“I won points championships not trying; we ended up winning them just because. Usually, if you try you don‘t win them. That‘s the way I look at it. We went to Williams Grove purposely to win the points two or three times. We came up short twice. It was really close, and we got beat out once by Greg Hodnett and once by Todd Shaffer. We were there religiously every week, spent the money and did everything we needed to do, and we still couldn‘t win. When we tried we didn‘t win, so I quit worrying about it.”
While Smith had previously dabbled in many forms of racing, once he left Zemco he bought a 360, and he was also at liberty to turn his attention to growing his Mach 1 chassis business. Mach 1 began to flourish and, by any yardstick, Smith became one of the top 360 racers in the land and the best endorsement for his own handiwork. For whatever reason, he always seemed to hit the ground running when things began in earnest in Florida, and he has done particularly well at East Bay Raceway, where he has won eight times since 2015 and claimed the Ronald Laney Memorial King of the 360‘s honors twice.
When asked why he takes to East Bay he claims, “I have no idea. I just like the place. It just seems to be a good combination for me. You are either fast down there or you are not.”
Before anyone draws the wrong conclusions about this man‘s career, let it be known that Mark Smith has been a very successful 410 sprint car racer. For quick reference, he has taken a fully-caffeinated sprint car to victory lane 33 times at the Port Royal Speedway and 16 times at Williams Grove. He has won with the All Star Circuit of Champions, the World of Outlaws, and ASCS, among others.
While Smith still finds time to climb in a 410, there is no question that he has found a niche in 360 racing. It is a discipline that fits him in nearly every way. He likes the places he can race and he really likes the way it has fit his budget. “We bought that 360 and would run it at East Bay and do pretty damn well,” he says. “And the 410 stuff just started to get so expensive, and it was just so hard on the equipment in the areas where we were racing. We ran all of these big half-miles and it takes a lot of money to run a 410 around here. So, we just started running the 360‘s more because you could get twice the life out of it, if not more.
“It is what we could afford at the time. We couldn‘t afford to do the 410 stuff the way we needed to. It was like we were taking a BB gun into a gun fight. I mean, we could win some races, but in a 360 we could take good equipment all the time. When you race locally here in Pennsylvania you are basically racing against the Outlaws every week. That‘s the kind of money you have to deal with. Ninety-five percent of the field has an Outlaw-quality car. It isn‘t your backyard racer anymore. You have to have a corporate sponsor or a mom and dad who have a lot of money to keep them going.”
Once Smith devoted the lion‘s share of his time to 360 racing, he began winning in bunches. His success at Selinsgrove Speedway, alone, underscores just how tough he is. While it may not have been an overriding goal, he has claimed the track championship three times, including the 2020 season. In addition, he has won the Kramer Kup, a race named in honor of the late Kramer Williamson, five times in the seven editions of the event. In 2018 he was named the National 360 Driver of the Year and was a strong candidate for the same award in 2020.
Taking everything into consideration, the simple truth is that Smith‘s 2020 season was nothing short of remarkable. With COVID dramatically impacting racing in the Keystone State, he pointed his rig south and spent a great deal of time racing with Pete Walton‘s United Sprint Car Series. “It cost us a lot to do that,” he says. “Because it is a 16- to 18-hour drive for most of the races he has. It kills me. But I stay in Mississippi a lot with the Howard family. Jan, Dale, and Josh Howard live in Byhalia, Mississippi, they all race and are customers of mine. They gave me a space to work and a place where I could leave my stuff.
“They even gave me a vehicle I could drive home. They pretty much opened their doors to us. I actually moved my family there for about two months. With all the COVID stuff going around, we were able to race down there when we couldn‘t here.” In what proved to be a stellar record in a truncated year, Smith won 20 feature events, and 14 of the 27 USCS races he contested. It‘s doubtful that Smith will race as extensively in the south in 2021, but as he puts it, “I like travelling around and trying to win as many races as I can. If I don‘t feel like going one weekend, I don‘t go. If I want to go, I go.”
That‘s the entire key to Mark‘s program. While he may race and build cars for a living, he isn‘t going to let anything become an anchor around his neck. “What I am dealing with is fun,” he says. “And I lost a lot of fun around home racing these big tracks. The money you have to spend here is not fun. Then you go to the track and you are miserable because you think about how much you will be spending that night. If you go to some of these race tracks around here and you walk around and start talking to people and just look at their faces you see how miserable they all are. I‘m dead serious. That‘s why I don‘t race here, because it‘s not fun.”
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