"It had a unitized body, just like the production car, from the driver back," Smith says. "In front, they put a jig frame on it, just like their NASCAR cars. I feel that was the first one that ever used a jig frame. Nobody had ever thought of it."
One man, though, was quick to see its virtues-and an opportunity. Barry Wright went to Smith's shop and took measurements of the Holman-Moody front clip so that he could duplicate it. It was the beginning of a business for Wright, who now operates Barry Wright Race Cars in Cowpens, South Carolina. The car-building business (Wright's in particular, and the industry as a whole) would have a profound effect on dirt stock car racing in the years to come.
If lightweight machines such as Smith's Mustang had a disadvantage, it was vulnerability. Conventional short-track cars were built like tanks, and drivers raced them accordingly.
"My gosh, when you'd get in a wreck, the tank would hit harder than you, but he'd put it in reverse and back up and go on, and you'd be sittin' there dead in the water," Smith says.
Eventually, lighter-weight cars and their drivers began to prevail over the heavyweights on a consistent basis and the competition followed suit to keep pace. But there was another force behind the transition to purpose-built race cars purchased from suppliers. It was simply easier to build and maintain the new cars.
"Man, it was so much simpler than before, when you had to take an old car and hull it out and build it," Wright says. "And there was nobody to go and buy parts from the way there are now. You had to have a machinist to help you get going. You had to make everything."
Modifying production automobiles was much less scientific-and, therefore, much more of a trial-and-error process, Wright says. A new car, or one that had been wrecked and repaired, didn't always perform like it was expected to, and sometimes it wasn't easy to figure out why.
Smith, who not only drove but also worked side-by-side with his dad to build his cars, agrees wholeheartedly. "There was a lot of hard work in those things," Smith says-and there was a lot of body putty applied to keep them looking presentable, too.
Many of the battered hulks that compete in "bomber" or "poor-boy" support division races at local tracks today show how rag-tag a production car can look after a few weeks (or a few laps) of short-track action. The flat-sided Late Models of today not only better withstand minor side-to-side contact, but are much simpler to repair. All that's necessary is to straighten mounting brackets and bracing as required, and then rivet a new aluminum panel in place.
Building A ReputationWhile the cars were evolving, so was the sport itself. In the '60s, dirt-track stock car racing was at low ebb. Big prize money and a visionary promoter, the late Robert Smawley, helped revive it. In 1978, Smawley created the National Dirt Racing Association, attempting to form a touring series to showcase professional dirt Late Model racing with an unheard-of First-Place prize of $10,000 for the winner of a 100-lap feature.
That pales in comparison to last year's event at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, in which Donnie Moran won $1 million for winning a 100-lapper staged by promoter Earl Baltes. But the NDRA helped lift dirt Late Model racing above the weekly Saturday-night level.
Jeff Purvis, one driver who has distinguished himself by winning in just about all forms of full-bodied stock car racing, moved from dirt to asphalt to superspeedways, from older, heavyweight Chevelles and Camaros to modern dirt cars and NASCAR-style machines. Purvis, currently on the mend after suffering head and neck injuries in a crash during a Busch Series event at Nazareth, Pennsylvania, remembers the not-so-good old days when he started racing at the quarter-mile red clay oval in his hometown, Clarksville, Tennessee.