Roadblock Ahead : Leisure: Terminal Island track is an experiment in ethnic harmony where all it takes to race is $10 and your own vehicle. But it may close in April to make way for an exporting facility.

Brotherhood Raceway on Terminal Island is a place where the uninitiated can get lost in the conversation around the car hoods. Terms such as dominator carburetors, planetary transmissions and superchargers flow back and forth among teen-agers, off-duty policemen, grandmothers and traditional drag-racing grease nuts.

But this is a track where you do not have to know that kind of jargon, a place where the motto is: “Run Whatcha Brung.”

On any given weekend, nitrous-equipped cars, junior dragsters, motorcycles and even kids on bicycles roll up to the starting line at different times to clock their speed on the quarter-mile track.

In a culture in which illegal street racing has traditionally attracted accidents and violence, the year-old Brotherhood Raceway is a testament to peaceful coexistence. A common denominator--the sheer fascination of pushing a vehicle to run just a little bit faster--has allowed all kinds of racers to mingle without incident.

The track is the creation of Willie Andrew (Big Willie) Robinson III, a longtime figure in Los Angeles street racing. After the 1992 riots, Robinson persuaded the Los Angeles Harbor Commission to allow him to use the Terminal Island property for $1 a month. With Robinson donating his time, the track breaks even without any government support.

But the unusual harmony of Robinson’s experiment appears only temporary. In April the commission is expected to close the track to make way for a coke exporting facility and a container terminal. Commission officials say they have no other suitable site for the racetrack.

Police credit the track with decreasing illegal street racing because racers have somewhere to go--a place where a computerized starter and clock prevent the usual arguments about who left the line early.

Robinson, a 6-foot-6, 300-pound onetime medical student, preaches peace. He shuns sponsorship from alcohol and cigarette manufacturers and has banned alcohol and drugs from the property.

“The race itself is the rush,” said Robinson, 52. “I don’t want any gang member coming here, getting drunk and doing something stupid.”

Although admission is $10 for spectators and racers alike, Robinson waives the fee for military veterans, police officers, firefighters and anybody who cannot afford it. His creed: “When it comes to wheels, there’s no generation gap, there’s no gender gap and no color barrier.”

The track draws people such as Barbara Ybarra, a 52-year-old grandmother, and her son Tony, who drive their twin El Caminos at the track on weekends after they close the family radiator shop in Carson.

Ybarra recalls a time when her son was chased by police helicopters for illegal racing on the street. She even admits to drag racing herself as a teen-ager.

Her husband insisted that she give up drag racing when she got married, but once she and Tony, 30, visited the track last year, they were hooked. These days she puts the pedal to the metal in only one place, even when people pull up beside her at a stoplight and want to drag.

“I say, ‘Come on down to Terminal Island and I’ll race you,’ ” she said.

Another track regular is Billy Chaffin, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who races a nationally competitive Buick Regal. Chaffin says he has seen people at the track that he has stopped on patrol.

“There are some guys that are gang-affiliated. I can see the tattoos and tell what neighborhood they are from.”

The last time he ran his car at the Brotherhood Raceway, it flew down the track at 129.5 m.p.h. Most of the time he beats the street racers who challenge him, but sometimes they get a good start off the line and take him.

Chaffin began racing in high school, when he bought a ’63 Corvette convertible.

“It was the fastest car around, and I was out street racing to prove it,” he said. When he got caught, the judge assigned him to a program at the Irwindale raceway, where he learned to race safely.

“I think cars probably saved me, because I was a rabble-rouser,” Chaffin said.

For almost a year he has been competing in a car painted black and white like a patrol cruiser--complete with a light bar on the roof.

He says racing with the youngsters on the track changes the way they think about law enforcement officers.

“I will give them a one- or two-second head start,” Chaffin said. “Then they go down the track and if they see red lights in their mirror, it’s the one time they don’t have to worry.”

Robert Natividad, 17, is typical of the youngsters Chaffin wants to reach. Natividad has been caught five times racing his black Honda Civic in the street. Now he brings his high-performance engine and exhaust system down to the Terminal Island track.

“So many people are getting to know each other here,” said Robinson, who ran a track on Terminal Island from 1974 to 1984 and in the past has volunteered to help police contain street racing to certain areas and hours. “You aren’t going to do a drive-by on somebody you know. They’re getting along, that’s the bottom line.”

Which is why the Harbor Commission’s plan to close the track in spring is so depressing for the racers.

Superior Court Judge Douglas A. McKee is one of the people trying to change the commissioners’ minds.

McKee describes himself as a conservative, maximum-sentence type who generally metes out tough punishment. But he is just another racer at the track, driving his ’85 Corvette, which he says he floored for the first time there.

“Every ethnic group I can think of is out there--just dragging,” McKee said. “What gets me is that down there I never have seen anybody even argue with anybody else. And these are guys who look like people I could have sent to state prison at one time or another.”

Closing the track will only send the racers onto the streets, McKee said.

“These guys have obviously spent a lot of money on their cars. If they weren’t doing it here, common sense tells you they would be doing it somewhere else.”