Smith gets race-day call
GLEN, N.Y. Regan WATKINS Smith got the call at roughly 8:30 a.m. ET Sunday.
Ryan Pemberton, his crew chief at JR Motorsports, was on the line with an urgent request: Get to the Nationwide Series team’s Mooresville, N.C., race shop immediately.
Three and a half hours later, Smith was in the Watkins Glen International garage — a place he’d just left after driving in Saturday’s Nationwide Series race — and getting fitted for Tony Stewart’s No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet.
Smith replaced Stewart after the three-time Sprint Cup Series champion withdrew from the Cheez-It 355 at The Glen out of respect for 20-year-old Kevin Ward Jr., who was killed when he was run over by Stewart’s sprint car Saturday night at a track in Upstate New York.
Smith finished 37th after crashing into spinning Jimmie Johnson with nine laps to go but made no excuses despite not hav- ing raced a Cup car since the Coca-Cola 600 in May 2013.
“It’s a race car — it’s my job to be able to drive a race car,” said Smith, who’s second in the Nationwide standings. “It took me a little longer to get acclimated than I hoped it would, and it felt like at the end there we were starting to make progress. I was able to get consistent with the car and understood the car a little better.”
The New York native, 30, who calls Watkins Glen his home track, has become somewhat of a super sub. Smith replaced Dale Earnhardt Jr. when the Hendrick Motorsports driver missed two races because of a concussion in October 2012, tested for Jeff Gordon in December 2013 and was on standby for ailing Gordon in this year’s Coca-Cola 600.
But it had been 15 months since Smith raced a Cup car, which has a new rules package. Plus, he had no practice time in Stewart’s car.
“These things are a lot different now than they were a year and a half ago,” he said. “There’s been a lot of changes to them.”
When the garage opened at 7 a.m., the team put Stewart’s hel- met on the roof of the car and made no moves to change the seat inserts.
SHR director of competition Greg Zipadelli originally said Sunday would be “business as usual” before backing off that comment.
Stewart decided it would not be a good idea to race after Saturday’s tragedy, and Smith was summoned. Smith’s JR Motorsports team is in the extended Hendrick Motorsports family — as is SHR — and Smith has more than four seasons of Cup experience.
So he traveled by plane to Watkins Glen with team owner Rick Hendrick, who even helped Smith carry some of his seat inserts off the plane. After taking roughly 15 minutes to get adjusted to the car — JR Motorsports had already relayed his measurements to SHR — he changed into his firesuit and walked to pit road.
Smith broke into the top 20 and had a shot at a decent finish until clipping Johnson’s car.
“These guys build fast race cars at Stewart-Haas, and I was thankful to be able to get in one, but definitely not under these circumstances,” Smith said.