The two of them come from completely different backgrounds, Matt Hagan and John Force.

But they're in the same NHRA drag racing arena, and they're there -- they're both champions -- because they have the same passion, the same mindset, the same drive. And that's why they're at the top of the Funny Car standings, Force with a 65-point lead over No. 2 Hagan entering this weekend's Toyota Nationals at Las Vegas.

Force was no force, really, at the start of the season. He was in 12th place after the spring Charlotte race in April. By June at Chicago, he was third. After falling back to fifth place, he marched to the top of the list at Reading, Pa., three weeks ago -- over Hagan.

The two of them come from completely different backgrounds, Matt Hagan and John Force.

But they're in the same NHRA drag racing arena, and they're there -- they're both champions -- because they have the same passion, the same mindset, the same drive. And that's why they're at the top of the Funny Car standings, Force with a 65-point lead over No. 2 Hagan entering this weekend's Toyota Nationals at Las Vegas.

Force was no force, really, at the start of the season. He was in 12th place after the spring Charlotte race in April. By June at Chicago, he was third. After falling back to fifth place, he marched to the top of the list at Reading, Pa., three weeks ago -- over Hagan.

So Force has turned his season around following four Round 1 losses in the first five races. He has three victories in seven final rounds this year, including a 2-for-3 record in the Countdown's first four races. His late-season surge, which gives him a 1,148-479 career round-win mark, makes it no mystery why he has won 15 series crowns.

Hagan's 2013 season didn't begin much better than Force's. He was seventh after the season-opener in February. The Mopar/Rocky Boots Dodge Charger driver took over first place at Charlotte in April, then again in June at Englishtown, N.J. He held it through 12 more races, despite four first-round defeats (two when he was No. 1 qualifier) and back-to-back second-round losses to fellow DSR driver Jack Beckman in the Countdown.  

That "No. 2 Hagan" label bugs Hagan. He's a competitor.

And he has won only one championship, but he might have learned more from how he lost the chance at his first. What surely isn't lost on him is that in 2010, when the series came down to two races (entering Las Vegas), Hagan had a 64-point edge on Force. Today he trails by 65. So the situation is reversed.

Back in 2010, Hagan led by 64 points and Force sliced Hagan's lead to 37 heading into the finale. By the end of that Pomona race, Force was the champion again and Hagan was 42 points short, his disappointment on full display. Yet Hagan also sent a signal that he never again would be unprepared for the surprise endings that the sport can throw at a leader.

This time it's his turn to make Force uneasy. It's uncertain whether the wiser young one-time champ can rattle the 15-time king. But the fun is in trying.

And that's where this disparity of backgrounds factors in. Or maybe it's where their different backgrounds can be thrown out the window.

Hagan is a Virginia cattle farmer. The closest Force might have gotten to a cow or steer in the last 50 years is somewhere in his nomadic travels across the U.S., if he took the wrong turn off a road.

Hagan's father is a locally prominent businessman. Force's dad was a gritty, hard-scrabble coastal California logger with a tough Kenworth truck and an equally tough job of trying to take care of his sizeable family.

Hagan knows he's blessed to have landed his Funny Car ride at Don Schumacher Racing after a promising Pro Mod and Funny Car stint in the IHRA. Force has the same level of resources in his shop that's just a few blocks around the curve of Northfield Drive in Brownsburg, Ind., from the DSR headquarters. But Force owns his empire and built it from nothing.

Hagan is a white-collar young man who has chosen the blue-collar life of a farmer. (His Matt Hagan Outdoors retail store, which will open in mid-November at Radford, Va., targets the outdoorsmen and farmers.) Force is a blue-collar-bred man who has worked his way into the white-collar world. He has morphed from a boardroom beggar to a multimedia deal-maker.

They're both gentlemen who have grown into their careers, who both still want it all, who both recognize that something has to give when their goals collide.

"I don't know, I mean, you can't help but like the guy," Hagan said of Force. "I like the guy -- and I'm racing him. He's always been very kind to me. He's a stand-up guy. He's the same off camera as he is on camera, and I mean, I don't know, just a good all-around guy.  So yeah, I understand why people like him.

"But when it comes to racing," Hagan said, "I want to beat him so bad I can't stand it.  I think about it at night. I think about it in the morning. I think about it when we're out here doing this deal [publicity for the Matt Hagan Outdoors store]. And I try not to think about it, because sometimes I feel like it consumes me.

"That's why I've got to get out here to the farm and do some different things to occupy my mind and spend some time with my family," the husband and father of two said. "But it is what it is. That's why we race. We have a passion for it."

He said this past Wednesday's family photo shoot for the store advertising/marketing purposes was a godsend.

"Racing is kind of the last thing on my mind until I roll into Vegas," he said last week by phone from Christiansburg, Va. "You can't help about think about it every now and then when you're lying in bed at night, and a lot of this stuff is out of your control.  We prepare, we plan, and we practice to win. But sometimes it comes down to just everything kind of lining up and the cards fall where they may. But you've got to do your job out there. And that can't be something that we take lightly, so we definitely have to stay focused and work hard."

Four races in as many weekends, all for the Countdown, wore on his crew members and their leaders, Dickie Venables and Mike Knudsen.

"Our guys were beat to pieces," Hagan said. "Four races in a row, for a fuel team, that's tough to do.  So the biggest thing is we wanted to get our guys healthy, back, and get some R & R in them and make sure they have a positive attitude to come out here and be competitive and are driven to win.  I think they needed a little break.  I mean, I needed a little break, and I get to fly around. It's a neat deal that we have a little time off right now."

In the blink of an eye, they'll be right back in the fight. But Hagan is not naïve. He has learned from his lessons of 2010. He put them to excellent use in 2011, winning that championship. He has used them to fashion a 2013 season that has reached career-best status in several areas. Hagan has won four races this season, his single-season best, and he has been runner-up four times. His five No. 1 qualifying positions also are a single-season career best.

Catching Force -- who has reached the final round at the past three races -- is a bit daunting, Hagan said. But it's not impossible.

"It's very tough.  John has got on a hot streak, man.  I mean, that's just one of them deals that sometimes that stuff happens.  Unfortunately we've had a few bad races. It's showing."

Hagan wasn't caving. He was being realistic, knowing realism can swing in his favor.

"Nothing but respect for that man.  He built fuel Funny Car racing," Hagan said. "Without John Force, it's hard to say that there's NHRA. He's that type of guy. But honestly, I think it's going to be really hard for him to keep moving forward like that. You see a lot of guys come out, win back to back, and then they struggle."

Hagan said, "I've kind of grouped my guys together and told them, 'These guys, they come out here and they win the next two races and we can't catch them, then you tip your hat to them and go over there and you shake their hand and tell them they did a hell of a job. But if they fumble the football, man, we've got to pick it up and run with it.'

"There's no room for error.  We've got to have two good races. He's got to have one bad, and it's got to play out that way. It did for me in 2010, man. I came out of this points lead in Reading 65 points ahead, just like John did just now, and he come back and spanked me again, man."

Approaching a situation like this for the other side, Hagan said he sees that "it's very doable. It's possible. You have to be confident.  Confident, cocky, call it whatever you want, you have to be driven to win. I mean, if you're not confident, and I think I read a sports book the other day that said if you're not confident, you find a way to lose. We're not going to find any ways to lose. We're going to find a way to win out here."

Hagan said, "The cards are stacked against us, but it'll make it that much more special when we win.  Definitely you look at a guy like that and you look at your career, and a lot of guys out here would just love to be in my position to do battle with this guy. He's 15-time champion, and I'm working on my second championship, and hopefully it comes together for us in these next two races.  But if it don't we'll get back together. We'll work hard and make it happen the next year. We'll go out and win it the next year. I'm still focused on that.

"John is a legend, but I think some of that stuff gets in people's heads," he said. "The biggest thing that we have to think about, that I have to think about, is just not who's beside me because that's out of my control. A lot of it is just what I can control in the race car. It's leave on time, keep it in the groove and turn the win light on. When you get to thinking about all that other stuff that's out of your control that's so variable anyway, I think it really goes and messes with people," Hagan said. "For me it's put the blinders on and just kind of dig deep.  The guy, he's drag racing, man, and I have nothing but respect for him. He's always been super-kind to me, but it doesn't mean that I don't want to beat him anymore."

Hagan knows it's every Countdown racer for himself this weekend.

"Nobody has been giving me anything out here all year long, and we're not going to give up any rounds to anybody else," he said. "If you read Facebook, there ain't no Matt Hagan fans out there. That drives you. People either love you or they hate you. I don't want anything in between. That's just racing and the fan base and that kind of stuff.  I feel like we've got the cards stacked against us, but if we can come out here and pull this thing off, it'll make everything that much sweeter for us.

"Nobody is going to give us anything. Nobody is going to help us out. Everybody is against us," Hagan said, citing his own DSR fraternity brothers as the biggest deterrents. "

"My teammates actually have been the guys that have been killing me the most. Nobody is going to give you anything out here. They're making their best runs against us every weekend. We're not looking for any love from anybody, so we don't have any advantage other than just knowing that we've got to go out there and work hard. And it all depends on us. We can only count on ourselves.

"John Force has been out here 30 some years doing this. He's built a humongous fan base.  This is my fifth season out here doing this. I don't expect everybody to cheer for me. It's one of those things where I'm not asking you to. I just want to go out there and race my race car and hopefully turn on four win lights on Sunday."

Here's where Hagan and Force are exactly alike: They love their fans. What racer doesn't? But Hagan is as quick to acknowledge his as Force is to say they have healing powers ("When I'm sick [emotionally], I go to the fans," he has said).

Said Hagan, "Hopefully I can just grow my fan base. I love my fans. I just can't say enough about them. And I got to really see that when we had such a bad year in 2012, after coming off winning the championship, and there was still a pile of people at the ropes asking for autographs and a pile of people still cheering us on. I know that I'm a long ways from John Force, but we're building them every day, and I just can't say thanks enough to the ones that support us."

They're alike in another way. They know each other. They've studied each other. They like each other. But they won’t feel a bit bad if they break the other's heart on the racetrack.

Force was the master at that in 2010, the year of his most recent championship. He told how he was fascinated with Hagan, "a good-lookin' kid" he described at the time (before Hagan's current lean-and-mean look) as the image of a Green Bay Packers linebacker. He said he introduced himself to Hagan's wife, Rachel: "Pretty gal - plays the piano at church." He said he wanted to know what made Hagan tick. What he didn't say was that he was curious to know what made Hagan tick so he could exploit that and beat Hagan. He discovered Hagan was nice.

It might have worked in 2010, but Hagan is letting that happen to him. He'll play fair, but he has taken a no more Mister Nice-Guy approach.

"You have to be aggressive with any sport.  You get to thinking about it and looking at it, you don't get your pom-poms out and cheer for the other team. So why are we doing it here? We've got a group of guys that are working really hard to go out there and win," Hagan said. "Their salaries depend on the bonus money, their paychecks, their wives, their kids, their house payments, that kind of stuff, and when you put it in perspective, I've got eight guys that are really counting on it. Fifteen grand, 20 grand, whatever they're about to make, that goes a long way for these kids. I just don't take it lightly.

"I just want to be aggressive and make sure that I feel like I've left it all out there on the racetrack. You'd hate to look back on your career one day and say, 'Well, if I'd have tried to get up on the wheel a little bit more, if I'd have been a little bit more aggressive, if I'd have done some things to maybe get in somebody's head, it might have had a different outcome.

“I just want to put it all out there, just like in sports when you put your body out there.  You just throw it out there and hope for the best," he said. "But you just do your best job that you can, and at the end of the day, it is what it is.

"I've had a very blessed career," he said. "The last three years of my five years of racing, I've been battling it out for championships, and it usually comes down here to the wire.  Anybody would trade me tomorrow for the season that I've been able to be involved with and the group of people I've been around. I surround myself with eight guys who work on the car, and they're just passionate about what they do, the chemistry with the group. Everybody is working hard, and it comes down to people, man, and making the right smart wholesale changes on the race car, good decisions out there, and surrounding yourself with the best. I feel like we've got the best group of guys out here."

Hagan knows his team is strong. "The points showed it all year long," he said. "But we've got to gather it all back up and go back out there and make it happen. I still feel like I've got the best crew chief out there and we've got the best group of guys. And I'm coming to win in Vegas."

Many men have come to Vegas intending to win. Some went broke. Some became the toast of the town. Hitting the jackpot at Las Vegas doesn't guarantee a championship, but it could make a marvelous down payment.

John Force knows it, too.

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