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He has had one operation so far, with one more to go, maybe
two. He has a scar around his nose and upper lip. “He
didn’t have an upper lip. It was like a fillet knife
had cut his lip and laid it over to the side,” Mike
said.
There is another treatment on his scarring, scheduled for
three weeks, and one more surgery after that. Recovery should
be complete by six to eight months.
Tim will be 18 this July. He will graduate this coming June
from Handley High School in Roanoke. Tim is talking about
being a welder, or a machinist, or else working in his father’s
wrecking yard or in the body shop after graduation. Father
Mike says he is the only kid from his high school who will
graduate with an advanced diploma and go on to trade school.
‘He’s a straight A and B student. If he has made
a C, I don’t know about it,” Mike says. Timmy
accrued a 96-point grade average in trigonometry. Trigonometry,
for goodness sake! He has already been accepted to Southern
Union Junior College in Auburn, Alabama.
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In just four weeks after the welding accident, Timmy was
racing the Vega again. “I wouldn’t let him drive
his dragster,” Mike says. His first race after the accident
was a B&M race. He went eight winning rounds for the whole
weekend. The following week, they went to Montgomery’s
Fistful of Dollars $100,000 race and did nothing, but at Hattiesburg,
Mississippi’s B&M race the following week, he got
down to seven cars.. As of late March 2005, Timmy was tied
for 10th place in B&M points.
For 2005, the Smiths committed themselves to hitting all
the B&M races at the beginning of the year, racing at
tracks from Tennessee to Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.
So far they haven’t missed a one. And at a winter series
three-day race at South Georgia Motorsports Park in Cecil
last year, Tim got down to four cars on Friday, six cars on
Saturday and went four rounds on Sunday. “But Edmond
[Richardson] kind of ran away with the points,” Mike
says. Still, Tim finished third in weekend points. “And
he’s fine with his foot. You won’t even know he’s
got two toes gone unless he takes his shoe off.”
Father and son travel to all the big bracket races in a toter
home with a two-dragster trailer, but soon that will give
way to a new 44-foot stacker trailer that will hold all three
cars, the two dragsters and the Vega wagon.
“I think he’s a great kid. I couldn’t have
asked for no better,” Mike says. “Like I told
him when he gets down and out, I said, ‘Look son, you’ve
won more than some people have who have raced for 20 years.
The average person has never won a $10,000 race. You’ve
already won one and been down to four cars in a $20,000 race,
and all kinds of stuff. You ought to be real proud of yourself.’”
Tim Smith always shakes the hand of a fellow competitor before
they race. We’d like to shake his hand for just being
there, race after race, in the recent past and in the near
future. 
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