Meet the ‘57 Chevy “Black Widow” NASCAR Saved, Barely, From The Crusher

Jack Smith might have accumulated more than 20 wins over a 15-year career in NASCAR, but he recalled his losses, his parts failures, and his crashes with far more clarity. That trait led one enthusiast to the discovery and restoration of one of the few remaining Black Widow 1957 Chevrolets, a car scheduled to cross the auction block next January.

Smith, an Illinois native, had competed in the first NASCAR race in 1949, but his racing career had a slow start. It wasn’t until 1956 that he notched his first win or earned more than a couple grand in winnings. That would all change in 1957 when Nalley Chevrolet in Atlanta—acting on behalf of, ultimately, Chevrolet itself—handed Smith the keys to his No. 47 fuel-injected 1957 Chevrolet 150.

As the calendar flipped from 1956 to 1957, Nalley found itself at the hub of a hubbub of clandestine activity. No less than Vince Piggins, Chevrolet performance engineer and the man who led Hudson to NASCAR championships in the early 1950s, had set up shop at Nalley under a venture named Southern Engineering and Development Company and had begun development of a super-duty race car for the 1957 NASCAR season.

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Piggins started with a Model 1512 utility sedan, a version of the 150 two-door sedan that Chevrolet introduced for 1957 and that came without a back seat and with fixed rear windows; at 3,168 pounds it was the lightest car Chevrolet offered that year. For a powertrain, he specified the fuel-injected 283-cu.in. V-8—factory rated at 283 horsepower but blueprinted and tweaked to 310 to 315 horsepower—a Saginaw close-ratio three-speed manual transmission, and a 3.90 gear in the rear axle.

According to George Swartz, 1957 Chevrolet expert and owner of the Jack Smith car, Piggins beefed up the chassis using heavy-duty springs, six-lug rear axle, spindles and brakes meant for the heavy-duty limousine version of the Chevrolet passenger car, a thicker radiator from a Buick or Cadillac, a 20-gallon gas tank from Chevrolet’s taxi version, and four additional shock absorbers. Piggins added Fenton cast-iron exhaust manifolds and ran the exhaust through the frame rails, then gusseted or braced just about everything he could.

A thousand other modifications, from the bolster on the bench seat to the cage meant to keep the fan from plowing into the radiator in an accident, added to the car’s durability and longetivity on the track.

Chevrolet itself couldn’t build the cars directly for the teams racing Chevrolets in NASCAR. Following the disaster at Le Mans in 1955, organized racing around the world became suddenly less popular, and with the folks in Washington, D.C., talking of banning racing outright, the folks at Chevrolet knew to take a low profile.

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Thus the company shipped a number of Model 1512s to Nalley Chevrolet, where Hugh Babes and Dale Swanson at SEDCO then worked to prepare them according to Piggins’s modifications. Exactly how many Chevrolet sent to Nalley and in what configurations nobody knows, but SEDCO ultimately built five for Daytona and as many as 15 to 20 by the season’s end. Nor does anybody know who came up with the cars’ long-lasting nickname: the Black Widow.

Jack Smith racing in 1957 at Daytona. Photo: Racing One/Getty Images

Smith didn’t finish at Daytona, but he went on to a breakout year at the wheel of his No. 47 Black Widow, finishing 25 of 40 races and winning four. He also crashed out twice, and while SEDCO was able to supply Smith with a fresh car after each crash, it did so by stripping the crashed car of most of its heavy-duty parts before sending the bare hulk off to a wrecker.

Smith finished fifth in the standings that year, and for the first time in his life accumulated more than $10,000 in winnings—more than he’d made in the previous seven years combined. (Though he didn’t win any of the six races he entered in the convertible series that year, he did net another $2,200 in winnings from that series.)