format. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

“It was good I had the ‘Lucky Dog’ riding with me because he must have helped me walk away from that one,” Hagan said, referring to the sponsor’s mascot.

He’ll have a chance to reverse his fortunes at the April 27-29 O’Reilly Spring Nationals at Royal Purple Raceway at Baytown, Texas, near Houston.