Police Red Flag Fails to Deter Street Racers

It was race night again in Sylmar--a Tuesday, in this case--and the crowd had gathered, as it always does, on the northern end of San Fernando Road. By 9 p.m., hundreds of people had converged at the spot where Interstate 5 arches over the street.

It looked like an automotive zoo. The crowd, made up mostly of teen-agers and young adults, drank beer and lined the street. The competitors, in dozens of vehicles, drove everything from motorbikes to tow trucks. Some of the cars had oversized engines, others resembled junk.

On the road below the overpass--in a stretch that serves as an echo chamber for the roar of well-tended engines--the vehicles quickly lined up in pairs, waiting for a signal from a volunteer flagman.

Police Arrive

But most of the first round of races that night ended at the starting line after a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter appeared above the crowd. A short time later, a police patrol car drove up the road from the north and an officer used a bullhorn to order the crowd to disperse.

The crowd returned an hour later, followed shortly by the police, with the racers coming back again an hour after that. Finally, just past 11 p.m., police barricades were set up at either end of the illegal raceway and the racers dispersed.

Some would be back the next night.

To the continuing frustration of Los Angeles police, racing activists and some of the racers themselves, scenes like these have long been a ritual at the end of San Fernando Road.

Like sections of Mulholland Drive to the south, and various “floating” drag-racing spots at other points in the Valley, the illegal drag strip on San Fernando Road has been drawing crowds for years, despite repeated complaints by neighbors and numerous crackdowns by police.

The racing site--conspicuously marked by “Start” and “Finish” lines painted at either end of a quarter-mile stretch of San Fernando Road--draws many of its participants from the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, with others coming from downtown Los Angeles and as far away as Orange County and Santa Barbara, police say.

And for just as long, it has periodically drawn police from the Foothill, Devonshire and Valley traffic divisions.

Police have tried a variety of techniques to stop the racers, ranging from distribution of warning flyers to setting up temporary blockades at either end of the street. Hundreds of citations have been issued, mostly for misdemeanor violations of city street-racing laws.

But around the starting line on San Fernando Road, the battle is at most a stalemate. As a result, by some accounts, the site has become the most conspicuous legacy of a now-dormant effort to relocate the racers to a legitimate racing spot elsewhere in the county.

“There are other drag-racing sites in the Valley, but this one is probably the most notorious,” Sgt. Dennis Zine said. “As a spot for regular, serious drag racing, this is the place that has endured. We’ve tried a lot of things, but dealing with this is like trying to spray for ants. You spray in one place and they turn up somewhere else, or they wait and come back the next day.”

Problems With Control

Zine said police efforts to control the racing have long been hindered by a lack of manpower, as well as by the obvious mobility of the crowds. Typically, racers leave the racing site en masse at the first word of approaching police, heading for smaller alternative sites or the parking lots of nearby restaurants.

The race site on San Fernando Road is not known as a haven for gang activity, violence or drug sales, Zine said. In most cases, he said, those who go there go strictly to race and socialize.

Typical crowds consist mostly of high school- and college-age students, with a smaller group of older racers, he said. Though vehicles vary, low-riders and other “cruising” cars are extremely rare.

Instead, the racers drive everything from Volkswagens and Chevrolets to dirt bikes and four-wheel-drive trucks. On some occasions, Zine said, professional drag-racing cars have been towed to the site and raced, at speeds well over 100 m.p.h.

Even though there has not been a recent drag-racing death on the strip on San Fernando Road--according to Zine, department records show no fatalities in 1984 or 1985--police describe the scene there as increasingly worrisome. In the summer, when the racing reaches its peak, races are held on as many as four nights a week, with crowds ranging into the hundreds. Serious non-fatal accidents occur on a regular basis, Zine said.

Others say the lack of a recent fatality seems a matter of luck.

‘Potential Killers’

“The truth is, the people out there are potential killers,” Officer Gordon Hagge said. “What they are doing is irresponsible and unsupervised. You take a 60-foot street and cut off eight feet on either side by filling it with bystanders, and then you run two 4,000-pound vehicles past them at 100 miles an hour. . . . Are you going to tell me that’s not dangerous?”

Police and some of the racers offer several explanations for the popularity of the illegal strip. Some say racing began there years ago, in the heyday of a defunct drag strip near the old San Fernando Airport. Others say the races grew out of a now-banned practice of cruising Van Nuys Boulevard.

Zine said the San Fernando Road site is said to be appealing because it is relatively isolated: There are no visible neighbors and traffic is light in the evenings.

To those who attend the races, however, the attraction is simpler than that.

Nowhere Else to Go

“Where else are we going to go?” said David Hogrefe, a 16-year-old high school student from Sylmar. “The drag strips are gone, Indian Dunes (an off-road vehicle center in Saugus) is gone--if you want to race now you have to drive to the Antelope Valley. People wouldn’t race in the street if they had another place, but we don’t. . . . So here we are.”

Two years ago, an ad-hoc group of businessmen and racing enthusiasts attempted to address concerns such as these when they launched a drive to find a site for legitimate racing in the county. The group, called the Valley Racing Assn., raised almost $8,000 in donations, and got a $299,000 grant from the state’s Off-Road Racing Fund.

But the drive fell apart when two proposed race sites in the Santa Clarita Valley drew fierce opposition from neighbors as well as from the office of Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

Proposal in Limbo

Since then, the proposal has been in limbo. Stephen Frank, a Sepulveda businessman who served as president of the association, said the grant lapsed to the state when the site proposals fell through. The money obtained through fund raising remains in a bank account, Frank said.

Sgt. Wayne Woolway said Friday that police would soon begin a stepped-up effort to try to control the races by strictly enforcing parking and racing laws, issuing more tickets and towing unregistered cars. In the past week, Woolway said, the department had issued 20 such citations in hopes of getting the word out and discouraging racers.

Woolway concedes that the chances of ending racing on the site are relatively slim, however.

“We’ll try to make it as uncomfortable as possible,” he said. “But it’s hard to imagine that we’ll manage to get it fully under control.”