Matt Hagan Goes All-Time Best 3.954 In Monday Palm Beach Test!

It’s been just a hair over three weeks since Don Schumacher Racing driver Matt Hagan sealed his second career NHRA Funny Car championship at the Auto Club Finals in Pomona, outgunning rival John Force on the final day of the season. While you might think some much-deserved R&R might be on tap, Hagan and his crew, including crew chief Dickie Venables, got their celebrating out of the way in the days that followed, and immediately got right back to work preparing for the fast-approaching 2015 opener back at Pomona.

So focused are Hagan and Venables that they hauled to the Palm Beach International Raceway this weekend to put some testing laps down, including some shakedown passes with the all-new 2015 Dodge Charger body that will be pressed into battle next season. But as the numbers indicate, Hagan and company were doing anything but making short spurts to simply to try out new parts or tweak their combination. They were absolutely getting after it, and rotated the earth just a little in the process.

On the final run of the day on Monday, just after sunset, Hagan ripped off what is unofficially the quickest 1,000-foot Funny car run ever, going 3.954 at 323.97 miles per hour. That run, amazingly, tops even the 1,000-foot clocking on the quickest quarter-mile run ever, as Robert Hight went 3.955 when he went a stunning 4.63 way back in 2007. Officially, Cruz Pedregon holds the distinction of the quickest actual 1,000-foot run with his 3.959 in Englishtown earlier this year.

Hagan went a ridiculous .878 to the sixty-foot clock, 2.272 to 330-feet, and 3.202 at a marching 277.83 miles per hour to half track on the run.

Pre-season testing in Palm Beach doesn’t even get underway, officially, until mid-January in the lead-up to the Winternationals, but after Monday’s staggering effort by the champ, the gauntlet has already been laid down well before the New Year’s ball has even dropped.