After going winless for nearly a year, Matt Smith returned to victory lane Sunday afternoon after winning a final round battle with his teammate, John Hall. Smith qualified in the No. 1 position for the fourth time this season and the first time since Norwalk.
Smith beat Eiji Kawakami and Seattle winner Chase Van Sant and had a bye into the final round. The former six-time champion won in the first two rounds and went straight to the finals courtesy of a semi-final bye run.
For his part, Hall defeated Angie Smith, Gaige Herrera, and Hector Arana Jr. to reach the final round.
In the final round, Hall jumped ahead of Matt with a quicker reaction, but the King, North Carolina rider reeled in Hall at half-track to score his 39th career victory and first of the season. Smith’s 6.700, 203.77 run beat Hall’s6.746, 200.26 mph.
“It’s very big,” Smith said of the Denso NHRA Sonoma Nationals win. “When your sponsor sponsors this race, and then you can come in here and perform like we did and win everything there was to win, that just speaks volumes to itself. We really put a lot of effort into running well here at Sonoma. The V-Twins have never been spectacular at sea-level tracks.
“Typically [Sonoma] is a Suzuki deal, and we put a lot of effort into getting our 60-foots better, saving our best motors for this race because it was a Denso race. And it showed all our hard work and gained ground with everything. Just proud of our whole team, between me, Angie, Jianna, John Hall, all my crew guys, Michael Ray, Brandon. We had a new guy, Devon, this weekend on John Hall’sbike and Cookie Man. It just takes a team effort to have our team be like what we are right now; we’re gelling and going into Indy and the Countdown. I think they know we’re here.”
Smith essentially won everything the Denso NHRA Sonoma Nationals had to offer. Starting on Friday, Smith secured the provisional No. 1 qualifying position and used the momentum to win SSaturday’s$25,000-to-win GETTRX All-Star Callout, beating teammate Jianna Salinas for the victory.
Smith said several factors helped the team parlay their efforts into victory, but the difference was the value of strong sixty-foot incremental times.
“It’s all in 60-foot,” Smith confirmed. “This class is so dependent on 60-foots right now. The Suzukis/Vance and Hines team stepped up the game with 60 feet, and that’s where we’ve had to get better at our program. We’ve always had good power. It’s just the simple fact that we couldn’t control it in the first, I’d say, the first 30 feet of the racetrack. That’s where we have our problem. We were leaving really low and taking a lot of power out, a lot of power out. It shouldn’t have even gone down to the racetrack, but it did every time, and we just stumbled onto something, and it really paid off for us here. We hit the tune-up immediately, and we just kept doing it.”
Smith believes his team can continue to develop consistency as the NHRA Mission Foods championship series heads into the part of the tour where favorable conditions will be prevalent. He readily admits his team still struggles at tracks near sea-level conditions.
“If we get in really good air, yes,” Smith said. “That’s been our Achilles heel. You look at when we’re at altitude; the V-Twins always run well. When we get to sea level or close to sea level, we always struggle because we have so much power and torque that we can’t control it. I came in [here] with the mindset of just taking a crap ton of timing out of it in low gear and leaving 1000 RPMs lower than I ever have before, and it worked. I just wanted to try it. It worked, and I was like, all right, just going to do that to everybody’s. We just had problems with John Hall’s bike in qualifying. It showed today. He stepped right up. We knew there was a problem with his bike. We fixed it. We found it in Q4. It didn’t start. We found it, and he went all the way to the finals.”
Smith and his team will return to competition at the NHRA U.S. Nationals, as the category is not scheduled for Brainerd. The 39-time race winner will enjoy a month off, come back fresh, and challenge for a seventh championship. Smith alluded what might happen if they achieve this.
“We got a month break to get our stuff fresh, get our stuff ready. We got to work with Jianna a little bit on getting her reaction times better. For some reason, I couldn’t cut a light here this weekend. I was .050s, .050s, .050s. First round I was .100, but I squeezed it really hard. I didn’t want to take any chance. I knew who I was running. I got to play it smart, but it’s just one of them deals. I stepped up in the finals a little bit. John was .034. I was .044.
“I’m 51 years old. I’m getting older. There’s a lot of young guns shooting for us, but I still can do this. I still can win a championship, and I would love to get seven, and that’s my goal right now. If I can get to that magic number seven, I promise you, I will put a young gun on this bike and show you what this bike can do with somebody really young on there.”
