Watching today's dirt Late Model in action is a sensory delight. The car screams down the straightaway, then veers violently into the corner. The engine goes eerily silent as the driver lifts his right foot and cranks the steering wheel to the left, pitching the car into the turn. Then the roar resumes. A fantail of dirt particles sprays from the digging rear tires.
The car's body rolls dramatically in surrender to centrifugal force. The left-front wheel lifts off the ground, but the left-rear rubber remains in contact with the track, far below the chassis, still spraying dirt.
The vehicles at the top of the hierarchy in all forms of racing are special and sophisticated in their own way, and this wicked machine is no exception.
The dirt Late Model's skeleton is made of high-strength round steel tubing. Sheetmetal components are aluminum. The nose, side skirts, and top are molded composite plastic. It has an aluminum V-8 engine and aluminum rims. With 20 gallons of gasoline (methanol, in some instances) in its fuel cell, it weighs less than 2,000 pounds; according to the rules of most sanctioning bodies, it must tip the scales at a minimum 2,300 pounds with the driver on board at the conclusion of a race, so ballasts must be strategically positioned to meet that requirement.
It's a special-purpose creature. As recently as 30 years ago, similar Late Model stocks were raced on dirt and paved ovals. Through 1970, the NASCAR Winston Cup Series included races on dirt tracks.
The race cars-Winston Cup and local short-track warriors' machines alike-were all built from production automobiles. They were taken from the street, or from the junkyard, and stripped down, hulled out, lightened, braced, outfitted with a rollcage, modified to accept heavy-duty suspension components, fitted with a souped-up engine, and hauled to the racetrack.
Radical DesignsIn the late '60s and early '70s, the evolutionary process of the stock car began in earnest. Racers began to build cars based on specific factory-made frames-Chevrolet sedans of the mid-'50s, early '60s full-sized Fords, '60s-'70s Chevelle/Monte Carlo-with bodies of various makes and models fitted to them. Some unibody models were successfully adapted, including "kit" cars sold by Chrysler Corp.
The next stage incorporated a factory-built front subframe from a unibody car, such as the Camaro/Nova, with a specially crafted full frame usually made of rectangular steel tubing.
Before the end of that decade, numerous chassis builders had begun mass-producing race car chassis made entirely of steel tubing. Pieces of steel were precisely cut and welded together on "jig" base templates to ensure consistency. A cottage industry was born.
From this point, significant changes began to separate the cars built for dirt and those intended for paved tracks. As production steel bodies were replaced by skins fabricated of sheetmetal or assembled from molded composite parts, dirt cars became less similar in appearance to street cars. Innovators went crazy with radical wedge-shaped bodies, some of them with huge sheets of clear Lexan bolted vertically along the driver's side of the body. Pavement cars retained more of a stock appearance.
Although the outrageous aerodynamic bodies have been discarded, chassis refinements have been more subtle. The dirt Late Model of the late '80s and early '90s had reached an evolutionary plateau.
Crafting A CreatureOne of the pioneers is still a top name among dirt Late Model drivers. Freddy Smith, then an aspiring youngster from Kings Mountain, North Carolina, had a connection with the famous Holman-Moody team that dominated Grand National racing in the '60s; his father, Clarence "Grassy" Smith, worked for H-M. The famous NASCAR team built Freddy a revolutionary dirt race car based on a 1968 Mustang.