With ambient temperatures at Pomona, Calif., zooming up toward triple digits and track temperatures at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona well exceeding that – blistering enough to cause Top Fuel finalist Just Ashley to wilt in his cockpit and concede a solo run to opponent Leah Pruett – Pro Stock Motorcycle winner Matt Smith acknowledged that it was maybe the toughest victory he ever had earned. 

“It was a tuners race, a lot of it,” the man who has led the standings after all but one of the 10 completed races said following his triumph at the NHRA Lucas Oil Winternationals. 

Luckily for Matt Smith, he’s a tuner, too. 

After defeating three-time champion Angelle Sampey in the final round, four-time champ Smith said it was grueling “just battling this track, as hot as it was out here. 

“We were just trying to get a hold of the track, and it got really greasy and 140-some degrees track temp. We just had to adjust everything and do the best we could. And we made it work,” the Denso-sponsored EBR racer said. 

Ultimately, Smith used a 6.828-second elapsed time at 199.52 mph on the quarter-mile course to defeat Angelle Sampey in the final round and hit the 30-race victory plateau. 

She was no match for him this time, with smoke coming from her Vance & Hines Suzuki. Sampey’s runner-up finish came with a rather tardy .102-second reaction time (to his .042), a 6.911-second E.T., and 173.96-mph speed. 

Smith indicated he saved his best for last, although that wasn’t exactly what he had planned. 

“Our Q2 pass Saturday (6.841/198.96) was a good example where we should have been at. I stayed there, but the track got a little bit worse than that and I spun [the tire] a little bit more in the semifinals. So I came up here for this [final] round and I just took a little bit more power out of it. And it actually worked, because we went back to where we were all day qualifying. We just over-pounded the track today the first three passes. We finally hit it right in E4.” 

The race – oddly named, considering the heat and the fact it began in late July and ended in August – marked the NHRA’s first event at Auto Club Raceway since the 2020 Winternationals, for the first time in 18 months. Neither the 2020 Finals nor the February edition of this traditional season-opener in February took place at Pomona. During that drag-racing absence, the racing surface itself became a drive-through food pantry for needy Southern Californians during the height of COVID restrictions. 

It’s no surprise that Smith extended his points lead, but it was a bit of a wake-up call for his challengers that they have just one last event before they either make the Countdown to the Championship chase or are left with hard choices to make and 2022 plans to design. 

While the other Camping World pro classes are moving on to Topeka, then Brainerd, Minn., before their Countdown to the Championship fields are set at the U.S. Nationals, the Indianapolis race is next on the schedule for the Pro Stock Motorcycle class. 

“We got one race before the Countdown. We got Indianapolis,” Smith said. 

And if anyone though the class was a tough one, imagine the combination of the NHRA’s most prestigious race and the fact this is the last chance to makde the field of 10 racers who even can hope to earn a series crown this year. 

“Everybody wants to win Indy,” Smith said. 

But he isn’t worried. 

“We got a good team,” he said. “We got three strong bikes.” 

He does – Matt Smith Racing does. But the trouble at Pomona for his three-bike contingent is that they “were just all paired up on one side of the ladder and we had to run each other.” 

All went well in that department for the Matt Smith trio in the first round. But in the second round, Matt Smith and wife Angie Smith had to race each other. And in the semifinal, Matt Smith had to line up against Scotty Pollacheck. 

The team boss said that “hopefully we’ll try to work that out in Indy and get everyone on opposite sides of the ladder and we’ll see if we can meet in the finals.”