Illegal street racing is a huge problem in the US and many other countries, and even the high price of gasoline won’t stop it. The truth is, whether we like or not, whether it makes any sense at all, racing is going to continue until the last drop of high-test is gone. (In this photo from the NY Times, former illegal street racers in Lodz, Poland, compete on a public street closed to all traffic by the police commissioner; the city spent more than $20,000 for timing equipment and this Christmas tree, and the track is open once a month).
Soon, gas/electric hybrids and clean diesel engines will be tuned for racing; hydrogen fuel cell EVs will be competing as soon as they hit the streets in any numbers. There will always be competition between cars and their owners, and there’s no reason that racing won’t continue with tomorrow’s cars. These people will start showing-up at the annual Las Vegas Automotive Holy of Holies, the SEMA Show, probably this year.
Today’s hot rodder is often a computer nerd.
Here’s why this problem needs to be addressed in new ways:
In Maryland a few months ago, a car on a turnpike where illegal races 
were being held ran into a group of spectators and killed eight bystanders. (In this 1950s photo from an LA-area auto show, NHRA founder Wally Parks, in the light suit, and his wife Barbara spread the word about legal NHRA drag racing).
In San Diego, where the street racing problem has been termed "epidemic," 16 deaths and 31 injuries were directly related to illegal street racing in 2001.
And an incident which has garnered worldwide coverage, being discussed at length even on Larry King Live, Nick Bollea, the son of wrestling personality Hulk Hogan, drove his Toyota Supra, which had been highly-modified for racing in a sport called drifting, ran into a tree at over 100 miles per hour. When that happens, the tree always wins. Bollea was, amazingly, unharmed, but his friend John Graziano, in the passenger seat, didn’t fare as well.
Doctors say he’ll remain bed-ridden and unable to communicate for the rest of his life in a near-vegetative state, his brain severely damaged and part of his frontal lobe having been surgically removed. Nick Bollea, lawyered-up with dad’s money, got eight months in a county jail near his home. Eight months.
(Nick Bollea's mug shot; Hulk Hogan's son escaped injury when he drove his Toyota Supra, modified for racing, into a tree at over 100-miles per hour; his best friend, US Marine John Graziano, who saw action in Iraq, was in the passenger seat and doctors say he will never again be able to walk, eat normally or engage in any meaningful communication. He had to come home to suffer because Bollea couldn't drive his car, which incidentally is registered in his father's name. It also bring up the subject of driver education and training, but that's for another, future posting.).
Click below for more on the need for illegal street racing to be brought to controlled racing environments, and the history of Big Wille and Brotherhood Raceway.
So I’m asking you to help solve the problem. I’ll tell you about a successful anti-street racing program which existed for a short time in Los Angeles and could easily be started-up again, plus some history about how and why the NHRA was founded and what the police commissioner in Lodz, Poland did about their street racing problem.
(Charismatic street racing celebrity Big Willie Robinson and wife Tomiko at the height of their body-building days in the '70s).
In 1951, after years of running hot rods at the dry lakes called Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base; you’ve seen it when the Space Shuttle lands in California) the National Hot Rod Association was founded in a restaurant by a few friends.
Shortly thereafter, drag racing, with more than a little help from William Parker, then chief of the LAPD, gained a legitimacy, respectability and reputation which had never before existed. The first races were held on the runways of what’s now John Wayne Airport in Orange County, but the first permanent track was created at the LA County Fairgrounds in Pomona, a measured and timed 1/4-mile.
The NHRA still holds the first and last races of their long, national season there now, 
and out of respect to Chief Parker, the strip has been called, since it was built, Parker Avenue, complete with street sign. Whenever I'm there with someone new, I always tell them how it's actually named for me. They believe that for about two minutes.
There’s nothing mysterious about why illegal street racing boomed first in Southern California. First, the weather and the environment, same reasons the movie companies moved there from NYC. The warm, dry weather allowed for racing all year, and the desert just an hour from downtown, saw little if any rain at all in a year.
So Cal had been full of "hot rodders" since before WWII; after the war, returning servicemen newly-skilled in engineering, aerodynamics, master machinists, could build superchargers and turbochargers (for use in aircraft engines) and the seeming ability to use spit, bubble gum and a pair of pliers to make any engine run better made their homes in and around Los Angeles. For many servicemen and women, who shipped out of or back to California during the war in the Pacific, they weren't going back home to bad weather, small town life and the family farm. They stayed and built both Northern and Southern California.
Illegal street racing in Lodz, Poland, had become such a problem that, according to the New York Times, Jaroslaw Woloszynski, the police commissioner in Lodz (pro: Woodge), was tired of trying to catch illegal street racers in and around his city. And more tired of dealing with injuries and deaths from the races. Kids in Poland now have more money, more spare time and access to more makes and models of cars than ever in the nation’s history. (Big Willie Robinson does TV interviews on the last night of competition at LA County Raceway; the track had been open since 1964).
Woloszyski couldn’t bring the racers to non-existent race tracks, so he brought the race track to the public streets.
He closes down some main streets once a month in the center of town, and, using the very American standard of racing from a stop on a straight track for 1,320’ or ¼-mile, and with more than $20,000 in lights and timing equipment, the illegal street racers are happily racing their BMWs, Hondas and Volkswagens in monthly events called Street Legal. (LA County Sheriff Bill Chaffin and the race car which the county helped pay for and Chaffin and others put together).
Here’s how cops in this country, the USA, handle the street racing problem:
They use the same draconian techniques they’ve been using for 80 years and which clearly don't work: first, patrol for the late-night 
races or develop intelligence using one of the racers or a friend of theirs to find the events, in other words, to rat-out their buds. Then, call-in an overwhelming number of cops to block ways out of the area. Wonder what's happening around town when all the police are at some street race? At this point, officers start running the license plates and registration info of every car there, not just the race cars. Then they run the driver’s license numbers of everyone there, looking for warrants so they can arrest someone. Then, they impound the cars, towing and flat-bedding them to yards which will cost the owner several hundred bucks to bail out their car or truck.
Police in Southern California have added two somewhat new touches to their ongoing persecution of racers, and of which police seem especially proud.
First, not just the racers and their cars are targeted. New laws ensure that anyone watching the races, anyone attending the event, any and all spectators, are also rousted, with their names run through the cop computers and issued tickets or even arrested. If that happens to a spectator, then even their cars will be impounded, too. (Big Willie proudly displays his Brotherhood colors; when he ran races in the streets, he forbid the Bloods and Crips from showing any of their usual gang-banger accouterments).
Second, if the police can somehow prove that specific cars were racing, through videotape or pressuring witnesses who are let go if they, again, rat on their friends, then those cars are impounded and then crushed, usually in front of local TV news cameras. Often the owners are invited to watch the destruction take place, then made available to the media to talk about how they “feel.”
The first time I met Big Willie Robinson, on a warm spring night in 1985, he was doing basically the same thing the hero Polish police commissioner is doing now. It was late, and Willie was standing in the middle of a bunch of Bloods and Crips on Los Angeles’ Crenshaw Boulevard. Robinson was not asking, but demanding they take off their gang colors, their red or blue do-rags and pull the colored rags hanging from their back pockets. And any alcohol, drugs and especially weapons had better be stashed somewhere else, not anywhere near the racing. Willie told me, "I know they're all strapped and holding drugs, but I didn't allow any of it out in the open. If we'd banned all that stuff outright and searched everyone, how long do you think they'd be coming to the street races? When the races were running, cops looked the other way because they saw big drops in crime on those nights."
And if they wanted to race, they acquiesced to Willie’s requests.
The street, like so many in So Cal, long and straight and perfect for drag racing, was empty of its usual traffic; Big Willie’s “volunteer track personnel” had closed off a 1/2-mile of Crenshaw and all its cross streets. A hundred cars, maybe more, and motorcycles were sitting on side streets, owners fiddling with engines and preparing for competition. Most racers drove their cars to the “event” while others brought them on trailers. All the trailered cars were either too loud, illegal and outrageous, with bottles of nitrous oxide which can instantly provide 100 extra horsepower, slick racing tires and wide-open exhaust systems to be anywhere near a public road. (Southern California is forever being inundated with plans for "new" race tracks; these plans below and others were used to get supporters, investors and sponsors for what was going to be called Drag City, located about 40 miles east of Riverside in Beaumont, CA; after the city had spent some money on the project, and the promoters said Chrysler was coming into the project, it all fell apart. This will happen again and again as gullible people get taken-in by promoters; the honest promoters have a tough enough time trying to just keep what they have, much less go throuigh the necessary hoops to build another track in So Cal).
With streets closed and racers ready, Big Willie and his now-deceased 
wife, Tomiko, went about the business of setting-up a Christmas tree (the starting lights at a drag strip) powered by a car battery, laid out some traffic cones to mark racing lanes and start and finish lines and began sending cars, two at a time, down their ¼-mile-or-so of public-street-turned-race-track.
The crowd was by no means all African American; there were old and young, black, brown, red, yellow and white all well-represented among the 300-or-so people waiting for the street racing to being. What they had in common was their love for fast cars and honest competition.
Police never showed up at these races. Willie told me that he and Tomiko always let them know where the races would be run. Why?
Because the cops knew that when the drags were happening, that gang-banging, drive-by shootings, robberies and burglaries, almost every type of crime were down. Big Willie and Tomiko accomplished what no civic group, community organization, police force or Neighborhood Watch crew had ever done on some of the meanest streets of LA.
(John Force is today's biggest celebrity in professional drag racing; his family even starred in a much-viewed reality show. Many amateur and sportsman racers deride the giant NHRA events around the country, saying the group has lost its original intent and is instead concerned only with TV packages, sponsors and possible buy-out offers, one of which, for $120 million, fell apart after a few months of NHRA negotiating last year with the man who created DirecTV).
After the 1992 riots in LA following the acquittal of police officers in the
Rodney King beating case, Big Willie and Tomiko went to Mayor Tom Bradley’s office to plead their case for a permanent city-sponsored track.
By this time, Willie had some important friends on his side, including Otis Chandler, then-publisher of the LA Times and a closet street racer himself, along with some ranking officers of the LA Sheriff and LAPD and a few important politicos.
Otis Chandler (whose car collection was auctioned for over $36 million after his death) wore his Brotherhood colors when he was at the track. Something which surprised, maybe shocked, most of the people attending Otis Chandler’s memorial service in early 2006, was when Big Willie, all 6'7" of hime, stood at the back of the packed Pasadena church and strode to the rostrum, unasked and unannounced, and talked about wanting people to understand “an Otis Chandler you might not have known.” Willie spoke his piece and says since then he’s been invited to do eulogies for people he didn’t even know, but he always does them, happy to do it at no charge. In the Times’ story about the service, Big Willie got almost as much space as Chandler himself, and the paper ran two photos of Willie speaking at the event. (Big Willie speaks with an NBC-TV producer in a posh Santa Monica, CA hotel, about an upcoming segment on their Whipnotic TV show, seen iSatuday afternoons and Sunday mornings in Southern California in both English and Spanish, the first and still only NBC show produced in both languages simultaneously).
Back to 1992, and Willie got the land, a huge lot from the city and Harbor Commission. They borrowed grandstands, fencing and cement barriers from the Long Beach Grand Prix, collected various odds and ends used during the LA Olympics, set-up their own announcing, lighting, timing and scoring towers and built concession and food stands. They christened it Brotherhood Raceway, hard by a traditionally tough part of the LA Harbor called Wilmington.
Thousands of racers and their friends used the track while it was open; admission was $10 per car and race cars were safety-inspected just as they would at a “real” track. Brotherhood Raceway had the approval of the National Hot Rod Association, the NHRA, biggest drag racing promoter and sanctioning body in the world. People who didn't have cars were invited to race on bicycles, skateboards or in their bare feet. The racing, Willie and Tomiko knew, was just a sideshow. The important thing was that these (mostly young) folks were off the streets, in a structured, controlled environment, and not causing anyone trouble elsewhere in LA. And gang-banger or not, newspaper publisher or not, everyone there mixed easily, sharing their favorite hobby.
One ambitious LA Sheriff (an illegal street racer himself) talked his bosses into giving him a budget to build a drag race car and regularly brought it to Brotherhood. The car, painted like a black-and-white LA Sheriff’s car and with a flashing light bar and blaring siren, was a hit with the crowds. (After almost 45 years of racing, LA County Raceway shut down in 2007; the track leased the land from a gravel company, and when they ran out of gravel, they needed the race track's land. The photo is from that final night at the track).
Tom Bradley left office in 1993 and changes in the Harbor Commission and city council saw the track 
closed after only a few years. The track’s old location is now a storage yard for mountains of coal being shipped to China.
Big Willie is now fighting to have Brotherhood Raceway re-opened, anywhere in LA County. One import car company has been talking with Willie about allowing him to use one of their many lots usually reserved for cars and trucks when they come off the company’s ships.
Big Willie and his supporters are not picky about where the track might go; LA County Raceway, which closed a year ago after being in business since 1964, was more than 100 miles from downtown LA, yet was filled to the brim on race days and nights with street racers from LA, Orange and San Diego and Ventura Counties, Las Vegas and even Phoenix, AZ.
If anyone has a better idea on curing the illegal street racing problem, I’d like to hear it. Seriously.
(Big Willie had the honor of calling the races on LA County Raceway's last night; tracks like this are closing all over the country due to high insurance costs, land values which have skyrocketed and neighbor complaints about noise. The problem is that street racers are going to race, one way or another, and that can't be stopped).
Steve, Thanks for the synopsis, which I will attempt to share with others not 'hip' to the Brotherhood-both in and outside the Southland. Your stand-up commitment to the solution is always appreciated and can never be shared often enough! Willie to the Mic!
Posted by: Philip Bradford | July 23, 2008 at 08:13 PM