Daniel Hemric, Bubba Pollard … Casey Smith.
In three years, the Southern Super Series has crowned three different champions with Smith becoming the most recent one on Saturday night with a 10th-place finish in the Deep South Crane 150 at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Florida.
A contender in southern Super Late Model racing for much of the past decade, Smith took his game to the next level in 2015 and found the consistency and good luck that hadn’t always been present for much of his career.
Simply put, Smith was flawless in the Southern Super Series this season, posting two wins and a 100 percent top-10 rate in all 13 tour events. His worst finish was actually the 10th he posted on Saturday night, a testament to his maturation as a driver and the reliability of his equipment, towed back-and-forth from Austin, Texas for each event.
“I hate that we ran so poorly tonight,” Smith said after the race. “We were pretty good the first 100 laps and were just riding behind (Casey) Roderick and then we got on those new tires — I don’t know if we had bad tires or what but we had no front grip.
“So I’m disappointed about that but we had a great year.”
Smith opened up the season with a second place finish in March in the Rattler 250 at South Alabama Speedway and followed it up with finishes of fourth and third at Fairgrounds Speedway Nashville and Five Flags respectively.
His first victory of the season came at Mobile International Speedway in April — leading wire-to-wire in the 95KSJ 100.
He then posted finishes of fourth, sixth and ninth at Five Flags, Mobile and Watermelon Capital Speedway. His second win came at Montgomery in the Rumble by the River 100 at Montgomery. And then came finishes of fifth, second, fifth and seventh before finishing the season with a 10th — his worst of the year.
With his championship, Smith will collect $10,000 and perhaps just as important — an automatic entry into the Snowball Derby in December.
“The Snowball Derby is more important but I like that $10,000 check,” Smith ultimately concluded.
