Unless you went into the pits Friday at Pacific Raceways during the Flav-R-Pac NHRA Northwest Nationals and noticed the cluster of folks in black shirts around a basic dragster beside a rather non-descript hauler parked on the far edge of the Top Fuel enclave, you didn’t get to see team owner-driver Ron Smith.
The 80-year-old retired Boeing engineer from Kapowsin, Wash., didn’t make a pass in Friday’s lone qualifying session. For some reason, the car wasn’t ready, despite the diligent attention everyone – including July 14 Lucas Oil Series Top Alcohol Dragster Division 6 race winner Kim Parker – was lavishing on it. But the hearts of the driver and crew member Harold Goens still need a bit of tuning, when right now a fix isn’t readily available.
Goens is Smith’s son-in-law, and both still are reeling from the loss in April of Smith’s daughter and Goens’ wife Ronnell from a brain aneurysm. They had experienced the same situation with Smith’s wife nine years before. She, too, had suffered a brain aneurysm, was airlifted to Seattle trauma center Harborview Hospital, and a week later was taken off life support. This is new territory, racing without Ronnell.
And Smith had felt so lucky to have enjoyed his daughter, a forestry worker alongside her husband, especially for the past quarter-century or so. “When she was in her twenties,” he said, “she had gotten hit by a car that was going 60 miles an hour. She was in a crosswalk. I think she was 20, 21 years old and barely made it through that. So he said, ‘I was just lucky to have another 25 years with her.’”
Recently, while enjoying a dinner that revolved around Diet Coke and red licorice, Smith was starting to fill out his tech card and make sure all the crew passes for this event were in order. And he sighed, “I can’t do this.” He asked Parker, his longtime five-minutes-away neighbor from the nearby town of Graham, Wash., and her A/Fuel dragster-driver husband Randy for help. And Kim Parker asked him, “Do you think you’re going to be OK to drive?” Smith said yes.
Smith, who’ll turn 81 in October but hits the race shop and gym daily (and participates in an aerobics class regularly), has a new nostalgia Funny Car in addition to the dragster that he’s been racing for about 60 years to keep his mind occupied. But Goens doesn’t have all that. So they’re supporting each other in their “new normal” without Ronnell.
It has been hard to be Ron Smith in the first place because as Parker said, “They only do this once a year, and things get out of practice when you don’t do it more.” The Smith team occasionally misses its one opportunity or struggles through it.
For example, their first round of eliminations here last season was a bit chaotic. The puke tank, which looks like a big vacuum cleaner on the back of the car, catches all the oil that might blow onto the valve covers. The team neglected to install it before the run.
“So they were just going to tow the car back to the pit,” Parker said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, get him in [belt him into the seat] and go get it. It only takes a second, a minute maybe, to strap it on in the car.’”
Ultimately, they overlooked another vital detail. Never mind the blow-by, the valve covers weren’t serviced properly on one side. The job on one side got done and not on the other. “One of the valve covers was not on tight. It wasn’t tightened at all. It was just set on there,” Parker said. “So after the burnout, it was leaking, and we got shut off.”
In Smith’s defense, Parker said, “People have no idea what it takes to run any of the cars out here. Just to get to the track is a whole process of going through everything and stocking everything and working on the car. And that takes a long time.”
Smith might not go to his Boeing job anymore, but Parker drives a school bus in Puyallup, Wash., when the school year is in session.
Parker said she was concerned at first about Smith’s ability to steer the Funny Car:
“When he got the Funny Car, I thought, ‘OK, he’s not driven a short car before.’ You had to shift once. And I was honestly a little bit worried, and I looked in at him, I’m like, ‘Oh no, that’s game face.’ He drove it just fine and after his first pass, he mentioned “a little bit of clutch dust in there” in passing. So the new experience didn’t faze him.
“He’s good at both,” Parker said. “It takes such a huge budget to run one of these, and he’s frugal. He always has been. But he’s happy with running once a year. I always would try to get him to come to Vegas and he’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. It’s too far.’ He’s good running here and in Spokane. He ran in IHRA for a long time. He’s got quite a decorated past in the fuel car. So he’s won quite a few races, and he just still wants to come hit the throttle. And a lot of people are like, ‘Well, why does he even bother? Why bother doing that?’ What else is he going to do, read the paper and sit around all day?
“He’s an engineer, so his mind is busy all of the time. He’s in the shop every single day. So when we’re done here, we’re going to take that motor out of the dragster, put it in the funny car, and then go, come up here and do something,” she said. “We didn’t finish his license. He needs one more full pull. When he lets his foot off, he grabs the brake. And I’m like, ‘You’re not all the way down the track yet. You haven’t run a quarter-mile. He’s used to 1,000 feet.” The NHRA shortened the course for the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes from 1,320 feet (a quarter-mile) to 1,000 feet in 2008, for safety concerns.
Smith has corrected one thing that has made it difficult to be Ron Smith, He has gotten Parker to stop calling him “Grandma Ron.”
She said with a laugh, “Worrywart Grandma Ron, after he drove the Funny Car a couple of times, he said, ‘Now can you stop calling me Grandma?’” She has called him that “for as long as I can remember,” she said. “He’s like a little old lady. He gets so wound up, not so much anymore now that he’s getting older.” She said Smith and crew chief Gus Foster, who have worked together since around 1969 or 1970 “argue like two old ladies. They’ve been together forever.”
If Smith is a “grandma,” he’s more like the Jan-and-Dean-song character: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena” who can’t keep her foot off the accelerator.
