Different time man. You could pull at the green light on a four lane devided and not take your life in your hands cause no one used to run the red. Most of us were slower then no matter what we say now and cars had to be driven due to lack of power steering or brakes in many cases. That and if we can't halp others to not make the same mistakes we did where's that leave the world.
Someone enlighten me here, maybe its just me but lets pretend for a minute that you're involved in an "illegal" activity like oh say a streetrace. You and 50 of your closest friends who are just as stupid as you are standing in a PUBLIC highway...car comes along runs into a smoke cloud and plows thru 10 or 12 of your "buddies"...heres where the "oh ****! we're ****ed!" state of mind takes over and all of the sudden your looking for some type of explanation that doesnt include putting yourself in the "hot seat"....hey, hees an answer "awww man officer, we was just standin around minding our business when this car came along with no lights on and hit eveybody!" Hmmm.... Btw can someone tell me how to turn the headlights off in a late model Crown Vic? I got one in the shop and they come on as soon as you turn the damn key on! Have I ever street raced? YES. Have I ever done it with a crowd around? HELL NO! Do I feel for those that perished and their families? YES. Was it their choice to take that chance? YES.
in the end no one is really in the right here... drag racers, spectators, and no lights on crown vic... i feel bad for everyone of them. I feel even worse for their famlies... but street racing will never die, it is what it is. americans are defiant by nature. if your told you cant do something... ATLEAST once in your life you will buck and do it. why say these guys should die? or be locked up for the rest of their lives? i mean by saying that i say you should go turn yourself into the police for YOUR illegal activities... i know i haven't been here long so im sure i will get a cussing but thats just my $0.02
You don't get for being new, just dumb. But, your post isn't. That said there is a difference between doing something dumb, street race, and stupid, street race in a crowd.
funny thing to me is, when i actually did stupid **** like that, no one wanted a crowd around.... **** DOES change, not always for the better.
Just a funny story. Street racing is still stupid. 1979 I had a 67 GTO. I'm at a light and a guy in a 68 GTO pulls along side of me. Light turns green and we both take off. Nothing crazy, it was a straight shot and we both backed off around 70 MPH (in a 45 MPH zone). (still was stupid) A couple days later I'm washing my car and a cop car pulls in front of my drive and stops. The officer asks "is that your car" and I told him it was. He said he had a GTO also. I said cool and that maybe I'd see it some time. He said "you already did the other day at the light on Garfield Avenue". I was at a loss for words. LOL
Street racing is a big problem in Toronto as well. The more they try to clamp down on it, the worse it seems to get. 15-20 years ago, you could drive fast on the highway at off hours and within reason and it was accepted. Now that they heavily patrol the highways to generate $$, the kids have taken to the street. Going 100mph+ on a highway designed for 80mph is bad enough, but doing 100mph on a residential road designed for 40mph is deadly. The reason most of us don't think we were as bad was because there were less cars on the road, more engaged drivers and in most cases the cars were not as fast. I remember when VW GTI with a 132HP engine was a rocket and most American cars hated corners. My current wagon has 220HP and would eat a GTI for breakfast. I feel for the families and people affected, but if I think back at my youth, I've done some pretty dumb **** as well. Your perspective on life is different at 17.
Not getting into the whole right-vs-wrong debate, but I noticed they don't have any close up shots of the Crown Vic (probably due to gore), but the lights off and rumors of a police undercover thing makes me wonder. Also- those hub caps aren't very popular on "civilian" models. I had a set---off a cop car...I don't see them very often on non-cop models around here. Usually they are on former police cars with the equipment holes all over them. Maybe I need to stop always thinking about conspiracy theories.
Personally, I don't believe the Crown Vic was a cop. Not for a second. In the 30+ years I lived in the DC area, I never saw just one PG county cop enforcing any laws. They might be traveling around by themselves but if it was an "undercover" thing, PG would have had 3 or more squad cars all together. Anyone ever get stopped on the beltway? They'll have 5 cruisers on the left shoulder and one brave cop who steps out into the left lane and points at speeders doing 80+mph while motioning them to pull over. Besides, in PG, one cop by themselves, could get hurt quickly. Situation ****s any way you cut it.
what is everyone going to say if they prove the lights were off and the guy was drunk or overly tired or on drugs... sad it happened.... Not sure how to say this and not sound like an ***... How much smoke could there have been.. (must have been rear wheel drive rides just sitting there roasting the tires). been around plenty of burn outs and rarely do you have enough smoke where you can not truly see something. where were all the cars parked for those folks watching.. how could everyone be in the smoke...???.. To me just to many things dont line up to be no fault to the driver of the white car... take a look at this video of some serious racers.. how much smoke http://www.1320video.com/Dec1Mexico.php (and that is not mexico)
This is a unfortunate situation. A friend of mine was killed in a street race in high school (bailey road, bay area, ~ 1998) But he was being an idiot. I look at this as less of a street racing related death, and more of a stupid people standing in the middle of the road death. They happened to be watching a street race, but no street racer hit or killed anyone. And if the car involved was a under cover cop, we will never hear about it... wouldn't surprise me - they do that maneuver all the time around here. I agree with the fast and furious comment too... I was involved in street racing right before and right after that movie came out - and it changed like a ******* light switch. We got out rapidly at that point.
Why is that ******* you off? That's pretty much what it was, a drag race gone wrong. This whole issue of it being a street race and not a drag race and whatever is just semantics. Street racing is pretty much drag racing on the street, and I personally don't see where it has any impact on legal drag racing at the track, so I'm at a loss for why this angers people.
What he is getting at is that as soon as anyone hears "Drag race gone bad!" they envision a car racing another and careening out of control into a crowd. Since that is NOT the case here I,m with him. Since the car that hit the people was not directly involved in any race I understand what he is saying. The public however will not see it as it really is...to them its a drag race gone bad.
Semantics? That's funny. I see a huge correlation between the media's outlook on street racing and the hurt it's putting on drag racing on a daily basis. I see you are in Florida... I am flying from Ohio to Ft Lauderdale later today, promoting 3 drag racing events in Immokalee, Bradenton and Miami the next 3 weekends. The series is designed to get racers off the streets and on to the track where I can keep them safe. If you would honestly like to know the difference between racing on a track and racing on the street, I will show you first hand. If you are interested, I will also see if I can take you to in interview where I will have to explain the difference between what I am doing and what innocent people get hurt doing on the streets. You will be surprised at how ignorant some people are and how they end up hurting the name of drag racing and hotrodding as a whole. Semantics. No. Not when you are effected by it 365.
I understand your point. But realize that I am no stranger to racing at either the strip or the street. I've done both. I guess it's just a matter of how you look at things. I've actually been to street races where they had a tree and everything. So I guess that in my view, it ain't like the two are diametric opposites or something. To me they're one in the same, except for the glaring, obvious factor of one being legal and somewhat safe, and the other being illegal and very dangerous. Switching gears, please elaborate a little more on your event at DeSoto speedway in Bradenton. That's fairly close to me and I may want to come down and check it out.
I've been to a bunch of street races and understand the allure of it. Danger. Well they got it. They want to be close.. to be a part of it. You can see this at the legal street races at the tracks. The spectators slowly crowd around the starting line until the announcer stops the show and makes them move back. Then, like the tide, they slowly creep in again. I'd like to take this time to blame the lawmakers. Make tougher laws... Take the cars if they get caught. Put more people out there patroling. Countless people have said that this has been a hot spot for years. Put a chicane in the road. A hill. A fork. A s****. Whatever! The crowds aren't wanted by racers. How are they supporting it? The last thing you want to do when you are breaking the law is bring attention to yourselves. And that is what having a crowd of people standing around does. It's like robbing a bank in a suit made of sparklers.
any chance he was driving a green firebird? I remember the races over there. Everyone used to meet up at the 76/carl's jr. Unfortunately I have to admit to being one of those idiots in my youth. I started street racing on back roads when I was 16. Stupid. Sad truth is that people have been doing it forever and they will continue to do so. There was just a m***ive bust in the bay area in the last 2 weeks. They're cracking down again. Good thing. Bunch of idiots around here. Bunch of guys stopped traffic on 880 to do donuts in the middle of the road during morning commute... video taped it and put it on youtube...
Ok, this has been bugging me for a while now... This accident had little to do with either street racing or drag racing... The car that killed all the people wasn't racing. The fact that it hit people who were there to watch a street race is irrelivent. What if they were at a 'freedom march' or a 'political rally'... Same result, but this time it would be a tragedy. People would be calling for the head of the driver... Especially if he had his lights off at 3am... My first thought when I heard the story and saw the pics of what looked like a white Grand Marquis with dark tinted windows? Cops... We had a little impromptu strip set up literally out in the middle of nowhere... Like 30min from the nearest dwelling, behind the dump, on a road to nowhere... And everytime the cops wanted to break it up (Even though 50% of the racers with truely fast cars were cops themselves) they'd roll in in unmarked cars with their lights off and wait for a race to begin. Then one of them would take off after the racers and the other few would block the escape roads and start writing tickets. It was all part of the 'game'... Street Racing is bad. But don't start calling people names, especially dead people, unless you've NEVER left a light a little fast in response to the guy next to you, or done a burnout, or for that matter driven more than a couple MPH over the speed limit... All those things are potentially deadly, but if you haven't done any of them, go ahead and judge.
anyone else read the news headling about Bangkok may have legal street racing zones? I remember the official being quoted as saying something like "If they don't have anywhere to do it legally they will find somewhere to do it illegally" makes sense to me. there needs to be a legal solution to this.
So, you're just going to say I'm a dumb*** without offering up an alternative viewpoint? Kind of a cowardly way to make a point if you ask me. Unlike you, I can actually discuss things in an intelligent manner without getting all pissy and insulting the person with whom I disagree. Which, in my eyes kinda makes YOU the dumb***, but hey, that's just my opinion. Some of you guys are acting like there's absolutely NO CONNECTION WHATSOEVER between drag racing and street racing, and it doesn't take a ****ing brain surgeon to see that this simply isn't the case, regardless of how desperately some of you would like to separate them. We're not talking drag racing vs. ballroom dancing here. I know guys who run their car at the track on Friday, and then run that same car at the bridge on Saturday, so whatever. You guys have fun with your little semantic argument.
Street racing with a tree, guard walls, crowd barriers, security, an ambulance, emt's and insurance is drag racing marketed as street racing. I have promoted and worked at events on public roads. The point is that is the perceived safety. There is a connection, a large connection. The problem is that what I try to provide safely is called drag racing and what people do illegally is called street racing. It is a semantic argument, nothing more. The point I want to make is that that petty semantic argument, pushed through the media, is aiding in the destruction of drag strips across the country. I'll PM you about my event. I am here for myself, not promoting my job.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg_GI_6kqwE&feature=related This happened in Birmingham AL a few weeks ago killed two this was a 30 thousand dollar race and yes it paid out one guy was hit by one of the racers and the other was shot when the money changed hands
Street races go on in downtown Detroit & they happen because of the $$$$ involved. Big bucks get wagered & people think that the risk/reward is worth it. We hear about guys getting shot for winning a race here too.
yea a buddy of mine talked to a guy he knows and said the guy with the money throw it at the winner and the guy didnt like it and his body guard shot him for no reason other than dis respect
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