Two-time NHRA Pro Modified champion Rickie Smith was at a crossroad during the off-season. He had to decide whether to go the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” route, or with the “If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em” theory.

Either way, it will cost him time, money, and aggravation.

Smith won the J&A Service Series opening Gatornationals this past Sunday at Gainesville, Florida, but his course of action for the remaining nine isn’t any clearer at the moment.

Forcing him into this dilemma is a set of rules changes for this popular class that features three different power-adder engine combinations: turbocharged, supercharged, and nitrous-injected.

For the record, the class appeared to have plenty of parity already.

Every race had a different winner: two in turbo cars, five in supercharged, and three on nitrous. (The complete count was turbocharged cars winning two of five final-round appearances, supercharged winning five of nine chances, and nitrous entries split six finals). The champion, turbo-powered Troy Coughlin, didn’t win any of the events.

Moreover, the Top 10 spoils were evenly divided. The top three – Coughlin, Mike Janis, and Bob Rahaim – represented each of the three combos. And the Top 10 shook out this way: turbo 3, supercharged 4, nitrous 3.

But during the offseason, the sanctioning body reduced the boost on the turbo cars by two pounds and took 50 pounds off the nitrous-equipped cars and some turbocharged ones. And longtime nitro-partial Smith, as well as supercharged Jan-Cen Engines Camaro owner-driver Janis, have been outspoken with their displeasure. They’ve taken different approaches, but neither sees the new situation as equitable.

“Everybody thought it was going to slow them down. If you have common sense, you know the [new] rules weren’t for the better. It just made it worse. It’s only going to help them [turbo-powered drivers],”Janis said. It’s a bad move all the way around. It’s a real bad deal, but we have to live with it now and see what happens.”

For Smith, the problem has been ongoing since at least five years ago. He said the NHRA caused it by welcoming turbo cars in a big way when Roger Burgess emerged with his talented R2B2 team. Burgess, although not the first turbo team owner-driver in the class, was the first to bring some serious money and muscle into the fold.

“We tried not to get this turbo thing allowed when Burgess brought it in. That’s where the mistake was made,” Smith said. Reminding that the class began with just nitrous and blown cars, he said, “If they had left that alone, they could have kept these cars really close all the time.”

Back in 2014, after Smith outshone the class at Atlanta in the third race of the year, the NHRA increased the minimum weight for nitrous-equipped cars by 50 pounds. Smith still is torqued about that: “Two years ago, I ran 250 at Atlanta. [He actually topped 250 mph with a 5.778-second run that was the quickest ever for a nitrous Pro Mod car.] That’s when they put 50 pounds on us. That was absolutely not right.”

At the time, he told Drag Illustrated magazine, “They take a world champion, after he’s worked his ass off, stayed away from home, did his testing, went through 147 pistons last year to get to where I’ve got, and take a pencil and just knock me down to my knees again.”

While he won the 2016 Gainesville race, Smith nevertheless is wondering, symbolically, if he’s really standing back up again. Are the pencil-pushers trying to keep him on his knees?

“They’ve got ’em close but they still messed up when they made the rules,” he said. “They took two pounds of boost off the turbo cars. But they took 50 pounds off so they can run even quicker. The two pounds of boost they didn’t need, anyway. Then they took 50 pounds off so they could run better E.T. There are some decisions that just don’t make logic sense. I just wish people would sit down and think about what they’re doing before they just make a rule change and not really realize what they’ve done. You want somebody to slow down and you turn around and take boost away to try to slow them down. Then you turn around and take 50 pounds off so they speed back up. It don’t take about a middle-grade student to figure that out.

“The problem is they’ve got to slow the turbo cars down, because there’s so much technology there that people just keep learning every year, whereas the nitro cars [and] the blower cars, they’ve been around for 30 years. Those things [turbo cars] can make up to 4,000 horsepower with the turbos they’ve got on them. A nitrous car will never make that kind of power, and a blower car will never make that kind of power. They’ve got a car in the class that’s way outclassed the class,” Smith said. “That’s the reason they have to jump on the turbo cars all the time.

“We’ve tapped out. We might find a hundredth [of a second in elapsed time] here and a hundredth there every year. But these turbo cars, there’s so much to be learned yet it’s unreal. They just keep finding three-hundredth, four-hundredth at a time,” Smith said. “So it’s a tough deal to try and keep under control.”

Janis made a similar argument.

“We go 247 miles an hour in Las Vegas. You have a turbo car going anywhere from 255 to 259 miles an hour. If you came to our dyno and said, ‘Hey, I’m going 247 and I want to go 255 or 259,’ you’d have to make another 400-500 horsepower on the dyno to do that. That shows the power they have over us. There’s no way. We’re running the cars as hard as we can right now,” Janis said.

Smith said, “The nitrous guys and the blower guys, especially the nitrous guys, we’re running our stuff to death. We’ve got the heads off of it after two or three runs just to keep up. And they’re taking these turbo cars and running them 25-30 runs.

“We just want the NHRA to keep the rules fair. That’s the main thing,” he said.

Likewise for Janis, who even nixed the notion of negotiating a deal that would give the supercharged contingent an edge on the competition.

“A couple of guys talked about giving the blower cars bigger valves,” Janis said, “and that would be an advantage. I spoke up, and so did Jeff Perley [crew chief for Steven Whiteley’s J&A Service/YNot Racing supercharged Cadillac]. We agreed we don’t want to go any faster. We’re trying to keep parity in the class. We could have gone and tried to make something happen for ourselves and given ourselves an advantage. But the best interest of the class is the biggest thing.”

Smith said he has a turbo car in his shop that isn’t in racing trim yet. He said he’s “just playing it by ear” for now, but said he might start fiddling around with it now that the Gainesville race is complete.

“We’ve had it about a month, month and a half. We’ll test it after Gainesville. I’ve got a good nitrous car,” he said of his Gatornationals-winning IDG Camaro. “I just thought I’d have a turbo car to have fun with it. The problem is that the NHRA has not kept the rules fair. That’s the whole reason I’m building this thing. It isn’t that I want to run it.”

Considering that, in his opinion, the NHRA is “always letting the turbo cars have the advantage,” Smith said, “It looks like the only way to kind of get it straightened out is for me build one and take it and go running. And if they don’t get the rules right, then I’ll just take it and run the fire out of it. And if they want to let us go out there and run everybody five-hundredths or four-hundredths, then that’s what we’ll do.”

He said before the Gatornationals that he would see how he fared with his nitrous car but reckoned, “I’ll test the turbo car and get it ready here before long. I’m just not in a great big hurry. I need to stay with what I know right now for running for the points. I don’t want to go out and run something I don’t know anything about and get way behind. It’s hard enough not to get behind with something you do know. I sure don’t want to go out with something I know I’m going to get behind with. We’ll take our time with this turbo car and test it and get it right. It all depends on how quick I come along with test time for the turbo car. I’m not going to take it nowhere unless it runs good. When I think it’s time, I’ll come out with it.”

Besides, Smith said, “I don’t have any spare parts for it, even if it runs really fast. It’s hard for me to take it to a national meet and not have a spare engine. If I hurt something, I couldn’t run the race. First thing I’ve got to do is see how I like it, see if it’s my bag of tea. If I run good, I may buy another engine. I’m just kind of playing it by ear.”

Another consideration, he said, is the fact that “the turbo thing has a lot of electronics on it. I’m not a laptop guru, so I’m going to have to get somebody else to help me for a little bit until I learn the car. That’s my biggest downfall. I’ve always done my own tuning. But I’ve got a couple of people really wanting to help. They’re seeing what’s going on also, as far as the rules not being fair. We’ll take it in time here and get it running and do pretty good with it, I think.”

Son Matthew Smith, the two-time NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle champion, has expressed interest in competing in one of his dad’s Pro Mod cars. Talk is that he might be able to do that at the second race on the schedule in Houston, at the April 29-May 1 SpringNationals. Dad set the odds of that happening at 25 percent.

In the meantime, Rickie Smith said he’ll be satisfied “as long as they keep an eye on these turbo cars.”