Street Racing. Opinions on an epidemic

[mechanixfetch]

Since we have controversial posts going why not add another very real issue to the world of car lovers.
Here in Vancouver we have a spreading epidemic of street races that have killed plenty of young drivers and forced changes to our driving laws. Although I've done it twice street racing in my opinion is REALLY foolish and selfish because there is a high chance of hurting yourself and others. Although I must say ther is a rush to doing it. So what are your opinions?

[Egg Nog]

Especially around urban areas, I think more tracks and drag strips are needed. Not in downtown areas obviously, but at least close to population centers.

Street racing can be very dangerous, but it really depends on the type. If two guys with big 'ol muscle cars want to battle it out old-school on a desolate stretch of Route 66, so be it; no qualms there. Even highways are safer than what tends to happen around here locally.

The problems start to occur when people start pushing cars in busy areas (a la Need For Speed: Underground). The plight of street racing nearby in Richmond (basically an extended part of Vancouver) is especially bad. They don't just drag, they target race for huge cash sums, they ignore any/all regulations, blow stop signs, etc. This is where it really gets dangerous.


EDIT: +1, Good idea for the thread.

[Batmobile_Turbo]

Especially around urban areas, I think more tracks and drag strips are needed. Not in downtown areas obviously, but at least close to population centers.

Street racing can be very dangerous, but it really depends on the type. If two guys with big 'ol muscle cars want to battle it out old-school on a desolate stretch of Route 66, so be it; no qualms there. Even highways are safer than what tends to happen around here locally.

The problems start to occur when people start pushing cars in busy areas (a la Need For Speed: Underground). The plight of street racing nearby in Richmond (basically an extended part of Vancouver) is especially bad. They don't just drag, they target race for huge cash sums, they ignore any/all regulations, blow stop signs, etc. This is where it really gets dangerous.


EDIT: +1, Good idea for the thread.

I think that street racing should be done in places where there is no people or very few people, such as a highway like you said Egg Nog. I think that there should be more drag strips around.
Indiana is a good place for street racing because there are a lot more desolate streets there.

[Dragon.Knight]

Especially around urban areas, I think more tracks and drag strips are needed. Not in downtown areas obviously, but at least close to population centers.

Street racing can be very dangerous, but it really depends on the type. If two guys with big 'ol muscle cars want to battle it out old-school on a desolate stretch of Route 66, so be it; no qualms there. Even highways are safer than what tends to happen around here locally.

The problems start to occur when people start pushing cars in busy areas (a la Need For Speed: Underground). The plight of street racing nearby in Richmond (basically an extended part of Vancouver) is especially bad. They don't just drag, they target race for huge cash sums, they ignore any/all regulations, blow stop signs, etc. This is where it really gets dangerous.


EDIT: +1, Good idea for the thread.

Yeah, but even some highways are extreamly busy, and not very safe...I believe if you are going to race then you should go out to a very safe closed off area for raceing, there you are only putting only yourself in danger and still the danger is minimal.

[crisis]

One of my mates was killed about 20 years ago drag racing on a long, rarely used stretch of two lane road . He didnt expect the fuel tanker to come out of the side road at the end of the stretch and the tanker didnt expect a car to be doing over 100 odd ks. Nothing has changed as far as attitudes goes but cars are faster now. These days he would have been doing over 200ks. Still would have died I suppose. When you get old and grumpy like me you tend to value life and have probably experienced its fragility a little longer. Frankly there is too much too loose. With a few exeptions we are all probably worse drivers than we think we are. One important quality I believe a good driver has is the judgement of a safe or unsafe road condition. If you are travelling faster than you react to an emergency situation and that situation means you could collide with another car at a potentially fatal velocity, the conditions are unsafe. I know of a guy around Adelaide that prowls the streets in the early hours of the morning looking for drag races. He admitted the only time he was beaten was when some big block pulled past him at 240kmh. This was on a main arterial road that runs through many Adelaide suburbs with many traffic lights and many side streets. His rationale is that there are not many cars on the road at these times. This incedently would no doubt be the attitude of all of those people who are on the road at that time. If you kill yourself doing this, bad luck. If you kill anyone else, including your passengers, damn you to hell.

[Falcon500]

I acually wrote an essay inmy final year of school about street racing longest one i ever done 6 pages in lenght describing culture lack of facilitys what can be done and everything else in between, i got a b+ on it. Basicly what i find that these people are fueled by movies like fast and the furious and want to be some kind of urban ledgends before thesemovies came out the huge majority were just muscle cars pulling burnouts at braddon (a suburb of canberra) and as it turns out a good majority problywould not end off using a drag strip facility if one was offerd (i know this because a good majority have told me so) which i just find incredably stupid...these kinds of peoplepiss me off! And while i dont do it myself but i make a habit of turning up at such events to whatch well i sued to the cops have really cracked down Sundown has been dead since my brother used to drag race there (i view if your going to do it any where theres the placeits off to the side and doesnt constanly have traffic going through itsa dead end) braddon is always crawling with cops and even with the addition of a super abrasive road surface(shreads tyers) and the copper pescence and 3 camras people still mange to dump oil all over the place and do burnouts and sand down is dead as a drowned dog too. Iview thatall forms of non controlled racing is dangerous and is not ok under any circumstances.
And crisis is right take the HQ he owned when he was my age or the falcon i own (70s vintages) both these cars gouing full flight would probly top out 200km/h (both quite bland) with very decent stretches of road one of my mates in a 95 vs commadore very easily and on a very busy public road pulled 190 km/h in probly a lot less time then either of them would do it in.

[semtex]

Since we have controversial posts going why not add another very real issue to the world of car lovers.
Here in Vancouver we have a spreading epidemic of street races that have killed plenty of young drivers and forced changes to our driving laws. Although I've done it twice street racing in my opinion is REALLY foolish and selfish because there is a high chance of hurting yourself and others. Although I must say ther is a rush to doing it. So what are your opinions?

Well if you hang around with these people, try this. Here in the uk one thing people do to have a race is hire a race track for the day. Now that may seem expensive, but when you organise it with alot of people (20+) and you all pay and equal contribution it can work out quite cheap. So you've got the advantage of socialising with like minded people that have a genuine intrest in performance cars, it's safe too, and you get to race on a proper track with a good quality surface. Try putting that idea to the street racers, if they think thats stupid, they should take a look at themselves

[Matra et Alpine]

hire a race track for the day. Now that may seem expensive, but when you organise it with alot of people (20+) and you all pay and equal contribution it can work out quite cheap.

To let you know HOW cheap that is, then for most club organised days it's only $60 per car, 'marque' days are about $80 !!!
Jealous ? tough
You get cheaper fuel and insurance !!
Still

Mind you on the A610 4 hours of track time in the day wears out the pads and a set of fronts ( I get about 6 hours out of rears ). So the total cost is high - but I rationalise to myself that pads/tyres/fuel would get used anyway

[Evil Ewok]

Street racing is dangerous, and sometimes isn't necessary. This only makes it harder for car owners to be able to drive the cars they love, and be able to cooperate with police and other officials. They make it more difficult on us to where we get tickets just because the car looks fast. This is exactly why I think the gumball rally is an outrage.

[crisis]

Well if you hang around with these people, try this. Here in the uk one thing people do to have a race is hire a race track for the day. Now that may seem expensive, but when you organise it with alot of people (20+) and you all pay and equal contribution it can work out quite cheap. So you've got the advantage of socialising with like minded people that have a genuine intrest in performance cars, it's safe too, and you get to race on a proper track with a good quality surface. Try putting that idea to the street racers, if they think thats stupid, they should take a look at themselves

To do that in Adelaide would require a ridiculous insurance premium, they have gone nuts about public liability over here, and you would probably have to be a member of a club or have a camms licence. It does make it difficult and I am sure it would be more expensive than over in the UK. It is a pity because I would like to try it myself and it is a possible answer for those who street race. They have mid week drags specifically for guys with 4s and rotaries and non professionals which is good but it is still expensive considering you only get a couple of races per night. If the government was serious about adressing these issues they could easily subsidise these events and track days with a minute portion of the revenue they milk daily from motorists with speed cameras. But they dont want to give us that money back.

[mr bill]

I vehmentaly oppose such actions, as they are the exact cause of the changes made to the young driver laws (in BC at least), and tend to peanlise the wrong people anyway (me for example... nazis...). The real issue, should be keeping your rich upper class twits from street racing in their expensive cars to begin with.

[Matra et Alpine]

They have mid week drags specifically for guys with 4s and rotaries and non professionals which is good but it is still expensive considering you only get a couple of races per night.

Not wishing to initiate a mass migration to Scotland, but our drag track at Crail charges $10 for a days entry to the track.
If it's a busy day you might get 6 runs.
If it's a quiet day you can burn your clutch out you get to go so often.
http://www.crailthrash.co.uk and check out the times ( no history, so no A610 untill I get the engine rebuilt )

[NoOne]

Flms like Fast and the Furious really glamorize street racing, making the whole idea appealling to younger people. This is a crime, a real injustice, I was part of the scene for 7 or 8 yrs and I swear I could fill pages of this thread with stories of carelessness, irresponsibility and the complete idiocy my own, my friends and people we associated with because of like minded attitude and interests.

I will share the one incident that completely turned me off street racing and probably added a good 10 yrs of maturity.

It's somewhere around 2:00 a.m. on a saturday night about 13 yrs ago, there are about a dozen or so cars "on tour", cruising, checking out the night life, looking for kicks. A few musclecars, a few not so stock Mustangs and a maniac in a HKS tuned Dodge Stealth twin turbo who wants to race anything including trying his luck with my friends '64 Pontiac GTO (a low 11 sec beast), my car is down for the weekend, having problems with the electric fuel pumps, therefore I'm "car-whoring" - grabbing a ride with whoever has a seat available.

Excitement builds as a new car is spotted - a tubbed, tunnel rammed Nova, thumping along, looks nice, sounds fast (wish I was in my car, I was due for a kill - so to speak), this guy in the Nova is anxious to race, we are downtown, but its quiet not much traffic. We grab a light, its the Nova in the left lane and a mid 12 second Mustang in the right. We are directly behind the Nova in the GTO, figure if the Nova takes the Mustang we could make a small wager ($500 or so) with Nova guy and pit him against the GTO (I'm sole passenger tonight).

Light goes green Nova is taking the Mustang, but not by much, when from somewhere behind us comes the Stealth in the oncoming traffic lane, he's in it so deep we think he's waiting for a sonic boom, he passes us, pulls behind the Nova then cuts in front of the Mustang, this is where all hell broke loose.

A girl, she's a waitress at one of the clubs we frequent, 21 or 22 yrs old nice looking, funny (always turning down my pathetic, drunken advances)... guess she had just finished her shift closing up the bar and was driving home. She made a left hand turn on to "our" road, she obviously didn't notice the sound or headlights of 6 or 7 cars screaming down the street at about 110-120mph. The stealth hit her so hard, it took her car up off the road and into the brick wall part of a store some 300 ft from where she had turned. Details are a bit blurry from here, I remember the store alarm, police and ambulance sirens absolute chaos.

The girl gets taken away in the ambulance, we find out later that she was comatose for several weeks, not to mention a broken bone in her forearm, dislocated shoulder and numerous cuts, bruises etc. The guy from the Stealth is taken by the police, nobody says anything to incriminate anyone else involved, we get lectured and the usual "scare tactics" from the police, we go our separate ways. I can't sleep that night, I had tried to help her before the ambulance came ... I could hardly recognized her.

She returned to work after a few months, I talked to her, but never admitted that I was there when it happened. We became pretty good friends. Shortly after that I met up with Mr. Stealth, I don't remember all the details, he did I think 6 months plus probation and community service and license revoked for I think 5 yrs. As we talked he made mention of how "that dumb bitch" should have been watching for traffic and none of this would have happened ... I promptly knocked the living shit out of him, not letting up until several of my friends literally dragged me of of his sorry ass.

To this day I cannot forget that night, I see "kids" racing and I pray they will stop before they kill themselves or someone else.

I pray this post might make someone turn down a race ... its better to swallow pride than blood.

-Dave

[Falcon500]

Well crisis i have taken a good look at getting a cams liscence. For your level2s liscence its $82 and you also get some other benifits as well as acess to race tracks...its still a better idea to be part of a cams affilitaed club they can helpyou improve yourself and can even make just about everything cheaper. And its $44 for a class 2 ns (non speed) meaning you can only do solo runs on a track.
As for our local 1/8 mile it cost $10 for your orange sticker (not running for the money) and you could add a further $20 on top of that for your red sticker which puts you in the running for the prize pool at the end of the night and if you loose it gets ripped off. That was when it was open the goverment closed it down for noise pollution of all things...i wouldent complain if there was any human being who lived any where near there and if it wasnt at the AIRPORT (noise indeed ) Fraser park (speed way track) got closed down because some dumbarse decided to break in and destroyed a large section in a 30 odd k worth of fence in such a way it needs full replacement so now where speed ways cars and sprint cars used to race is now growing weeds. All we have left is fairburn park the Hillclimb track (which when i get they XY up and running ill get my cams liscence and become a member) and we have the Sydeny drags and Wakefield park (both a few hours drive away from me) and the Liberal party (who im now a firm supporter of stuff labor Mark Latham can go to hell) are talking about re-opening Fraser park and either A wish to reopen the 1/8 mile or B wish to make a full on 1/4 mile track.
http://www.cams.com.au/default.asp Any australian whos interested in the liscening system or what is required on certain sports or where an affiliated club thats nearby them is can look them up on the cams website i just put up.

[Swissbeatz]

Street racing is stupid. it's on open roads and drivers just want to prove that their cars are fast. I love speed but I don't like this kind of activities. Even on the highway, stupid 18 or 20 years old drivers want to race your car cause they have added a ship or a turbo to their engines. There are tracks for this kind of activities.
Me I love doing speed on open road with nobody on the road. But in street racing their are overtaking everybody and it's very dangerous.