Anyone who gets a warm feeling from watching Mark Martin win Sprint Cup races at the age of 50 ought to get a real charge out of seeing Pappy Powell race his dirt track car at the ripe old age of 85.
Roston “Pappy” Powell isn’t some old geezer out there making laps. As Mark Martin might say, he can “get ‘er done” with the best of the drivers in the Full Size or Street Stock class at tracks across the Southeast like West Georgia Speedway, a 3/8-mile track located in rural Carroll County, just west of metro Atlanta.
Powell drives a battered 1979 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a red “85” on the door. For the past 20 years, he has changed his car number every year to match his age. The race cars are built from parts salvaged from junkyards and cast off by his competitors. His trailer is a home-made, single-axle job that looks out of place among the fancier rigs at the track. He has no shot at “Best Appearing Car” awards.
West Georgia’s promoter Sammy Duke, a former minor league pitcher who once received a 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible as a signing bonus from the Dodgers, estimates that Powell, a retired truck driver, has won somewhere between 65 and 80 features at his track alone over the past 15 years.
“Pappy is one of the best racers I’ve ever seen in my life,” Duke said. “He can still outrun those young boys. You don’t find a specimen like him very often.”
“If he had the same equipment as those other boys, they couldn’t outrun him,” Duke said. “But he can throw together a bunch of junk and outrun most of them.”
Scott Dooley, who owns a machine shop in Fayetteville, Ga., and sometimes works on Powell’s engines, likes to tell the story of one of Powell’s visits to a track in Albany, Ga.
It seems Powell showed up at an asphalt oval with his well-worn dirt track car.
“Those boys over there were just laughing at his car,” Dooley said. But as he often does, Powell got the last laugh. He won in a runaway.
They were laughing again at Childersburg, Ala., one night when Pappy’s Buick tipped the scales at a whopping 4,670 pounds. Powell’s son Joe, age 63, said that when it was all said and done, the trophy and the winner’s pay were headed back to Georgia.
“He started 29th and won the race,” Joe Powell said.
Over the years, Pappy has had his share of nasty crashes. He even wrecked in his first start, at the old Suicide Circle in Albany, Ga., when he was just 14 years old.
Even open-heart surgery some time back didn’t stop Powell from chasing checkered flags.
