♪ Ride with the mob, Alhamdulillah ♪
♪ Check in with me and do your job ♪
♪ Ferg is the name, Ben Baller did the chain ♪
♪ Tourneau for the watch, presi Plain Jane ♪
♪ Yamborghini chain, rest in peace to my superior ♪
♪ Hermes link could feed a village in Liberia ♪
♪ TMZ taking pictures, causin' mad hysteria ♪
♪ Momma see me on BET and started tearin' up ♪
♪ I'ma start killin' niggas, how you get that trife ♪
♪ I attended Harlem picnics where you risked your life ♪
♪ Uncle used to skim work, sellin' nicks at night ♪
♪ I was only 8 years old, watching Nick at Nite ♪
♪ Uncle Psycho was in that bathroom, buggin' ♪
♪ Knife to his guts hope Daddy don't cut him ♪
♪ Suicidal thoughts brought to me with no advisory ♪
♪ He was pitchin' dummy, sellin' fiends mad ivory ♪
♪ Grandma had the arthritis in her hands, bad ♪
♪ She was poppin' pills like rappers in society ♪
♪ I f*** yo b**** for the irony ♪
♪ I'll send Meechy at yo hoe if yo b**** keep eyein' me ♪
♪ Ride with the mob, Alhamdulillah ♪
♪ Check in with me and do your job ♪
♪ Ferg is the name, Ben Baller did the chain ♪
♪ Tourneau for the watch, presi Plain Jane ♪
- Go back to the original "Fast and the Furious" days
and you'll see people slapping on wings,
pretty much putting crazy decals
everywhere they possibly could.
And putting on more polyurethane bumpers
than the entire cast of "Cars," the movie, which by the way,
has quite a cult following,
and it makes me a little bit uncomfortable.
Movies just didn't age well,
specifically the original "Fast and the Furious,"
but the movie speaks for itself
to like the innermost enthusiastic within all of us.
And that is, we must have a fast car.
To do what?
I'm not really sure, okay?
I dunno, maybe to race, I'm Alex, alex.fi on Instagram,
and today we're gonna be talking about a hobby
that 110% seem to be insanely more popular back in the day.
And nowadays seems to be all but distant and replaced
by like the history channel, reality TV shows
if that even makes sense.
You could not tell 12 year old me
that the history channel was gonna have reality TV shows.
That's just not a thing.
But today we're talking about, hah, what happened
to the street racing?
(upbeat music)
Speaking of street racing in all honesty just don't do it
because there's like a million different places
you can actually drive your car like a loony.
And there's tons of driving schools and things
that you should focus on instead.
And I mean, this is a disclaimer,
but it's also just like general common sense.
At least to somebody like me.
No one, I mean, no one wants to get a midnight phone call
of you getting into an accident
or even worse ruining someone else's life
that was simply around
while you were driving uncontrollably.
I know at night it seems like nobody's around,
but typically there are, there's always somebody around.
And a lotta times you hear about a lot of accidents
that have to do with other people
because of somebody driving fast.
So with that outta the way, don't forget
that if you're looking to build your car
for some of the speed legitness, okay,
and need some light ass wheels and good tires,
be sure to check out fitmentindustries.com
and drop a comment on what you'd like to see next
in the what happens series,
or if you have some ideas for so you want
we might just be bringing that back and maybe January
or February, it's already January.
We'll see you next year.
That joke doesn't work anymore.
Street racing is something that began
the moment two production vehicles made it off the lot
and apparently never really stopped.
You could actually trace this all the way back
to the early 1900s.
And in all honesty, since cars have been made,
people have been using them to either compete
against each other, run away from each other,
or some sort of selfish intent.
In all honesty, cars are just a selfish platform
to do more of whatever it is that we want to do.
People swapped in ambulance engines for more power
to run away from cops back in the 30s and 40s.
This was a real thing.
I mean, what do you expect?
You had moonshine runners that were running
the midnight roads with no headlights on
and modified chassis to handle the weight.
That's a whole story that had to do with air suspension
and the birth of NASCAR.
You also had people learning how to actually make their car
like 007 up in here and it was absolutely awesome.
You have people racing against each other
and it was a little bit like a mating ritual,
except there was predominantly between people
that I don't that ever wanted a long-term relationship,
but either way street racing among any other type
of competition-style driving has always been around
the automotive industry, but as production cars began
to get faster and more dangerous,
it was only a matter of time until groups, associations,
companies, and the police decided
that they're gonna have a little love circle
because there's a lotta going on.
And if they didn't get it under control,
everything was gonna implode.
And I'm really trying to understand
that this was an insanely fast-growing hobby
and it was actually ignited even more so
after World War II, when everybody was coming back
and looking for a little bit of the American dream,
and a little bit of more excitement in their life,
now think like driving a car really fast,
you had the spawn of NASCAR,
which really was one of the first association-related
large-scale automotive events in the United States.
Hell yeah, brother, okay?
You had the NHRA take on the drag racing crowd
to find people a place to fly by the seat
of their pants safely with the only potential injury
being that to themselves
and potentially the other competitor
that was racing right down the line with you.
You had events overseas where the major manufacturers began
to really step it up, as well with the introduction
of professional racing, such things like Formula 1,
by the way back in the day was insanely dangerous, okay?
It was like the scariest thing in the world,
but you also had things like Baja runs,
World Rally Championship, and Le Mans, you had 24 Hours,
you had this, you had that,
you had so many different types of racing
that if you were an automotive enthusiast,
you had something to watch.
And if you lived in the 60s and 80s,
professional automotive racing was a massive pass time
for the world.
But no matter what organization, whether it was small
or large, it was enough to satiate some people.
And there were other people that still wanted more.
You see, through the evolution of cars
and the professional motorsport era,
there was still a group of people that prefer to do it
on a public road, so much so there wasn't inherently just
a random sporadic group of people,
but there was a very collective organization of individuals
in local areas that would get together
and illegally street race.
Now, a legal street race would start to be birthed primarily
in the early 70s.
It leave for a bit in the early 80s,
and then come back swinging in the mid-80s and into the 90s
until it reached its peak likely in the late 90s
to early 2000s.
You have to remember that the EPA in the 70s
and into the early 80s really curved that down
because of the fact that you couldn't actually street race
a lotta your vehicles because of the price of gas,
and the fact that everything was inherently very slow.
It only came back into the fray once a lot
of those emissions started to lift,
speed limits were raised, and a lotta people started
to realize you could still have fun with cars.
Street racing, by the way,
is something insurance agencies also look at.
If you're in the following states, congratulations,
you're gonna stay with the most street racers per capita.
I didn't even know that this was a fact.
It's interesting, nonetheless,
because the States are not what you would expect.
Number 10 comes in with Virginia.
Not sure who lives there.
Tennessee, number nine because of the Tail of the Dragon.
Eight is Wisconsin.
Seven is Iowa.
Six is Arkansas, five is Hawaii, not entirely sure why.
Four is Oregon.
Three is Wyoming.
Two is Idaho.
And the number one state is North Dakota
with 85% more street racing violations than average.
There's 41.43 drivers with a racing violation
per 100,000 drivers in North Dakota.
Why, what's even there?
Mountains, skiing.
Racing and high adrenaline has been something
that's been a lotta people's blood for a long time.
In fact, street racing and just cars in general
to some people is more than a hobby, it's a passion.
And in 1971, for example, there's somebody
by the name of Brock Yates Sr.,
started something you may know as the Cannonball Run,
which was a 2,800-mile street race,
which was predominantly illegal.
Stuff like this started popping up in the 80s, and 90s,
and even the early 2000s.
And now we get back over into the favorite movie
that everybody knows and loves, the "Fast and the Furious."
Now, "Fast and the Furious" is no sludge to kicking
that energy and nickel to the next set
of generational enthusiasts with a bald muscly man driving
an RX-7, for some reason.
I'm not entirely sure why Vin Diesel was driving an RX-7
in the beginning of the film because nothing else
after that aligns, but whatever.
People, once again, revitalized that want and need
to drive fast.
As the activity surged back up, lots of new groups,
organizations, and associations were quick
to quiet trying like quell the issue,
like we're going to fix this, okay?
The spark created the growth of autocross groups,
smaller drag associations, and additional road courses
that could be used at a fraction of the cost.
But for some reason or not, it still didn't seem
to fill the void of those that ran cash no-prep races
on the tow ways of Houston and on the Beltways of Texas,
because that was a thing.
And, in fact, I even remember going back early
in the early 2010s to late 2000s,
if you can even put me back that long ago,
maybe you thought I was a baby, I was not,
and going to Texas for the Texas 2K,
but in the past, street racing was relatively well-known.
It was big, it was dangerous.
And now it's all, but gone only to be taken place
by maybe one or two major events.
So what exactly happened to street racing?
Did the cops finally shut it down or did people get bored?
Did everyone's project car run outta money or patients?
Well, it's really, none of the above.
Street racing has been in a really weird spot
that hadn't really been talked about for quite a while.
And something that's pretty interesting though,
is the most recent resurgence of illegal street racing,
which was caused none other than the pandemics-forced hand
for individuals to stay home.
Because people were forced to stay home,
more illegal street racing occurred,
and you can actually see the spike in 2020,
and a lotta news stations and articles talking
about accidents, and injuries, and deaths, and fatalities
because of illegal street racing in the 2020.
Because of this, more enthusiastic had time to finish
the car in the garage with less sanctioned events happening
around the country, in both parking lots and at tracks.
Places like Road America, BRR, Road Atlanta,
and a lotta those places couldn't actually host anything
which started to suck people's, you know, hobby even more.
(rock music)
(explosion booming)
What unfolded was nearly five times the reporting
of street racing incidents in places like New York City.
New laws were violations that could be tied to street racing
that you'd go to jail for three to five years,
and you'd have your vehicle completely forfeited,
unable to ever buy it back.
The spike caused by being forced to stay inside may have
an influence on some people of maybe the prices
that people like you and people like me pay
for cars in 2020.
And it's really interesting to kinda hear that
because otherwise outside of 2020,
there really wasn't a whole lotta talk about street racing
at all, you had the Texas 2K,
which was predominantly a sanctioned event
at different tracks or oval tracks around the Houston area.
Nowadays, street racing is still prominent in certain areas,
but it's much quieter and rightfully so.
In places like the Texas 2K absolutely do not condone
the activities that happen on the Beltway at night.
Make no mistake, cars have always been dangerous,
but when there's cars nowadays that you can buy
with a red key that lift the front wheels
from the dealership without any driving knowledge
or having any experience driving a high horsepower car,
that can be kind of nuts.
And it's always been like that a little bit,
but really it's starting to be insane.
Put that amount of power and a budget-friendly car,
and you have even more people that lack
the greatest modification of all,
it was just so happens to be driver's mod.
That's just one of those things that a lotta people have
a tendency to think they have until they don't.
These accidents that have been reported were by those
that likely had no idea the gravity of what they were doing.
And you can see it in when they're convicted.
There's been TikToks and YouTube videos
of people going to jail
because they were illegally street racing
and hit somebody.
And that's why it just shouldn't be a thing.
But like I said, illegal street racing isn't something
that really should be glorified
because when you do mess it up,
you can seriously injure someone else.
That's really the big thing, you could hurt
or damage somebody else, okay?
If you wanna do burnout, go do it
where the only person you can hurt is yourself.
Maybe in a country back road or something like that,
then shake it off when you oversteer into a ditch
and then ended up calling your dad.
But if you can try to keep it to places
where there's like staff, and safety, and ambulances,
and stuff like that, don't do it around people.
Street racing has started to learn this.
Most of it's illegally sanctioned events
here have made their way to private property.
I remember going to the Texas 2K
and one of the old grudge match racing was actually done
on an airfield in an abandoned warehouse
versus on the Beltway.
It's just a weird thing that people are starting to do.
Now, most street recent can still be tracked, and logged,
and practically emailed to you as you're conducting it too,
because of how good enforcement has become
about monitoring high-risk areas.
And it's only a matter of time
before the United States of America decides
to start putting cameras on every highway,
and starts just mailing you tickets when you're speeding,
because that sucks, but it's probably gonna happen.
Now, don't call me Buzz Killington.
I know, it's not like the most exciting thing
because I love racing just as much as the next guy.
And I spent quite a bit of time and money buying stuff
so my car can perform like a beaut around Road America.
PS, thank you Michelin for the driver's mind
because it helps me, all right?
But outside of a small poll,
street racing isn't worth doing,
and people doing weird night hobbies these days,
and I dunno, Pokemon Go's coming back,
you got people walking around outside in the metaverse,
and they got an Oculus on, you can't see them.
I dunno if the juice is worth the squeeze, all right?
I just don't know if it is.
I don't think it is, but find the local autocross group,
find the local nearby track, or event organizer
that allows you to use it and abuse the old shitbox
with a helmet on, because at the end of the day,
it's not like we're driving around a bajillion-dollar car.
It's mostly like a Mazda Speed 6
that's just like two miles away from blowing up.
And if one doesn't exist, then make one yourself.
And when you do jump into the sport and you're looking
to modify the car with some lightweight wheels
and sticky tires, just be sure to snag 'em
from fitmentindustries.com, let us know
what your thoughts are on the old street racing.
And, of course, drop a comment below on what you'd like
to see us talk about next.
If you're looking for wheels, tires, and suspension,
be sure to check us out over at fitmentindustries.com.
I'm Alex from Fitment Industries, and we'll see you later.
Peace.
(upbeat music)
♪ Woo ♪
(upbeat music continues)