How To Spot A Street Racer – Want to start a fight? Tell people you are racing in the fastest street car. The first reaction is that people are horrified to hear that you race illegally on the street, and if you explain that no, these are street-legal cars that race on sanctioned tracks, well, you’re going to get an argument about what a defines street car.
Is it turn signals? 91 octane? Factory body panels? These arguments are extremely boring and a terrible waste of time when you could be discussing the history and technology of these road and rail warriors instead. Last weekend brought the full tire-smoking, turbo-spooling glory during the 2018 running of the Roadkill Nights Woodward Avenue street race. Calm down, it’s a legal street race hosted by Dodge and
How To Spot A Street Racer
The history of racing street cars – and arguing their streetability – goes all the way back to the first formal drag races. That is its own story, but it is enough to know that the NHRA was founded by Wally Parks in 1951, and people were racing their stock and modified machines well before that. By 1953 there was a class intended only for stock cars, but stock cars did not remain in stock for long, giving technical inspectors plenty to do. “Already through racing, the cars are getting too radical to drive on the street, and people are trying to make rules to bring them back to a stock, or at least stock-appearing level,” says David Freiburger, host of
Detroit Street Racing Challenger, Duesenberg No. 1 Go Into History
Magazine. “Stock cars start running race fuels, become Gassers, then Altered Wheelbase, Funny Cars, Pro Stock, and when the races go up in cost and complexity, there’s always an underground scene that races on the street or with alternative sanctioning bodies, and that is what we noticed at
Teamed up with the National Muscle Car Association (NMCA) to give these outlaw cars a chance to show on the track. At the time, the fastest cars were running high 8-second passes, and when you realize that the fastest production car of the time was a Ferrari F-40 that took 11.8 seconds to run the quarter mile, you start to tip the scale show of performance. From the NMCA Fastest Street Car Shootout, organized streetcar racing tests began to add the “street” part. After all, it’s one thing to say your car is streetable, it’s another to run on pump gas or actually drive a great distance in traffic and around town. In 2004, the Pump Gas Drags asked contestants to run 91 octane and drive 30 miles to the track. That turned into
Drag Week, which sees competitors drive 1,000 miles over a series of five days, each day at a different drag strip. “Drag Week is a torture test,” says Tom Bailey, who has won the event in two different 6-second Camaros. As fire hardens steel, long drives and hot-lap turnarounds test engines, transmissions, axles, cooling, fueling—every component of a car, in fact, including the driver. The cars that make it are getting stronger and faster, and many were on display at Roadkill Nights.
The two highest horsepower cars we saw were Bailey’s 1969 Chevrolet Camaro and Bryant Goldstone’s 1973 AMC Javelin. Both cars are great examples of the far end of defining streetable. Bailey’s car is Camaro-shaped, but no GM plant has ever churned out this tubular chassis or its gold fiberglass panels, and no assembly-line UAW man or woman has the head bolts on its 3,500-horsepower, 615-cubic-inch twin-turbo big torqued. block Chevy. Goldstone’s Javelin can boast steel panels and glass windows, but it has been a long time since this Jav sported an AMC 401. Like Bailey’s car, Goldstone is bowtie power, a double turbo Dart-block 572-cu-in Chevy, which’ t put down. 2313 horsepower
Street Racing Illustrated
On a portable dyno the evening before the Woodward race. Radical as both cars are, they drove around Detroit all week, idling at stoplights and getting 11 mpg. Probably better than your big big block muscle car.
The final runoffs were rained out, but the Quick 16 included James Pranis, 1968 Dodge Charger; Peter Bokedon, 1972 Dodge Dart; Gary Box, 1965 Chevrolet Corvette; Craig Groebner, 1971 Chevrolet Nova; Leon Hudson, 1965 Plymouth Barracuda; Jimmer Kline, 1966 Pontiac GTO; Jim Kline III, 1996 Chevrolet Arcadian; Mike Mislivec, 1982 Pontiac Trans Am; Bryan Rosario, 1972 Chevrolet Camaro; Mark McGill, 1978 Chevrolet Camaro; William Gill, 1966 Shelby Cobra; Adam Hodson, 1973 Chevrolet Camaro; Kenny Laflower, 1970 AMC Javelin; John Lopez, 1988 Ford Mustang; Justin Spiniolas, 1991 GMC Sonoma; Carl Stancell, 1984 Chevrolet S10 Blazer; and Rick Steinke, 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle
Bailey will be the first to tell you, however, that horsepower isn’t a guaranteed win in street car racing. Unlike NHRA pro events, street car events are often on less sticky or completely untouched racing surfaces. If you want to follow a branch of this family tree, check out “No Prep” racing and prepare yourself for some squirrely, wheel-cranking, half-track wheelie-popping action.
Things weren’t quite that extreme on Woodward. The trail at Roadkill Nights was an eighth mile section of a public road. Barriers were put down for safety, and some traction compound was laid at the beginning, but the road was crowned, uphill, and cobwebbed with cracks and sealer. Despite the two most powerful cars in attendance, neither Bailey nor Goldstone made the Quick 16 for the final. “If the fastest pass is a 5.70, well, I’m bringing a 4.30 car to the fight and I can’t use most of it,” Bailey says good-naturedly. He has won the event before, but this year every one of his passes was a smoke show, simply overpowering the surface. “It’s not about the power, it’s about handling the conditions.”
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If the tracks are bad and the competition torturous, what’s the appeal of building a street car? “I started street cars because I couldn’t afford a truck and trailer,” says Nick Plewniak, whose Chevy-powered 1930 Plymouth was a crowd favorite during Roadkill Nights. “Street car stuff adds a whole other element to building and tuning, plus you get to use it more. It’s really sweet to only have a race car that you drive on Fridays and it rains a couple of Fridays in a row and you can’t use your car We take it grocery shopping, dinner, ice cream, and just the occasional cruise around town.
Every person we asked echo Plewniak. While going fast is never cheap, street car owners get more time in their car per dollar spent, and there are more interesting ways to make their car fast than if racing a more established class, where usually strict engine combinations and cookie-cutter methods to E.T.s. Street car racers can still gain an advantage by being smart, rather than just spending more money. A well-built car with less power can end up being a fragile big-horse machine. You have to win the race, but first you have to get on the track.
“Most failures are not mechanical. At least, not initially,” says Bailey. “They burn out a racing fuel pump because the tank is too small and the gas heats up, 200 kilometers cycling 1000 gallons per minute. Or they don’t have a big enough alternator or cooling system. Some race cars don’t even have an alternator or cooling system. You don’t need it for a single quarter-mile pass, but you can’t get away with it on the street. The street gives complexity.”
Look inside the cars and the creativity becomes even clearer. Is that a cup holder between the air-shifter and the center bar of rollcage? Figuring out where to charge iPhones, how to fit a sun visor and a parachute handle in the same space, where to put a turn signal indicator…pretty sure Don Garlits never had to worry about those issues.
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The challenge of making a car roadworthy and then enjoying it with friends and family without going to a track event is the main reason why owners choose to build. The commonality ends there. Some people think that a car that needs to be worked on regularly doesn’t count as a street car, and others think that if you can get a DMV employee drunk enough to slap a plate on a top fuel carrier, it should count, even if you had to rebuild it every few blocks. People also cannot agree on where the movement started. Some follow Freiburger’s logic that the first street cars started with the first street cars. Others believe that the Pro Street movement of the 1980s gave rise to the cars of today. Tom Bailey credits Rod Sadbury with the first 6-second quarter-mile pass on street tires, but many other racers say Larry Larson built the first truly streetable 6-second car with his Drag Week-winning 1966 Nova Chevy II.
It’s not an argument that we’re going to win here today, but we’ve touched base with Larson to find out what he thinks of the boom in the street machine scene. “Technology makes it easier and easier to go faster,” he says. “EFI and better tuning options, there are more aftermarket parts, more efficient power adders. I have my