It was a little like stealing your parent’s keys, wrecking the car, bringing it back with a tow truck and then stammering out a half-baked explanation.
“I had to tell him I tore the right side off,” said Regan Smith, driver of the up-and-coming, Denver-based No. 78 NASCAR race team. “He got pretty quiet.”
He, in this case, is Furniture Row Racing owner Barney Visser, the man bankrolling the only Sprint Cup Series team outside the Carolinas — and with it, the brash 28-year-old Smith, who stormed into the NASCAR conversation last season by winning the Southern 500 at Darlington, a crown jewel on the high-profile stock car circuit.
In December, Smith borrowed a race-ready car from the team’s garage to drive professional skiier Jess McMillan to a Telluride mountain for a filmed segment in an upcoming Warren Miller movie.
Slap some snow tires on a stock car, and ice-covered mountains should be just like racing Talladega, right?
“It wasn’t exactly a clean ride,” Smith said.
He crashed the car into a tree. “But it’s not every day you get to race on snow,” he said.
It’s also not every day you see a NASCAR team so calm going into a new season. But Smith and the No. 78 team were a snapshot of steady resolve Tuesday at their Park Hill garage in north Denver. They’re making final preparations for a trip this week to Florida for the Daytona 500 on Feb. 26. Speedweeks testing and qualification start next week.
With Daytona near, Smith will feel new pressure. A season ago, the team was looking not only to win its first race, but finish in the top 10 for the first time. They did both, winning at Darlington on May 7 and finishing in the top 10 five times. Smith notched impressive finishes in four of NASCAR’s biggest races — the Daytona 500 (seventh), Southern 500 (first), Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte (eighth) and the Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis (third). But inconsistent finishes throughout the season left them with a 26th-place finish in the season standings — just two slots better than 2010, when they raced a full schedule for the first time. Smith was the lowest-ranked driver among those with victories last season.
“We’re still riding under the radar, and I don’t mind it,” crew chief Pete Rondeau said. “The surprise element works out well. But if you’re finishing back in the 30s, you had a real bad day.
“We need to level out the inconsistencies. Our bad days need to be in the 20th-21st range, at worst.”
The bar, Smith and Rondeau said, now is a berth in the Sprint Cup Chase among the top 12 drivers.
“We need to communicate well,” Rondeau said of working with Smith. “In the end, I’m the coach. He gets excited out there — too excited — and I need to bring him back down. He needs to stay calm and figure out what the car is doing early in the race and early in the season. And he needs to communicate that to the pit.”
Smith recently moved to the Denver area from Charlotte, N.C., to be near the team’s garage. He has already taken to Denver, scoring tickets to see the Broncos during their Tim Tebow- powered run late in the season. The Avalanche will be familiar too — Smith’s fandom of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes is enough that he pitched and published editorials on the team’s website.
Still, a top-heavy set of stars in NASCAR, including 2011 champion Tony Stewart and runner-up Carl Edwards, are among those driving in Smith’s way this season.
That’s if he doesn’t get grounded.
Nick Groke: 303-954-1015 or ngroke@denverpost.com
NASCAR Speedweeks
The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series starts this month with the Super Bowl of stock car racing, the Daytona 500:
Feb. 18: Budweiser Shootout preseason race, 6 p.m., KDVR-31
Feb. 19: Qualifying, 11 a.m., KDVR-31
Feb. 23: Gatorade Duels 150 for pole positions, 11 a.m., Speed
Feb. 26: Daytona 500, 10 a.m., KDVR-31
