Street gangs and street racing

I occasionally watch a show called Pass time. You guess what the elapsed time of a given car is going to be in a quarter mile run. They give you the basic stats on the vehicle and the modifications thereto and you take it from there.

I generally get the best guess well over half the time. The farm manager here at Falling Downs thinks I should apply to be a contestant. Problem is, the most you're ever going to come away with is about two thousand bucks. So even if I get on the show and win, the winnings won't cover the cost of the trip.

There's a reason for my good luck at guessing elapsed times. Back in the day there was a hard-core street racing community in the town I lived in. The racetrack, informally known as the Highway 86 Dragway, was right in front of my house. Matter of fact, a couple of years I personally repainted the start/finish lines.

On any given night you'd find GTO's and Shelby Cobra's and hemi Chargers and six-pak Road Runners duking it out. This was a passion driven enterprise, but money did inevitably change hands. Eventually you'd find that cars that reigned supreme on the 86 were cars that had been on the NHRA circuit a year or two before.

This trend became particularly noticeable in places like New York City, where you'd find guys who were making big bucks in illegal drugs getting into street racing with last year's race car they just bought from Grumpy or Dyno Don or Ronnie Sox. You'd have 140 mph street races in Bed-Stu with a hundred grand changing hands at the finish line.

The forces of do-goodism were alarmed by this trend, and somewhere along the line the "Street-racers of Los Angeles" were invented. That was a joint venture between the LAPD and God knows who. Their front man was a guy named Big Willy something or other. Big Willy was a big black dude kitted out in Hells Angels type garb except where you would expect to see the flying skull there was some other bullshit patch instead.

(Not to be confused with Wild Willy, a skinny white guy who campaigned a scary AA altered car forever and spent his golden years working in obscurity in a muffler shop. RIP Willy Borsch)

Big Willy had one message; take your street racing to the track. And that is where I saw him. He was running a Plymouth Superbird with a small block. Had a couple of german shepherd guard dogs around his car at all times. His 340 Superbird was running low thirteen second times.

Needless to say, that failed to make much of an impression. I'd had a number of faster cars, and virtually everybody on the street racing scene had faster cars than me.

Not that the Superbird wasn't an interesting idea in it's own right, but it was never intended as a quarter-miler, and only an idiot would go drag racing with one, especially with a small-block. Not that Big Willy was an idiot; in fact, he was just indulging some highly impractical personal fantasies while getting somebody else to foot the bill.

Big Willy didn't convince anybody to take it to the track, but I'm sure that thanks to the LAPD he did OK for himself.