Louise Smith, who died Saturday at 89, was an old-school, dirt-track stock car racer, the kind of down-and-dirty driver who would sooner lock bumpers and flip an opponent than endure a racing slight.

For a decade, starting in 1946, she competed in races at small tracks up and down the East Coast, driving modified stock cars against men. It was a day when the rules at Indianapolis forbade women from competing at all, but Smith could hold her own in the driver’s seat and out. “We were all friends, but once you hit that racetrack, you ain’t got no friends,” she told the State newspaper of Columbia, S.C., in 2001. “It’s every man for hisself. And on my part, it was every women for hisself.”

“If you won a race, you had to fight,” Smith, who won 38 races in all, recently told NASCAR historian Deb Williams. “You might as well get out swinging a tire tool or something.”

By all accounts a hot-blooded girl who liked a party, Smith was known as a lead-footed driver who could elude the police, though she always insisted that, unlike some stock car drivers, she never smuggled moonshine. After a while, she often noted, police would just wait for her at home, which was near a junkyard owned by her husband, Noah Smith, in Greenville, S.C. The auto parts he scavenged often ended up in her cars, but he never reconciled himself to her hobby and profession.

Smith’s reputation led to an invitation from Bill France Sr., who founded NASCAR in 1948 and who was always looking for a novelty to draw a crowd, to drive in a race at the Greenville-Pickens Speedway in 1946. Despite having never seen a stock car race, she finished third. She was soon driving on tracks from Florida to Canada six days a week, despite her husband’s repeated urgings to quit endangering her life and come home.

He had reason. For one thing, there was what Smith once called her “knack for wreckin’,” which she first experienced as a 6-year-old, when she crashed her daddy’s Model T into a henhouse.

At her first serious race at Daytona in 1947, she put a new engine in her new Ford, flipped it, and had to take a bus home to Greenville, although she did finish the race. She told her husband the car was a lemon that had broken down in Augusta. She was nonplussed when he showed her a copy of the Greenville News with the story of the crash on the front page.

In following years, Smith broke half the bones in her body in a series of wrecks, including one that left her trapped under her car with a broken collar bone in Hillsborough, N.C.; another that saw her crash through an abandoned house by the side of the Asheville-Weaverville, N.C., track, and a third that left her stranded atop her car in the middle of a lake in Mobile, Ala.

Life on tour was wild, and Smith had a trunk full of stories of carousing with stockcar legends like Fonty Flock, Ralph Earnhardt, and Buck Baker. Once, she pawned her wedding rings to bail out a whole crew of racers arrested for boozing and brawling.

The injuries had begun to wear, and Noah Smith had threatened to throw her out of the house on more than one occasion. It was the intervention of Jesus, Smith said, that led her to retire at last. Her husband had the minister of the local Tabernacle Baptist church call her one day in 1956, as she was preparing to leave once again to race at Daytona. When her racing friends called to ask her when she was leaving, Smith replied, “I’m not going. I got saved last night.”

She walked away from the sport for 15 years, and worked for the local rescue mission and helped organize an orphanage.

Yet she never lost her flair for the theatrical, and photos from the 1960s and 1970s show her sporting a giant, black, beehive hairdo. By the 1970s, she was serving as grand marshal for local race day parades, and began sponsoring racing teams. For many years, she worked with the Miss Southern 500 pageant in Darlington, S.C., and the Miss Southland contest at Daytona.

When Noah Smith died in 1990, the couple had been married 47 years. Despite her youthful wildness, “He couldn’t quit me,” Smith told the State. “He must’ve loved me.” There were no children, perhaps because, in her words, “I stayed gone all the time.”

In recent years, slowed by heart problems and other health setbacks, Smith was confined to a walker, but she continued to driver her Buick LeSabre around Greenville, occasionally taking it up to speeds exceeding her age. “I was born to be a race-car driver,” she said.

“She was just a good ol’ girl trying to get along in racing with a bunch of men,” reflected Tim Flock, himself a veteran of the old dirt-track days.

In 1999, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame inducted her as its first female member. The second, Janet Guthrie, is slated for induction next week.

Louise Smith

Born in Barnesville, Ga., on July 31, 1916. Died on April 15 of cancer at a hospice in Anderson, Ga.; there are no immediate survivors.