Strength and Courage

Young Timmy Smith has been a winner on the race track. Now he faces a different hurdle.

By Dale Wilson
4/8/05

ourage, thy name is Timmy Smith. For a 17-year-old high school kid who has been racing hot ‘n steady for three years, he has recently been through a lot: the loss of two toes on his right foot, the results of a hunting accident with his father Mike; and a devastating welding accident that literally blew off his nose, upper lip and two teeth and moved his whole face over to his right ear.

“Shoot, if that’s the worst of it all, I’m in pretty good shape,” Timmy told us at a recent three-day bracket race at Montgomery (Alabama) Motorsports Park, merely months after his second accident.

Mike Smith, Tim’s father and an auto salvage and wrecking yard owner and racer in Roanoke, Alabama, began bringing his son to the races when he was just “knee-high to a grasshopper,” he says, just three years old. Meaning that as with many second-generation bracket racers, Timmy was practically brought up at a race track.

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Father Mike is no slouch when it comes to bracket and class racing. He won two NHRA Division 2 Super Pro crowns, in 1989 and in 1991, plus he won the bracket Race of Champions in 1989 as well. He raced a roadster and then a dragster, and bought the Vega that Timmy now shoes in 1988. He, like son Timmy, started drag racing at age 15. He has been at it for 27 years now.

But Timmy Smith seemed to be the one who stole the racing show. He started at age 15 in the Vega that was once owned by a Smith friend, Keith Nelson. Mike was looking for a Super Streeter that could duplicate the one he won his Division 2 Super Gas races in. He bought this Vega wagon and passed it on to Timmy. It was his first car.

With it, Tim won a Top Eliminator race at Atlanta Dragway, a $3,000 prize, in the first four months of his racing career, on July 28, 2002. Since then, Timmy won a $3,000 race in Super Eliminator at Montgomery in 2003, then in 2004, he won a 10-grander and a 5-grander, then in Mike’s dragster, he won a Super Quick race at Montgomery in 2003, then went to the Turkey Trots at Huntsville Dragway and got to three cars on Friday and four cars on Sunday.

Cardboard display checks now line the walls of the Smith’s wrecking yard in Roanoke, many with Timmy’s name on them, a testimony as to just how much this kid has won over his short bracket-racing career. “About $35,000 to $40,000,” Mike Smith says.

Mike, like the rest of us, has heard that drag racers are family when it comes to times of need, but since Tim had those two accidents – especially the second --- he has been overwhelmed by the support, the phone calls and prayers that other racers all over the country have shown his family. Joe Sannutti, of Baxley, Georgia, the IHRA Division 2 chaplain, recently got a call from a Phoneix, Arizona, racer who had heard about the Smith’s misfortune, based on messages that Joe had sent out to the IHRA chaplain, Renee Bingham of North Carolina, and the association’s God Speed Ministry, plus others to the NHRA, Racers For Christ and Racers ‘N Christ.

As accidents like these two go, it almost seems like a cliché, but it’s true --- they both happened so suddenly …