Matt Smith finally pulled it off. The six-time NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle pulled off a feat he’d been pursuing for almost two seasons. He stopped Gaige Herrera in the final round and, in doing so, won his second national event of the season and the 41st of his career.
Smith ran a 6.702 second elapsed time at 202 mph to outrun the now two-time champion Herrera.
This season has been one of letdowns and frustrations for the second-generation champion. But on this weekend, he ended the season on a high note.
“We came in here knowing that we couldn’t get three hats, we could get two hats, and that’s what our goal was, was to get two hats,” Smith said. We got the number one qualifier hat, and we got the race win hat, and we put more pressure on them by our qualifying position of Angie and me and making it come down to today. So it made us sweat a little bit more overnight last night.”
Smith, who has been critical of the Vance & Hines team, understood Herrera had a strong running bike but that he was beatable. When those opportunities of Herrera’s vulnerability came along, he was unable to capitalize on the opportunities.
“It was deserved of him to win the championship. He had the best bike through the countdown and didn’t have any mistakes, and our bike had a lot of little mistakes. So hopefully next year we’ll be better, fix our mistakes, and give him a better run next year.”
And Smith, 52, who has expressed his interest to retire with a seventh championship has mixed feelings about this.
“I enjoy doing this,” Smith said. “I love doing this. In essence, I’d like to get off the bike. I’d like to get off the bike and put somebody young on like what Andrew and Eddie have done and give somebody an opportunity that can go double-00 [reaction times] and teens all the time. It’s hard for me to go .20s and teens. I pushed myself there in the Finals to go because I knew Gaige was going to be good.
“I really love doing it, and I think as long as Denso’s with us, she told me, she goes, ‘Hey, you need to quit talking about retirement because we’re still backing you and your wife. So you need to cut that out.”
“So I guess I still got a job right now, and I’ll just keep digging away, and hopefully, we can get that seventh championship. We’re going to push real hard next year.”
Make no mistake about it: Smith was excited when NHRA announced earlier this month that a new fuel supplier and spec fuel were coming to Pro Stock Motorcycle. In his mind, this move could shuffle the field enough for the field to catch up to Herrera.
“I think NHRA is going to do something [with parity],” Smith said. “We’ve seen too many times through this countdown that bike would go out there and go five, six-hundredths faster than everybody else. It happened at Reading, it happened, I think, at Dallas, and it happened somewhere else. It’s one of those deals. I mean, they have a fast bike, and when it does do that, it shows the potential of that combination. Our bike was .72, .73, .74. We went to .70 in the finals. We were consistent all weekend with where we were at, and I feel like they could have gone faster this weekend. Simple fact of they missed the first pass, they blew the tire off. They had a layup.
“We’ve got a new fuel coming next year, so we’ve got to go learn that fuel. It’s totally different from what we’ve ran in the last 10 years. So we’ve got a lot of work to do this winter.”
Smith reflected on the competition with Herrera, recognizing the mutual respect between them. He’s adamant that Herrera has made him a better racer.
“I think Gaige is a good guy, and he’s a great racer,” Smith said. “And from the word go, I’ve never said anything negative about Gage. I’ve had my conflict with the Vance & Hines team. . It is one of those deals; I mean, if you look at all the years they had the Harley deal, nobody could buy those bikes. Nobody could run that stuff. Andrew and Eddie won all those championships on bikes nobody could get, and they couldn’t win on the Suzuki. They couldn’t win on stuff that everybody else could buy. So they stepped off the bike, and now they’ve got two young guys in there who are doing the job for them.
“Maybe that’s what I got to do eventually if we’re going to knock them out. But right now, like I said, I think Gaige is a great guy. I have no problems with Gaige. I love running Gaige. He makes me come perform better.”
Smith recalled critical races that impacted the championship standings and made the difference between his team being championship contenders and just being mathematically eligible.
“We stepped up at Dallas,” Smith explained. “That was a big race for us. I think that was the race in the finals there is probably what caused me the championship because we had that race won and the bike didn’t shift. That was a 40-point swing. So I think if that would’ve been different, we’d have come to this race a little bit different attitude.”
Smith can’t blame it all on Dallas, as there was the fuel pump failure in the second round at Reading, which cost him 20 points, and a cam sensor failure in St. Louis which cost another 20.
As 2024 concludes, Smith is optimistic about building on his experience and improving his team’s performance against formidable competitors like Herrera.
“We know what problems we have to fix,” Smith said. “The V-twin vibrates so much that you just can’t keep up with all the stuff it can shake loose. We’ve fixed our engine issues; now we just have to make sure those little things that cost us are taken care of, too.”
