Rickie Smith began racing on a national level in 1976 in a Ford.
There’s a strong chance that he is going to end those pursuits in the same brand. (And, no, for the umpteenth time, he’s not about to retire.)
For the past 33 years, the multi-time NHRA, IHRA and PDRA champ has piloted General Motors products. When the 2022 NHRA Pro Modified season kicks off March 10-13 at Gainesville, Fla., Smith will roll to the starting line in a late-model Ford Mustang.
It’s not for sentimental reasons in an attempt to bring his career full circle, he said. Simply, it’s because a long-time sponsor, Junie Michael of Parkway Ford, asked him to make the switch.
“Back in the ’80s when I was winning my stuff and had Motorcraft and Ford with me, on the back had Parkway Ford most of the time,” Smith, 68, said. “I had bought a Ford truck, and Parkway was on the car as an associate sponsor. I haven’t had anything but a Ford truck since the late ’80s.
“So I was down there a coupla years ago, trading trucks, and he was asking me what I was going to do. I said I didn’t know. COVID had started, maybe I was ready to quit. Anyway, he asked me what I wanted (in sponsorship) for the door of the car, and he got me this deal with Sokal,” an advertising agency with offices in Raleigh and Huntersville, N.C.
“We got to talking late last June and he said, ‘You know I like Fords. I wouldn’t mind going another year (as a sponsor), but I’d really like to see you run a Ford.’ I said, ‘If that’s what you want me to run, I’ll run a Ford.’ ”
Michael said his company’s involvement with Smith precedes the years of Ford factory sponsorship that the racer enjoyed in the mid 1980s.
“We’ve been with Rickie in some way for long time, even when he wasn’t racing a Ford,” Michael said. “Even when he was in a Chevrolet in recent years, we were involved through our Capital Chevrolet dealership.”
And that’s why there’s a Mustang in the paint booth right now at Jerry Bickel Race Cars in Moscow Mills, Mo. Smith expects to fetch the new car early in the first week of March, and take it home to his shop on Newsome Road in King, N.C. From there, it will be loaded into Smith’s racing hauler, where he will will take it to Orlando, Fla., for a day of testing prior to the Gatornationals in Gainesville..
Into mothballs will go the Chevy Camaro he drove to an 11th-place points finish, and without a final-round showing, in 2021.
But one thing that won’t change will be the power under the hood. The engine will remain … well, let him describe the current state of Pro Mod horsepower.
“We all run the same motors. All these motors – Ford, GM, Chrysler – they’re all aftermarket stuff,” Smith said. “I run Dart heads, C&M block, Callies crank. Pat Musi puts them together, and I keep them up from there. You can call it GM, Ford, Chrysler, whatever you want to call it, but it ain’t a full-blown any of them, it’s all aftermarket stuff – blown or whatever, but it’s aftermarket. Mine is a Ford car with a 959-inch Musi engine on nitrous.”
Smith, with a nudge from sponsor Junie Michael and drag racer Jim Ruth, tackled the NASCAR Busch (now Xfinity) Series in 1988. Two days spent at the Buck Baker Racing School at North Carolina Motor Speedway in Rockingham gave Smith a left-turn-only foundation, and in June, he made the first of four attempts to make a Busch Series starting lineup on four short tracks.
He was successful on three of those four outings – two in Rougemont, N.C., and one in Myrtle Beach, S.C. – and he was running at the finish of those. He didn’t make the show at Louisville (Ky.) Motor Speedway. His best finish was a 16th in the Myrtle Beach 200.
“That was when I was winning my championships,” Smith said, “and I had to figure out whether I was gonna do this or that, and I stayed with the drag car. I loved to do it, but it takes money. Those things you wreck every week, and you’ve got to fix them, so I figured I’d better stay with what I knew.”
Did he feel like a fish out of water in stock cars?
“A little bit,” he said. “I was bad-ass in go-karts back in the day. I had a coupla fast ones and nobody could hardly beat me in that stuff. I think I had the knack to drive a round-track car, but it’s just like anything, you’ve got to have the money and the people behind you.” – Thomas Pope
It’s a far cry from Smith’s quasi-pro debut in 1976, when IHRA spawned a Super Modified class, or what he called a “miniature Pro Stock” division. Its ranks included the likes of standout racers such as Herb McCandless, John Bray, Paul Mercure, John Lingenfelter, and others.
Smith drove for Keith Fowler, who attended the same First Baptist Church in King as Smith. Fowler was a promoter of country & western concerts in major venues for stars such as Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, and the Oak Ridge Boys – and a racing fan. When he wanted to go racing on a higher level, he chose Smith to handle the driving duties, and had a Ford Maverick built by former Pro Stock racers Wayne Gapp and Jack Roush.
“It was a bad-ass class,” Smith recalled, “but we dominated so bad, they did away with it after I won the championships in ’76 and ’77. Chrysler cast a special (cylinder) head for McCandless the second year, but they couldn’t touch us. I don’t know why they did away with it because we always had a decent car count.”
With the extinction of Super Modified, Fowler and Smith had to set their sights elsewhere. Fowler was a Ford aficionado, and Don Hardy was commissioned to build a Mustang for IHRA Pro Stock competition.
In 1981, Smith’s partnership with Fowler literally came to a grinding halt. At an IHRA points meet in Richmond, Va., an issue with a rear tire caused Smith’s car to barrel-roll multiple times; a crash so violent it ripped the rear end from the chassis. Smith escaped with a bruised shoulder, but Fowler decided he was done.
The following year, Smith was on his own with another Hardy-built Mustang, and he drove to the first of five IHRA Pro Stock crowns in that decade. The 1982 title was followed by one of the most dominating performances in IHRA history when Smith took the No. 1 decal for four consecutive seasons (1986-89).
The last of those came in a different brand of car and sponsor (Pontiac and Stroh’s Light beer). Smith remained a loyal GM campaigner from 1989 through the end of 2021.
During that time, Smith won the first NHRA Pro Modified race – 2001 Gatornationals – and would capture NHRA titles in that division in 2013 and ’14. In 2015, he was PDRA’s Pro Modified champion, then returned to NHRA the following season to earn his third title with that sanctioning body.
His best finish since then was in 2018, when he fell seven points short of catching Mike Janis for the NHRA gold. He’s spent the past few seasons in a tug o’ war with NHRA technical officials, strenuously defending his belief that the nitrous-assisted competitors were at a performance disadvantage.
“This whole deal with NHRA Pro Modified, it’s all up to NHRA whether they let who or what win,” he opined. “If you go back and look for the last 10 years – nine, for sure – 98% of the time I have been the fastest nitrous car there. If I can’t qualify 1-2-3-4, if I’m down here low in the field and can’t win, it ain’t all my fault. If I’m the fastest nitrous car there and I’m not competitive, then that’s NHRA’s fault. If there’s another nitrous car out there outrunning me 3-4-5 hundredths and I’m not winning, then that’s my fault.
“It’s all about the rule packages. NHRA finally got the rules changed some midseason last year, and it looks like they’ve got the nitrous car back where it’ll be competitive.”
And now he will be back in the Fords that helped him earn a spot in the North Carolina Drag Racing Hall of Fame.
“It’ll be a late-model Mustang. I’m not exactly sure what year style it is, but it’s kind of like what Larry Morgan ran when he ran Pro Stock, and like Stan Shelton’s PDRA Pro Boost car,” he said. “As far as the records and such, I’ll enter it as a 2022 Mustang.”
The return to Ford is something Michael is happy to see from his long-time friend.
“He’s a competitor, and I am, too. He’s just good people, and he’s going to win. He’s definitely going to win,” Michael said.
“It’s good for business for us to be involved, but I just like to see our name out there, of course. We’ve been a Ford dealer in Winston-Salem since 1967. The two races in Charlotte give us great exposure, and our employees like it. He’ll have his car at the dealership, and he’s very generous with his time. He’ll come in and talk to our employees one-on-one. They love it.”
