RICKIE SMITH - MOUNTAIN MOTOR PRO STOCK LEGEND

On Saturday, September 29, Rickie Smith stood at the starting line at Maryland International Raceway and wiped away a tear as thousands of appreciate IHRA fans acknowledged his selection as Torco’s CompetitionPlus.com’s No. 1 All Time Mountain Motor Pro Stock Driver.

It was the second of two major honors bestowed upon the King, North Carolina, resident in 2007, and significant because it coincided with the 30^th anniversary of the class Smith helped pioneer.

In July, Smith was named to the inaugural Legends of Thunder Valley class at Bristol Dragway in recognition of his being the driver with the most wins in the history of the venerable facility. He was in impressive company that summer day, joining “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, IHRA founder Larry Carrier, and NHRA founder Wally Parks. It was high praise indeed.

“I’ve had some really big honors laid out on my plate this year,” Smith said. “It’s been over 35 years of hard work – I don’t know how to explain it – I’m just so thrilled over it. The good thing is that I’m still racing and I’m still able to enjoy it. Thank God Evan Knoll is helping me right now. He loves drag racing and he’s helped a lot of people. I’m just glad he’s not a NASCAR freak.”

When asked about his inclusion in the legends of Thunder Valley class, Smith said, “Wally Parks started this stuff. If it wasn’t for him waking up one day and having a vision for all of us to go racing I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I’ve had. Wally and Larry carrier, who started the IHRA, are both gone now. Me and Don Garlits are the only two left from the four who were honored at Bristol. I hope this isn’t a sign. I’m going to watch Garlits because if he goes away I’m going to stay by my doctor’s office. Seriously, though, I really appreciate all the honors.”

After years of sacrifice, Rickie Smith is honored as a legend

David McGee Photo

An emotional Rickie Smith accepted the award from Torco's CompetitionPlus.com as the greatest mountain motor Pro Stock racer of the last 30 years.

It was the second of two major honors bestowed upon the King, North Carolina, resident in 2007, and significant because it coincided with the 30^th anniversary of the class Smith helped pioneer.

Smith’s story is tied inescapably to the history of International Hot Rod Association mountain motor Pro Stock racing, and no discussion of the class would be complete without taking an in-depth look at the storied career of the seven-time IHRA Champion.

“I started drag racing in 1975 with a ’68 Camaro Super Stock car,” Smith said. “I didn’t like the breakout class, though, so I built a Ford Maverick and jumped into an IHRA class called Super Modified in 1976. That was like a miniature Pro Stock class – heads-up, no breakout, single four barrel. You had to run divisional and national events for championship points in IHRA back then, and I think we won 14 or 15 out of 18 races the first two seasons we ran. Eventually, they cancelled the class because nobody could run with us. A few guys came pretty close – I remember John Lingenfelter running a fairly competitive GM car, and Herb McCandless had a good Mopar, but we dominated by as much as a tenth over the field most of the time.

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Smith branched out on his own with this Mustang and won his first of five MMPS championships.

“After they did away with the class at the end of 1977, we started building a ‘78 Mustang for Pro Stock because we didn’t want to go back to a breakout class. We spent most of ‘78 fine-tuning the car – we won a few races that year, but we didn’t run full time until the following season.”

Then, as now, racers spent much of their spare time scrounging for sponsorship money, but Smith had things a little easier than most when he first started out. It wouldn’t always be that way, though, as we’ll find out.

“My partner back then was a neighbor of mine by the name of Keith Fowler, who was a big Country music promoter at the time – he had Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty and the Oak Ridge Boys under contract. He had originally put his business name “Country Shindig” on our Super Modified car, and when we went to Pro Stock, he put the Oak Ridge Boys on the new car. They were huge stars back then, and they even came out to one of our races, which really helped us promote ourselves. We ran Loretta Lynn’s name on the car for a while, too, which was a real popular deal.

“In 1979, our first year, we finished tenth in Pro Stock points, and in ’80 and ’81 we finished second. I was learning a lot during that time, but the biggest lesson the sport taught me was pretty hard to take. Before the 1981 season was over, I had my first bad wreck in Richmond, Virginia. Back then we ran tubes in the tires, and I spun the tire on the rim when I left the starting line. When I put it in high gear, the tire went flat and jerked the car into the left lane. When I jerked it back, it flipped over and the roof of my car caught the door of the car in the other lane and flipped over its roof. He just kept going, and I flew through the air; the car rolled and flipped a bunch of times. They found the rear end housing up in the woods, about 200 feet away from the car. There was only one wheel left on the car, and there was nothing left of the body but the two rear quarter panels. The roof was peeled back and folded under the rear bumper. I finally got out of the thing, and I wasn’t hurt too bad, but I’ll never forget that experience, especially since we had one race to go to finish out the year.

Smith has always considered himself a pure drag racer. While others were off partying, many nights he was on the cold motel asphalt underneath his car working.

“We went ahead and borrowed a car to wrap up the season. Keith decided to get out of it after that, so in 1982 I bought the motor, transmission and rear end out of the car from him for $50,000 and set out on my own. Chassis builder Don Hardy gave me a real good price on a new 1982 Mustang and I gave him the okay to start building it. That was a big commitment, because in those days I was just married and working with my dad in a construction company, so I started out with basically nothing. I had to borrow some money from the bank to pay for everything, and my wife thought I was crazy.”

At this point Smith’s direction changed, as he explained.

“John Kaase had been helping us out with motors when I was with Keith, and he and I continued to worked together when I started my own team. A local guy who owned a nightclub called SRO gave me $10,000 for the doors on the car, so with a little old truck and trailer and $1,000 in the bank, we went IHRA Pro Stock racing. Back then guys like Warren Johnson, Lee Shepherd and Ronnie Sox were running with us, so that will tell you how tough the competition was. We were up for it, I guess, because in 1982 the good Lord was with me, and we won the IHRA championship.”

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Rickie became a household name amongst MMPS fans when he drove to the first-ever seven-second run in 1980. IHRA founder Larry Carrier presented him with the time slip.

“The next year Ford came along and started helping us. That was the year that the new Thunderbird came out, and they were really promoting the new design, so eventually Bob Glidden and I each got a new Pro Stock Thunderbird. It wasn’t without controversy, though. Everybody knows that Glidden had a strangle hold on Ford back then, because he was so dominant, and he didn’t really like the idea of a younger guy coming along and running another Ford car with Motorcraft on it, you know. We got along all right at first – I tried to be friends with him, but by about 1988 things got pretty bad. He was dominating in NHRA at the time, and I was dominating in IHRA – I won three straight titles between 1986 and 1988. Anyway, I signed a three-year deal with Motorcraft that year, and at Indy Glidden went to the Motorcraft people and told them that there was only going to be one Motorcraft car out there – either his or mine.

“Before long I got a phone call from Ford – they wanted me to come for a meeting,” Smith said. “They flew me to Detroit, sat me down and told me that they were going to have to let Glidden have his way or he’d quit. They asked me if I would let them out of their contract if they found me another sponsor, and I said that I would. The main thing I was concerned about was the fact that I had already made major financial commitments for equipment and so on based on having three years to pay everything off.

“Two or three days later they called me and said they had something set up with Stroh Brewing. Pat Patterson and I went up to meet the Stroh people – I took Pat because I really had no experience in negotiating with these big companies. Anyway – we took a proposal along with us and sat down to see what we could come up with. We eventually worked things out to where we were all satisfied.

Smith enjoys life at a much leisurely pace when outside of the race car. Inside, he's still wide open.

“Right after that, something happened that changed my life even more, if that was possible at the time. As we got up to leave, I told them, almost as an after thought, that while I thought the world of Ford, it wasn’t likely that they were going to use me to advertise their products any more. I then told them that the folks at Pontiac had been talking to me a little bit, and did they mind if I ran a Pontiac the next season. They asked me if I thought I could win with one, and I told them that I thought that the GMs were making more power than the Fords, so I didn’t see why not. I told them that I wanted to run for another IHRA championship in 1989 – I would run a few NHRA races, but I wanted to prove that I could win in the IHRA with a GM car after all the championships I won with a mountain motor Ford. They said ‘fine, let’s do it.’ They left it up to me from that point, so I called Pontiac and got the ball rolling.”

“It was a big change, but we didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, so I went back to the shop, told my guys what we were doing and we got to work. We sold all our Ford stuff, replaced it with GM stuff, and within three months we were ready to start the 1989 season, which we won to extend the streak to four in a row.

“Everything was going great until Stroh dropped a bomb on us a little later. Out of the blue they cancelled all their motorsports sponsorship deals –and they were into everything back then- and left us high and dry. Fortunately, John Erickson was in charge at Pontiac by this time, and he had connections with the people at STP, so he went to them on our behalf and got us a deal for 1990, ‘91 and ‘92. It was a good deal, but it wasn’t anywhere near what Warren Johnson and Glidden and them were getting at the time – probably a third of it. Because of that I just couldn’t compete at the level I was used to competing at. We fell to running in the middle of the pack most of the time. I mean, we did okay, but even that deal was doomed.

“The year my contract was up for renewal, 1993, was the same year that Richard Petty got out of the driver’s seat in NASCAR, and once he did that he demanded an extra million dollars from STP so that he could put another driver in the car. Well, right after that they pulled my program and their Indy car program. Eventually the Indy car program was put back, but mine never was, and I was looking for a sponsor again.

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Next season will mark three decades of Pro Stock racing for Smith.

“Later I signed a real small deal with Slick 50, but it wasn’t nearly enough to be competitive with. We had the power, and I proved that I could win, but we just couldn’t afford to play with the top dogs any more. It’s too bad, because I was in my prime then, and trying to move into the NHRA program, but I was never able to do it the way it needed to be done after that.”

The NHRA and IHRA Pro Stock classes were undergoing major changes at this time, and for a while IHRA racers could be found at NHRA events, putting their big-inch mountain motor-powered cars up against the 500-cubic-inch equipped cars driven by their counterparts.

“When I won my IHRA championship in ’88 we ran our 800-inch cars against quite a few NHRA guys with their 500-inch cars,” Smith said. “Glidden ran against us, and so did guys like Reher – Morrison and WJ. Of course, they kept piling weight on us in 1988 to try to make it even, and that made it a lot tougher when we were running for championships. We managed to struggle through it and win in ‘87, but it got out of hand when they threw another 50 or 75 pounds on us in 1988, which made the cars weigh 2,650 pounds. I don’t think we qualified number one more than twice during those two years. We were fortunate enough to win the championships because I was able to get the car down the track on race day, and out-drive people when I had to.”

There has been a lot of speculation as to how you Smith earned his “Tricky” nickname, and Smith was keen to set the record straight.

“I’ve heard all the stories, and believe me most of them are BS. A guy who did some announcing at a local track back when I was just starting out started the ‘Tricky Rickie’ thing. I was just a young guy with a pretty fast car who didn’t know any better, and back in the early eighties when I first started running my Mustang against guys like WJ and Glidden, they used to mess with me a lot. The thought it was fun to burn me down at the line, you know, holding me there as long as they could and stuff like that. I was pretty scared back then, and didn’t have a lot of confidence, especially when I raced the big name guys, so they wore me out the first year I ran a full schedule in IHRA. By the second season I had gained some experience, though, and I didn’t let them pull that stuff any more. I decided that if it was good enough for them it was good enough for me, so I started playing the games myself. Warren and I had some real good staging battles back then, I can tell you.

“Anyway, I also did a lot of match racing back then, too, and the word got around back home about the staging stuff that was going on in IHRA. One night I was racing back in North Carolina, and this announcer was talking on the PA system about all that had been going on, and just started hollering TRICKYYY RICKIEEE, over and over again. He got the crowd so pumped up that by the time we went to the line they were going wild. Back then Pro Stock was a real hot ticket, just like Pro Mod is these days, and it just spread from there. After that, everywhere we went people started hollering for Tricky Rickie, and the name just stuck. I never knew how much it meant to the fans, especially to the kids, until quite a few years later. By the late 1980s the name had gotten a little old to me, and I wanted to change it. I decided that since I was just an old North Carolina hillbilly that I’d use that for my nickname.

“Winston held a big deal every year for the NASCAR folks and so on, and they invited us to put the Pro Stock car on display. I figured that it was a good time to bring the new name out, so I took Tricky Rickie off the window and put on Hillbilly. My wife told me not to do it, because she worked with kids, and she knew that the name was pretty popular with them. Well, I just didn’t think that it was a real big deal, but man did I find out real quick what a mistake I made. There were so many comments about the name change, mainly from kids, that it really bothered me. I just had no idea. As soon as I got the car back home I put the old name back on and it’s been that way ever since.

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Smith has said his career is winding down and one day he plans to walk away with no regrets.

“In a way, I think there have been times when the name hurt me. I got a reputation for always playing games, and sometimes starters would get mad if I was just a little slow moving in, thinking I was trying to start something. The name has been like a red flag at times. But the kids liked it so well that I decided to stay with it no matter what.”

And stay it has, through all the years, the wins, the championships, and the honors. And the man himself has exhibited the same kind of staying power. When Smith received his trophy at Maryland, he wasn’t there as an invited guest, a retired former icon dusted off and trotted out to satisfy the nostalgic cravings of race fans. No, not at all. As soon as the ceremony was over, Smith hurried back to his pit area to prepare for the next day’s first round of eliminations. At 53, his desire to compete is as strong as ever, and the fact that he’s had a lackluster year, at least by his standards, does not sit well at all.

“I just wish we could have run better this year – we have been struggling,” Smith said. “The good news is that (engine builder) Sonny Leonard has given us a new motor, and from what I’ve seen it’s a pretty hateful piece. It’s so much better than anything we ever had. He’s got Dennis Warner working with him now, and he brought a lot of NASCAR technology to the deal. They have really picked this program up, and hopefully next year we’ll be as bad as we thought we were going to be this year. It was a bad year for me, at least on the track, but we survived it, got a lot of press and a lot of honors. Next year we’re going to shoot for the championship.”

Smith feels good, and he believes that he can be competitive in 2008, but he also has a firm grip on reality, and he knows his days as an active driver are numbered.

“I can still drive one of these cars backwards as well as anybody can drive one forward,” Smith said. “I might be a little slack on the tree once in a while now, but when I’ve had my rest I feel I’m as good as anybody out there. I’m no duck I don’t think yet. But I don’t want to be out here taking up space when some young person needs to be in there. I want to give them their chance one day. If Evan has some young driver in mind then maybe I can be a team owner on down the road.”

Smith’s son Matt comes to mind when young drivers and Pro Stock are mentioned in the same sentence, but he’s quick to squash that notion.

“Some people have said that my son Matt would make a good Pro Stock driver, but to tell the truth I’d kick his butt if he wanted to get in one of these cars,” Smith said. “He’s doing awesome in Pro Stock Motorcycle and it wouldn’t make any sense for him to change. He’s a good rider and he knows how to win races. He needs to stay right where he is. I don’t see Pro Stock cars in his future at all.

“I’m not saying for sure, but in my heart I feel that in another year or two I’m going to get out of the seat and give someone else a chance,” Smith said. “I don’t want to stay too long. I’ve seen other guys do that and that’s not what Rickie Smith is all about. I really want to be doing all right when I do decide to get out, and I want to be remembered that way.”

It’s a safe bet that will never be the case where “Tricky” Rickie Smith is concerned.

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RICKIE SMITH - MOUNTAIN MOTOR PRO STOCK LEGEND