Driving Through Barriers : Age, Gender Don’t Deter Boucher, the Grandma Racer Who Delights Pony Stock Crowds at Ventura

Helen Boucher speeds onto the track at Ventura Raceway and the crowd roars.

Go, Granny, Go!

That said--and that simply has to be said--don’t let Boucher hear you say it again. Hasn’t she heard enough cracks about women drivers or the elderly behind the wheel?

“I want to be taken seriously,” Boucher says by way of introduction. “I don’t want to be taken as a joke.”

She isn’t. She is, however, just about the most popular attraction to hit the seaside track since the destruction derby.

At 51, Boucher, a retired hairdresser and grandmother of two, for heaven’s sake, is more than twice as old as many of her Pony Stock competitors. But that’s where differences cease.

Boucher, 5 foot 2, lives in Oak View, which is north of Ventura and nowhere near Pasadena. And it doesn’t take a pair of bifocals to see she’s no ordinary little ol’ . . . well, let’s just say she’s really something.

“The crowd absolutely loves her,” said Jim Naylor, the raceway’s promoter. “The first night she came out here the crowd went crazy. Then she ended up almost winning a race and the crowd went crazy. So, people right away got behind Helen.”

The Pony Stocks are speeding through the evening’s first heat race and Boucher is battling for position in her cherry red Ford Pinto on the quarter-mile clay oval. Naylor is calling the action:

“There’s Helen Boucher, our grandma, doing a whale of a job.”

And the crowd roars.

Since taking the wheel of a stock car for the first time last May, Boucher has stolen the show nearly every night she has appeared.

“Everybody has been just super nice to me,” Boucher says. “If I run a good race, they come down to congratulate me. Some of them come out of the stands and want my autograph. It’s embarrassing.”

Boucher currently ranks seventh in points in the Pony Stocks’ inaugural season entering Friday night’s program. She has yet to win a main event, but she’s about the only one who cares if she ever does.

“Driving a race car would scare me to death,” says Donna Martin of Oxnard, watching Boucher from the stands. “But she goes out there and she’s fearless. That little old lady is the greatest.”

Oops. There it is again. All right, go ahead and say it. It really doesn’t bother Boucher too much to be labeled a little old lady.

“No, because, obviously, I’m not,” she said.

In her first outing, Boucher coasted through the main event on the outside lane while Naylor coaxed her over the public-address system to shift into high gear. When she finally did, the crowd roared.

In her second race, Boucher picked up speed and finished second, again to the delight of all in attendance. “I was second out of five cars,” she said. “The other three got flat tires.”

The winner of the race was Scott Boucher, her 30-year-old son who spends his time on the track both lapping and looking out for his mother. He has led the points race for most of the season before recently slipping to second.

“I see her getting better every week by her finishing and me not lapping her,” Scott said.

“She tells me to treat her just like another driver on the track. That means if I can, I drive around her as cleanly as possible. I think about her getting hurt. Anybody would hate to see their mother get hurt in any sense. But if we’re sure she’s safe and she’s having fun and she’s comfortable with it, that’s great.”

With each week, Boucher becomes more confident and more certain she belongs behind the wheel.

“The first time I passed another car, I had to look back and make sure,” Boucher said. “Now, this is beginning to be an accomplishment for me because I know I’m getting better.

“I like sports, but I never thought I’d be driving a race car. I like challenges.”

Ironically, Boucher loathed stock cars for years while Gene Boucher and the couple’s two sons turned the family driveway into a small-sized Gasoline Alley every spring.

Gene competes in the track’s Mini Stock division. Steve Boucher, who lives in Reno, is a former Ventura Mini Stock competitor.

“For 30 years, I’ve been fighting race cars,” Boucher says. “I didn’t like ‘em, I didn’t want them around the house. . . . They were filthy-dirty. And every week they were out there putting cars together.”

Boucher’s life took a turn for the unusual when Gene asked her to go outside one evening and drive his stock car from the driveway into the garage. The distance was only a few feet. But did Boucher got a lot of mileage out of that ride.

“She loved it,” Gene said. “She wanted to drive. Two weeks later, we built her a car.

Gene Boucher painstakingly prepared the car with safety in mind, right down to the reinforced roll cage. Before each race, he personally straps his wife into her seat and reviews safety procedures.

“We designed the car totally for her,” Gene said. “I bought a seat that only she can fit into. If I want to move her car, I can’t fit into it. I have to get her to move it.”

Gene and Scott, mechanics for their own vehicles, take turns poking their heads beneath the hood of Helen’s car between races. During the week, they make all necessary repairs for all three vehicles.

“They do all the maintenance,” Boucher says. “All I do is wash it. And drive.”

The first night at the track, Boucher was downright frightened.

“I have claustrophobia,” she says. “I wasn’t so afraid of being hit. It was the idea of having a full helmet on my head and being strapped in so I couldn’t move in a tight, flame-resistant suit. When I got out there, I thought, ‘My God, get me out of this thing.’

“Now, I’ve lost my fear. Just in the last race I got really brave and thought, ‘I’m not going to get hurt in this thing.’ I’ve gone around the turns now as fast as the car will go and found that that little car is going to go wherever I put it.”

Back on the track, Boucher is having a tough time in the main event. The surface is damp and she’s having trouble with traction. Cars are passing her with ease. The crowd is behind her, but no cars are. She slips and slides her way to a ninth-place finish.

But she’s not slip-sliding way.

“That was too short,” she says, pulling off her crash helmet. “Let’s go around again.

“My goal now is to come in first. Jim says a lot of fun stuff to the crowd like, ‘Is Scott’s mother going to beat him tonight?’ I haven’t yet, but I plan to. And the day I do, the crowd, I’m sure, will have a ball. And so will I.”