MORRISON, Colo. — Pro Stock Motorcycle winner Matt Smith said after Sunday’s conclusion of the Mopar Mile-High NHRA Nationals that he had wanted so much to excel at Bandimere Speedway.  
“I kept saying, ‘I’ve got to get that monkey off my back,’” Smith said.
What an ironic choice of words.
Matt Smith’s father, Rickie, is a veteran Pro Stock and Pro Modified driver, a multi-time several times who has a wall full of trophies.
Now, Rickie doesn’t pretend to know anything about tuning a motorcycle — “I don’t know how to crank one of them things. That’s the truth,” he‘ll tell you. “I don’t know much about ’em at all.” But he had some valuable advice for son Matt this weekend, data from his experience and intuition about what a motor needs to run competitively in Denver’s thin air and hot temperatures.
They worked, as Matt Smith was top qualifier with a 7.347-second elapsed time and a top speed of 180.24 miles per hour.
He said he and his team “were trying stuff we shouldn’t have been doing” and that his dad “got us back on the right track. He gave me some pointers on what to do up here (on the mountain). We just needed a baseline (tune-up), and he gave us a baseline.”
So, what does that have to do with monkeys? Well, Rickie Smith, a wrestling champion in high school in his native North Carolina, took on the challenge of fighting a monkey in a “tough-guy” contest. And this was one tough monkey.
“It was one of them monkeys at the circus,” Matt Smith said. “This monkey was in a cage. Nobody had ever hit the monkey.” But Rickie Smith, who later would earn the nickname “Tricky Rickie,” cleverly put a move on the monkey that it wasn’t expecting.
“May dad hit the monkey in the head and drew some blood, and the monkey went crazy,” Matt Smith said. With some prompting from its trainer, the monkey rallied and attacked Rickie Smith — “broke his jaw and knocked him out.”
So, while that monkey tale didn’t turn out 100-percent successful for Rickie Smith, it did show one thing: while Matt Smith is more low-key than his more outspoken father, they both have the ability to jump into a challenging situation and give it a full effort.
The Pro Stock Motorcycle class has had eight races this season, and Matt Smith has advanced to six final rounds. Smith is an independent racer this year, tuning not only his own bike but a second one that Chris Rivas rides. And this was his first experience tuning the bike at Bandimere Speedway.
Although he knows that his rivals are friendly but tight-lipped about their tune-ups, Smith said with a sly grin Friday, “Wouldn’t nobody give me a tune-up. I asked around what they all were doing. Nobody gave me any hints. Nobody.”
After such monkey business, he figured it out for himself, with help from his dad. And like his dad, he is doing it his way and winning.
What started out looking like the year of the woman in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class, with Angelle Sampey and Karen Stoffer dominating the early races, is turning out to be the year of Matt Smith.
He and Sampey are close buddies, even though with Sunday’s victory he has defeated her twice in as many final rounds, but he needs to be reminded of one thing. Sampey has a pet monkey, a capuchin named Andy, who according to Sampey has a nasty little streak in him.
Smith, 34, knows that his competitors can be as stubborn and territorial as Andy the monkey or the one his father tangled with at the circus. But he has shown so far this season that if the other bike contenders want to stop him as the Pro Stock Motorcycle point leader or as a race winner or as a key player in the Countdown to the Championship, then they had better expect a fight from him. He has put the monkey on the back where it belongs.