Quite often people in stressful occupations will find a moment to slip away into a happy place. A location where they feel relaxed and they'll try to draw that relaxation into the current situation.

Amazingly, Matt Hagan admits he has never let his mind drift back to the farm while awaiting his turn to run down the drag strip.

“You know I wish I could say that I have done that, but I really haven't. The race track is just so intense and there's so much going on that I try to put all of my focus into the car and making sure I do a good job driving. That car, it demands your attention, when you're driving it, when you're starting it. Just the smallest detail on these cars, if you don't pay attention to it you can get somebody hurt. I wish I could do that and have some release there, but when I get to the track I try to absolutely focus one hundred and ten percent on what I need to do at the task at hand.”

At the farm, Hagan is a farmer. At the track, he's all driver.

“Pretty much. I try to keep it that way. Obviously I read a lot of farm books and stuff at night, you know just with rotational grazing and crops and stuff like that, to learn as much as I can. But when I wake up in the morning and strap my butt to that car it's one hundred percent that race car.”

Rotational grazing?  Is there any correlation between where and when cows eat and working on a race car?  Evidently, there is.

“Rotational grazing would be the same as learning about changing a clutch pack on a car. It's not the make or break, but it's a very key role in making sure that race car performs well. And no different with rotational grazing, you want to make sure you keep enough feed out here, enough grass, that you don't over graze the crops or the grass. And by allowing rotational grazing, let's say you have nine or ten lots, and you push those cattle through those nine or ten lots throughout the year, and by the time they get back to that same lot that you were grazing in first the grass should be back up to where you started with it. So you'll take a pasture that has 10, 12 inches of grass on it and you'll graze it down to three inches and move them into another lot. Well that allows rest on those pastures that you've just grazed until you get back to that point, by then that pasture has gotten back up and you also don't have to use as much fuel or machinery to harvest the grass because you're actually allowing the cattle to harvest the grass for you. So in turn you're saving money, you're not over grazing your land, you don't have to worry about erosion and everything else.

“And when it comes to a race car, it's no different than a guy learning to set up a clutch pack and make sure that he puts the right weight on it and making sure that he's got the right floaters and discs and stuff like that.”

Farming and drag racing, who knew!