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The SHELBY AMERICAN
Fall 2015 253
I first met Dick Smith in Oakland
at SAAC-1, in August of 1976. His
smile was warm and friendly and
when you talked with him he was gen-
uinely interested in what you had to
say. It was, after all, just two car guys,
talking cars. His bright red 427 S/C
was not a pristine show car – it was a
retired race car, a former SCCA Na-
tional Champion with nothing to
prove. Realizing that by the mid-1970s
the car was no longer competitive,
Smith had taken it off the track and
occasionally drove it on the streets of
his hometown, Fresno, California.
You could tell as you watched him
wiping the exterior down with a damp
towel or lifting off the hood that was
held in place by a klik-pin at each cor-
ner, that he was intimately familiar
with the car. He raced on the West
Coast from late 1966 through 1968
and garnered two ARRC invitations,
one in 1967 (where he finished 1st in
A/P) and one in 1968 (DNF due to a
mechanical malfunction). In March
1969 at Sebring, a Porsche slid into
him causing the Cobra to spin back-
wards into a post near the track’s
edge. The rear end was crunched and
there was a fire which was extin-
guished quickly. Smith repaired the
car and decided not to race it anymore.
He painted it bright red and drove it
on the street, entering the occasional
open track and hillclimb. Then vintage
racing came along and he was all-in.
Dick Smith was always interested
in flying and had a private pilot’s li-
cense when he was a teenager. In the
mid-1950s he joined the Army and
went to Infantry Officer Candidate
School at Ft. Benning, Georgia. From
– Rick Kopec
Monterey Historics, August 1976 [
left to right]
Kopec, George Harm (Smith’s long time
friend and sometime sponsor), Dick Smith and CSX3035.
Smith started racing the car in the fall of 1966. George Harm originally purchased the
S/C from Mel Burns Ford. The intention was for Smith to race the car but no full com-
petition cars were available. There wasn’t much difference between a comp model and
an S/C. It was originally Silver Mink but Smith painted the nose orange to make the
car stand out. In 1967 he bought the car from Harm and had a very good season. He
went to the American Road Race of Champions at Daytona in November 1967 where
he won the A/P National Championship. He was clocked at 198 mph.