Those seven words, delivered by a ghostly voice in the dead of night, led Kevin Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, to bushwhack his Iowa corn field and build a baseball diamond so Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other disgraced players from the 1919 Chicago White Sox could have a shot at redemption.
For Pat Joffrion, it wasn’t a disembodied voice telling him to build a racetrack just outside Belle Rose. It was the strident voice of a track owner, one who jabbed his finger into Joffrion’s chest and spat out the words, “If you don’t like the way I run my business, build your own damn track.”
That was 1998, and Joffrion was about to tow his race car to Indianapolis to compete in the U.S. Nationals drag racing championship. What he wanted to do was test his car beforehand so he could compete evenly against the best drivers and fastest cars in the country.
“You don’t take a knife to a gunfight,” Joffrion says.
But he ran into a problem at the track and a heavy dose of attitude. Before he left for nationals, Joffrion pulled his custom-built 1994 Camaro to State Capitol Raceway outside Port Allen for a few test runs. When Joffrion arrived at the racetrack, however, the owner at the time said he’d cancelled the races that weekend because there weren’t enough spectators.
Joffrion said he didn’t need to race, he simply wanted to run his car to make sure it was tuned up for Indy.
No, the owner said. Joffrion offered to rent the track. Still, the answer was no.
That’s when the man started his finger-jabbing and told Joffrion that if he didn’t like the way he ran his track then he could build his own.
So what did the enterprising 54-year-old do?
“I built my own track,” he says.
Joffrion did make it to Indy that year, but he had to go by way of Bowling Green, Ky. On the way to the nationals, he stopped in Bowling Green and rented a track for a day to test his car. Later, in Indianapolis, he beat out 16 other drivers to win first place in his class.
Back home in Louisiana, Joffrion found a 163-acre tract of land off of La. 996 near the town of Belle Rose. The tract was a cane field and thick woods—not exactly ideal conditions for a drag strip. Nevertheless, Joffrion bought the property and set about building a racetrack.
“It took me two years to clear the land,” he says. The total cost to turn a cane field and a patch of woods into a first-class drag racing track: nearly $6.5 million. He sold real estate holdings (and paid half a million in taxes on the sale), plus he borrowed $2 million from the bank.
“I invested my entire life savings into it,” Joffrion says. “It was a challenge.”
The gates to No Problem Raceway opened Sept. 15, 2001, the weekend after 9/11.
“It was a terrible time to open a business,” Joffrion recalls. “Everybody was hunkering down after the terrorist attacks.”
He expected 5,000 people on opening night. Only 500 showed up.
“I told myself, ‘Man, I’ve got to be the biggest idiot,’” he says. “I thought I was crazy.”
But then something extraordinary happened. They came. First in a trickle. Then in a torrent.
By Sunday of opening weekend, Joffrion had his 5,000 fans.
Joffrion grew up racing. He drag-raced his way through the 1960s and ’70s, but gave it up and turned to accounting when he and his wife started a family. Instead of racing cars, Joffrion says, he bought diapers and baby food.
But all that changed in 1993 when a friend asked him for a ride to State Capitol Raceway. The two piled into Joffrion’s Corvette.
“I’m not staying,” Joffrion told the gate attendant. “I’m just giving my friend a ride.”
Inside there were 500 street cars ready to compete. When Joffrion saw the cars, when he smelled the burning fuel and when he heard the screaming engines, race fever hit him. Someone suggested that he race his Corvette. Joffrion borrowed a helmet and added his name on the list of drivers.
“I hadn’t raced in 21 years,” he says. “I had to ask if the signal lights were still the same.”
He almost won the whole thing. “I got down to the last two cars out of 500,” Joffrion says. “That’s what got me back into drag racing.”
It wasn’t long before he built his own race car, a 1994 Camaro. To build it he stocked his refrigerator with beer and invited his friends over to help.
In three months Joffrion won $40,000 racing that Camaro. “That’s how good that car was.”
Since getting back on the racetrack, Joffrion has won the stock or super stock class at the Indy nationals four out of the five years he raced there. The year he lost, his throttle got stuck wide open and he plowed off the track. In 2000, he was named National Hot Rod Association Driver of the Year.
Joffrion loves to race, whether it’s race cars, 100 mph go-carts or sailboats.
“I’m the most A-D-D guy you’ll ever meet,” Joffrion says, trying to explain his need for speed.
Several years ago he and his wife helped crew a sailboat in a race from Florida to Mexico.
“We came in second,” he says. “If I wouldn’t have fallen asleep, we would have won.”
Joffrion is also an instrument-rated airplane pilot and an offshore charter boat captain.
Joffrion built No Problem Raceway from the ground up, with a racer’s eye for detail. In building his track he incorporated all the good things he’d seen at tracks around the country, and eliminated the bad.
Racers, Joffrion says, look for three things in a good track:
• “Hooks,” meaning the surface grabs the tires.
• A smooth finish for maximum speed.
• Ample shutdown space after the finish line to safely handle cars with mechanical problems.
No Problem is no sleepy dirt track. Cars reach speeds of 300 mph. One dragster, after hitting 265 mph, blew its parachute, but the shutdown space let the driver roll to a safe stop.
Two-foot-thick solid concrete walls border the quarter-mile drag strip. Beside the strip sits a covered grandstand. Behind the starting line is the control tower, and below that the Red Line Sports Bar.
Beyond the drag strip is a road course for car, motorcycle and high-speed go-cart racing. The 1.8-mile course is packed with 14 turns.
No Problem Raceway hosts two major NHRA events a year, plus scores of smaller races. Professional drivers, club racers and weekend warriors race every weekend. There’s also midnight street-racing the first and third Saturday of each month, where kids put their hotrods on the track to drift and drag.
“It’s got to be a street car,” Joffrion says. “No race cars.”
One weekend in April, 450 race car drivers made their way to Belle Rose for the Cajun Sports Nationals. Five thousand spectators a day showed up to watch, Joffrion says. He boiled 1,500 pounds of crawfish.
Race car drivers have voted No Problem Raceway Track of the Year three times.
“It’s as good as any track you’ll find in the country,” says Ken Thibodeaux of Baton Rouge, who drives in the top dragster class and has raced in Indianapolis, Memphis, Las Vegas, Houston and Dallas. “We’re fortunate that a racer built the track.”
Moments after speaking to 225, Thibodeaux blasted down No Problem’s quarter-mile drag strip at close to 200 mph. Thibodeaux, 61, works for Precision Equipment Service, an automotive service equipment supplier, and has been a drag racer since 1975.
Joffrion sums up the philosophy at No Problem Raceway this way: “We don’t plan for a drag race. We throw a party and let a drag race break out.” noproblemraceway.com
