Coming off the best earnings year of his career, driver Jeremy Smith is easily on pace to crush his career high for wins and earnings in 2025. The 45-year-old, who currently sits second in the Miami Valley driver standings behind Dan Noble, seems to have taken his career to the next level recently despite dealing with on-track accidents and other strange injuries. A native of Ohio, Smith is in the top 10 in both earnings and wins nationally through two months and hopes to keep that pace up through the Miami Valley meet, into Scioto and back to Dayton on the Buckeye harness racing circuit. While driving to the track on a Monday, Smith took the time to discuss his path in the sport, his bad luck with injuries, the speed of racing, and much more. Enjoy!    How did you get started in harness racing? My grandparents owned a few horses when I was growing up – usually two a year – and that is how I got to going to the racetrack. I got in with a couple of guys who trained with them. Was harness racing always going to be your path in life? In high school I was really good at baseball and I pitched. I pretty much had several scholarships my senior year and I got into some trouble that made me ineligible. So that went out the window and pretty much my life did for a minute. I planned on playing baseball but I was going to back it up with veterinary school. I figured if I wasn’t good enough to go pro in baseball I could fall back on being a vet. When that went out the window, I always loved horse racing my whole life growing up and wanted to do that but I didn’t have an in. It does kind of seem like the majority of guys racing are ones whose dad drove or trained, so I had to work my ass off. Your first drive came in 2002 but you kept a more limited schedule for the first 10 years or so. Was that just trying to break into the sport and earning your place? Yeah, basically. I worked a job driving a box truck for Sears delivering lawn and garden equipment and would go wherever, even if I had one drive, to race. It was kind of tough. Sometimes you have to wait for other older guys to move on before you can get in. It was a great job but once I was able to start getting more drives, that was what I wanted to do. At age 44 you set a career high for earnings despite missing 21 weeks of racing due to on-track accidents. What changed to get you to those heights? I think some of the guys I’ve been driving for the last three to five years got better horses and they moved up a little themselves, and of course I got in with a couple of different guys. It just snowballed. I just mentioned you’ve had some bad luck with accidents but you also had a setback in 2023 with a sports hernia. Have you just been snake-bitten lately? The last several years it seems like if there was a wreck I have a magnet in my pocket and I find it. That ain’t no joke. You can ask anyone. Knock on wood it hasn’t been something I’ve done but I always seem to be right in the middle of it. With the hernia, I had a 2-year-old filly trotter in a leg of the Buckeye series. She was going crazy in the post parade and I was damn near out of the bike a couple of times. She just went berserk. What’s crazy is after she did that in the post parade I made it to the gate thinking she’ll race like a goat but she ended up circling the field and running off. Over the next couple of days I was wondering what was bothering me. I went to the doctor four or five days after that and found out it required a surgery. I missed the first five weeks of Dayton [late 2023] and Chris Page was in the lead with 40-something wins and Dan Noble was second a few shy of Chris. I ended up catching them to win the driver’s title after that. That is when it seemed to really start rolling. I went into Miami Valley and won the title there [2024]. I was also in the lead at Scioto until I had two wrecks. One I missed about two weeks, maybe six race programs, and then the second one happened which put me out for most of the rest of the year. How hard is it to come back from accidents and injuries? It’s tough. Maybe I’m wrong on this but I feel kind of like guys are a little skeptical on you at first; is he going to be the same Jeremy? Maybe it isn’t like that because I’ve never really asked and I don’t know if they would tell me the truth anyway, but I feel like it is. Then it takes you a minute to get back because other guys are driving your horses and it is tough for trainers to just toss the guys who have been driving for them. So you just have to work your way back. ► Sign up for our FREE DRF Harness Digest Newsletter What is your favorite track to race at? Why? I like Dayton. I don’t know what it is but it seems like there is a level playing field there for everybody; trainers, horses. In the standings you’ll see trainers who do well there who are maybe towards the bottom at a place like Scioto. It is a great facility. Now if we were only talking racetrack alone it would be Scioto because we race there during the summer and get a chance to go some dirty miles. [My favorite] may end up being Scioto because they are finishing up a brand new paddock. What is your favorite big event in racing? Why? Probably the Sire Stakes final night, Super Night in Ohio. There is so much money on the line and there are a lot of good horses. Horses come from everywhere basically, even for the aged stakes races that are Grand Circuit races. It is sweet to have those stakes horses come. What is your favorite thing to do outside of harness racing? I like to build cars. I’ve had some badass ones and I’m into the muscle car stuff, but I’ve had a 1968 Camaro and a bunch of others. That’s my addiction outside of racing horses. What is one word that describes harness racing for you? Great. It has done so much for me. I owe everything to these horses. What is the best advice you’ve ever gotten or given about harness racing? That it’s tough. It is a whole different animal than any other job a guy could have. What was your best moment in harness racing? Probably when I won the Battle of Lake Erie with Little Rocket Man last year [at Northfield Park]. It was just nice to get a shot. Forever I was considered to be like a loose cannon because I always liked to try to leave with everything and put fifty-to-one’s in the mix – not that I don’t do that anymore because I always say horses can’t read the toteboard. I drove a little loose for the first several years once I got going. I think maybe some of the bigger trainers shied away from me a little. Now it seems like everything has changed. So that Battle of Lake Erie win really meant a lot to you? It sure did. It was the biggest win of my career. I drove a lot for Ken Rucker and he’s done me very well over the last several years, and it means a lot to him. Is Little Rocket Man the best horse you’ve ever driven? For sure. He’s a really nice horse that made all his money the hard way. I think he’s closing in on two million and it wasn’t because he won the Indiana Sire Stakes championships or anything. In 2025 you are sitting seventh in the nation in wins and fourth in earnings through two months of action. Is your current pace sustainable? I think so. I hate to say this but I’m kind of disappointed after last year. I had just got back right at the end of the meet at Dayton, so the first month at Miami Valley I was just getting back in the groove and getting with some of the guys I had done well with previously. I mean I’m tickled as hell with where I am. Anytime you are throwing up numbers that put you in the top 10, I don’t want to sound like I’m not grateful as hell, because I am, but I’m a guy that likes to win. I’m a sore loser. I may not show it to any of the guys coming off the track but I feel it myself. You mentioned being the leading driver at Dayton in 2023 and at Miami Valley in 2024. How tough is the driving colony in Ohio? I say it is as good as anywhere in the country and I truly believe that. Chris Page won the Jug a few years ago, Dan Noble has been the leading dash driver, Brett Miller, Sam Widger. We have guys here that have all won several thousand races. Also, we race here. If you compare our style of racing to anywhere else in the country, it’s cutthroat. I don’t know why but there is never an easy mile. Every race is on its toes. How do you think the potential addition of David Miller next year could shake things up further? I think it will. When you bring a guy in like him it definitely changes the overall perspective. Things will get a little tougher. Looking at your driving record, you have some whipping violations and a couple of fines for inappropriate behavior. Is that just the case of you being too wrapped up in the action? Yeah, and it goes back to what I was telling you about being a sore loser. I’m one of those guys who if I get beat a couple of times by a nose, sometimes a get a bit of tunnel vision and I push too hard. Never am I ever out to hurt a horse. It isn’t that. It is just the heat of the moment and trying to win. I’m all in when it gets near the wire. If you had the power to change one thing in the sport, what would it be? The time between races. Everything now is geared towards being fast. All of the sports are doing it but harness racing just doesn’t want to change from what worked 40 years ago. Normal people, even if you are sitting at home watching, you get two minutes of pumped up – especially if you are betting on them or something – action and then have to sit around and wait for 25 minutes until the next race goes. If feel like times have changed and the horses have. Back in the day guys would turn a horse and go a [training] trip to warm a horse up and it would take 10 minutes or so. Now most guys just go a couple of laps because the breed has gotten better and they don’t need all that warming up. We could run races every 10 minutes and everything would be fine. I think the handle would go up, maybe I’m wrong, but I believe it would because people would be more interested. How do you view the future of harness racing? That’s a tough one because it is difficult for someone who is outside this game to get into it. Also, I feel like most of the tracks, at least around us, they don’t promote the racing. You don’t watch the news at night and see a commercial for Scioto Downs. I feel like, again, there is too much of doing things the way it was done 30 or 40 years ago. With social media you would think tracks could really push the sport. At night when I leave Miami Valley and grab a pop or whatnot at the gas station a couple of miles up the road, I talk to them and they don’t even know there is horse racing there. They think it is only a casino. That’s how crazy it is that people a couple of miles from the track don’t even know horses are racing there. I feel like we can overcome a lot of that by getting younger, tech savvy people into positions at the track so they can get the message out. What does a day in the life of Jeremy Smith entail? I get up and get everything ready for the track in the evening. Then I head out to the shop. I have an old truck that I’m working on right now and I usually tinker with that. I’m always doing something. My wife asks me all the time, ‘do you ever sit down?’ When the weather is nice I’ll be working in the yard. When it is time to race, I grab a shower and my stuff and head to the track. A lot of times when I get home at night I’ll run back out to the shop. I don’t go straight to bed because the adrenaline is still rolling from racing 14. So I’ll try to wind down. Time for the stretch drive… Best Horse you ever saw: Artsplace. I got to see him at Scioto one night with Gene Riegle when he was just starting his 3-year-old year. He was in the Open because he had so much money made. I was a little kid at the time, maybe 12 or 13. Me and my grandpa went in the paddock and I got to pet him. It was the greatest thing ever because that horse was like a killer. Lasix – Yes or No: Yes. Favorite TV Show: Iron Resurrection. Trotters or Pacers: Pacers – I like the raw speed. A good trotter is something special but there is something about a wicked-fast pacer.