Matt Hagan keeps the points lead and keeps the streak alive. The four-time NHRA Funny Car champion reached the semifinals Sunday at the NHRA Midwest Nationals in St. Louis for the sixth straight race, then absorbed a tire-smoking loss to Jordan Vandergriff and left World Wide Technology Raceway still holding 72 points over his closest championship rival with three events remaining in the 20-race season.
It is the kind of damage limitation that championships are built on. Hagan qualified third at 3.882, dispatched Terry Haddock at 3.935 and Spencer Hyde at 3.925, then saw his TSR American Rebel Light Beer Dodge//SRT Hellcat lose traction against Vandergriff in the semifinal. The DNQ on that pass hurts, but the math stays comfortable: Vandergriff, the man who beat him, is still 72 points back.
“The pressure is huge out here,” Hagan said. “We did stick a new supercharger on there, and maybe it had a little bit more meat than we needed and it smoked the tires. But we’re still leaving here with the points lead. This is absolutely one of the toughest championship fights in a long time. It’s going to come down to the last race in Pomona, a dog fight to the end.”
Six straight semifinals. The streak dates to Brainerd in August, a stretch that includes wins at both Brainerd and Rockingham. Hagan’s Rockingham victory last week was his fourth of the 2026 season and his 59th career Funny Car win, and the Countdown push lifted him from fifth to first in points. The lead has compressed slightly from 84 after Rockingham to 72 today, but Hagan, tied with Don Prudhomme and Kenny Bernstein at four titles each, has every round of the last six races to show he belongs in front. A fifth championship would make him the most decorated Funny Car driver in NHRA history outright.
Leah Pruett’s Sunday was more complicated. The TSR Top Fuel driver opened with a holeshot win over Kyle Wurtzel, posting 3.735 to Wurtzel’s 3.733 on a .077 reaction time, a win decided at the tree rather than the stripe. That brought a quarterfinal matchup with Shawn Langdon, who was carrying a three-race winning streak into the round and went on to make it four straight. Pruett’s 3.770 couldn’t catch Langdon’s 3.714, and the points leader took the event. Pruett stays fourth in the Top Fuel standings.
“In the second round, we were seeded against the best car on the property, the No. 1 qualifier, the points leader, and ultimately the race winner in that round,” Pruett said. “The opportunity was there, to take out the points leader in the same round that all of our close points company just got eliminated. But we were unable to seize it. Our power just wasn’t there.” She noted valvetrain issues during warmup forced her crew chief Neal Strausbaugh and car chief Mike Domagala to pull the tune-up back for both rounds, leaving the Pellera Dodge dragster short of what the situation demanded.
Tony Stewart filled out the TSR quarterfinal scorecard in Top Fuel, beating Josh Hart before losing to Will Smith, whose 3.721 was quicker than Stewart’s 3.762. Stewart holds third in the Top Fuel standings, ten points in front of Pruett. The two have not faced each other in eliminations through 17 races this season; Dallas could theoretically change that, depending on how the brackets fall at the Texas Motorplex on Oct. 16–18.
Stewart’s trajectory at St. Louis mirrors a pattern from earlier in the season at Norwalk, where he reached the quarterfinals while Pruett and Hagan struggled. Sunday flipped the Pruett piece of that equation, both TSR Top Fuel drivers advancing past the first round on the same afternoon.
One item from the weekend’s scorecard: Lee Hartman won the Factory Stock Showdown final that had been postponed from the Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals two weeks ago, running a 7.511 at 176.67 mph in his Dodge Challenger Drag Pak over David Janac.
Three races remain, starting with Dallas in two weeks. Hagan has enough cushion to survive another semifinal exit or two and still win the championship, but the math tightens fast if Vandergriff gets to a final round. Six straight semifinals is the answer to pressure. Whether Hagan can make it seven in Texas will tell a lot about how close this gets in Pomona.
Source: Stellantis. Images courtesy of Stellantis.
