To hear 86-year-old Sam Pourciau tell his drag racing history is a little like sitting on a park bench listening to Forrest Gump. The longer he talks, the more unbelievable it gets, except Pourciau actually lived this stuff.
He raced a Flathead Ford as a teenager. He was a Golden Gloves boxer, served in the military, once fought a kangaroo at a county fair and has spent nearly 70 years racing cars.
Now Pourciau can add another line to a life story that wasn’t exactly hurting for material.
Pourciau became what is believed to be the oldest driver to win an NHRA divisional event when he captured Stock Eliminator at the recently completed NHRA Division 4 race at Tulsa Raceway Park in Oklahoma. He defeated Austin Williams in the final round with the kind of performance that would have been impressive if the birth certificate had been left at home.
Pourciau was perfect on the starting line with a .000 reaction time in his B/Stock Automatic Camaro and needed only a .031-second package to finish the job.
Then somebody told him what he had just done.
“I’ll be damned, man. Ain’t that something?” Pourciau said. “Yeah, it’s something.”
Even better, Pourciau shared the winners’ circle with his longtime sponsor Rodger Brogdon.
That was about as close as Pourciau came to acting his age.
The significance began settling in afterward. Pourciau was still trying to process the victory when CompetitionPlus.com caught up with him.
“Oh. Well, I’m still floating on a cloud,” Pourciau said. “My feet didn’t touch the ground yet.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about Pourciau winning the race on a perfect light. Nearly seven decades after he first started racing, the old boxer still knows when to throw the punch.
Pourciau began drag racing at 17 with a 1949 Ford powered by a Flathead V-8. The car was painted what he remembers as “Chrome yellow,” and after beating enough people around Louisiana, somebody suggested a name for it.
“Mr. Lemonade.”
“On the side of it I had painted. I run them boys left and right with that old car,” Pourciau said. “And that boy told me, he said, ‘Sam, you know what you ought to put on the side of that thing?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Mr. Lemonade.’ He said, ‘You e-lemonade everybody every time you come in.’
So I painted Mr. Lemonade on the side.”
The machinery changed. Pourciau didn’t.
He raced Javelins, 427 Fords, different Stockers and even spent some time in Super Gas before eventually landing in the Camaro he still races. For much of those early years, national-event racing wasn’t economically realistic.
Pourciau had three children and a job. Drag racing happened close to Baton Rouge because that’s what the family budget allowed.
“We used to run at the airport first,” Pourciau said. “We didn’t have a track. We ran NHRA national points race over there.
“I was winning races like — oh man, I was ahead of everybody in Division 4 over here.”
Pourciau said he accumulated enough divisional points that other racers sometimes asked to use them to attend the U.S. Nationals because he couldn’t afford to make the trip himself.
“I couldn’t go out of town,” Pourciau said. “I had three kids, I was working and that’s all I could afford around here.”
Eventually, he started traveling to national events. About 15 years ago,
Porciau came within one round of winning the biggest one of them all when he reached the Stock Eliminator final at the NHRA U.S. Nationals.
His engine had other ideas.
“If I wouldn’t have broken the motor, I think I’d have won,” Pourciau said. “I think I could have won that race there because I was hammering the tree pretty good, you know?
“I took a lot of good people out. And so I guess that’s the closest I got to a national event.”
The 2011 Indy Stock runner-up was special but the telephone call Pourciau received after Tulsa might have hit him even harder.
NHRA President Glen Cromwell called personally to congratulate him.
“Yeah. I couldn’t believe that,” Pourciau said.
Cromwell’s message was short and direct.
“He said, ‘Man, congratulations,’” Pourciau said. “He said, ‘You made NHRA look good.’ And I told him, I said, ‘You know what, Mr. Cromwell? I’ve been racing since I was 17. I never been recognized in NHRA. And I finally got recognized.’”
For a racer who spent much of his career competing close to home because life wouldn’t allow anything else, a telephone call from the NHRA president landed differently.
When the president calls, you’ve done something.
Then again, Pourciau’s life away from drag racing could fill another story.
He was a boxer before the military, then discovered plenty of willing sparring partners after entering the service. Pourciau said he weighed about 165 pounds when he started boxing and eventually grew to around 185 after joining the military.
He was 6-foot-2 in his younger days, although Pourciau figures gravity probably has collected a little of that height by now.
His strategy in the ring wasn’t dramatically different from bracket racing. Don’t beat yourself, let the other guy make his mistake and then go after him.
“I’d fight defense,” Pourciau said. “I’d just move around in the ring, jerk them back and make them swing until they burn out. And when they burn out, I saw they dropped their hands, you know?
“When they dropped their hands, that’s when I laid on to them.”
And don’t mistake the smile, stories or heavy Cajun accent for somebody merely making ceremonial runs. Pourciau knows exactly what is happening when he rolls into the water box against racers young enough to be his grandchildren.
There is pressure and there is still the desire to win.
“People don’t realize a lot of pressure on your ass when you’re in that car,” Porciau said. “And I tell people that all the time. It’s not just get in that car and go win the race. You got pressure on your ass. When you’re running them young kids, you know you got to go, you know?”
At 86, Pourciau’s definition of a young kid covers a fairly broad demographic.
He laughs about that, too. He still catches himself referring to people as old before somebody reminds him who owns the seniority card.
“You know, you don’t realize how old you are unless somebody tells you,” Pourciau said.
Maybe that’s the secret.
Pourciau hasn’t convinced himself that he’s supposed to stop. The Christmas Tree still comes down the same way, the finish line hasn’t moved, and Tulsa showed his reaction time apparently hasn’t received any senior-citizen discount.
“I don’t ever think about it, Bob,” Porciau said. “I just do what I got to do, you know? And a lot of people, ‘Damn man, you sure don’t act like you were 86 years old.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it, maybe that’s what helps.’”
