For Racers, Ride’s Worth Risks

It’s late Friday, and Raul Avila and his crew are parked under the neon lights of the Shell station at Roscoe and Coldwater Canyon boulevards, keeping an ear to the street for the little whine between gear-shifts that betrays the presence of a turbocharged engine.

They’re listening for competition. It’s drag-racing night in the San Fernando Valley.

An Acura Integra roars into the station, followed by a gaudier white Honda Civic, its aftermarket body kit all fins and flying angles--like something Frank Gehry would design for a Star Wars imperial storm trooper.

The Honda’s driver cuts the gas, his jaw working a wad of gum as he checks out what Avila and his friends bring to the table: two Integras, a ’93 and a ‘98, and a moderately blinged-up Benz sedan.

“This is how it works,” says Raul’s friend Sean, a 30-year-old grocery stocker. “Everybody kind of hits each other up for races here.”

Usually, after a little trash-talking, $20 bets are placed. A quarter-mile is measured out as roughly eight light poles. And at the drop of a starter’s arms, they’re off.

“Unless,” Sean adds, “the cops come by and bust us.”

Like magic, two Ford Crown Vics appear. Poof! LAPD.

“Uh-oh,” says Raul, smiling.

“You guys buying gas?” a patrolman asks. “If not, you’ve got to get out of here, or I’m going to start checking IDs.”

The hot-rodders disperse in a matter of seconds, but the officers know they have just sent the problem down the street.

“It really has nothing to do with racing,” says LAPD Officer John Wagner, surveying the empty station through the window of his cruiser. “It has more to do with showing off. Just a few minutes ago on Saticoy there were maybe 50 cars, but they weren’t racing--they were just waiting for more people to show up.”

It’s just after midnight, and it’s just beginning. Tonight--like most Tuesday and Friday nights--the Valley’s wide industrial streets will be abuzz with tricked-out imports looking for races, and with squad cars Keystoning after them. Citations will be issued. Crowds of teenage racing fans will be dispersed. City-issued hubcaps will roll off into gutters in the wake of hot pursuits.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” says Sgt. Tom Toutant, an LAPD North Hollywood Division watch commander. “It’s been going on forever; it just changes. When we come down on them hard, they just go somewhere else. But we just don’t have the resources to chase them all over the Valley.”

Illegal street racing is a key component of Valley history and myth. After World War II, veterans and others pioneered the art of the drag on the dry lake beds north of here, but also on these very streets.

Dickie McWilliams, 70, of Burbank, remembers drawing 500 to 600 spectators when he raced out on Sepulveda at San Fernando Road in the late 1940s.

“Oh yeah, we were the bad guys,” McWilliams said. “But we did it anyway. We’d meet at Bob’s [Big Boy] drive-in, then we’d go out from there. Of course, there wasn’t nearly the traffic then that there is now.”

And even though the old-timers scoff at the front-wheel-drive Japanese jobs that are the fashion on the streets these days, they acknowledge that kids like Raul Avila are carrying on a hallowed tradition from the ducktail era.

“Those [imports] are nothing compared to an American car,” says Al Giddens, 56, president of the Road Kings of Burbank, a dragster club that dates to the early ‘50s. “But at least they’re out there racing. We’d prefer they race on a drag strip, but they don’t have one.”

And that, Avila says, is the reason he’s on the street, the reason he’s got officers like Wagner wasting their evenings chasing after him.

“You know, the racing’s much better at the track,” Avila says. “They’re complaining that kids are getting hurt; well, open up a track. You’ll keep kids off the street and the city will make money.”

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Carl Olson, a former pro racer and unofficial drag-race historian with the National Hot Rod Assn., agrees that legal options for today’s amateur dragster aren’t what they used to be.

By the 1960s, as the sport became more respectable, there were as many as eight dedicated tracks for legal amateur drag racing in the L.A. area, Olson says. But by the 1970s and ‘80s, most of them had closed down, victims of a growing population and increased property values.

But the hot-rod mentality lives on. At a recent Valleywide traffic summit, law enforcement characterized the area as an automotive “Wild, Wild West:” Though police don’t keep track of fatalities caused by racing, so far this year there have been more than 60 auto-related deaths on Valley streets. Police blame speeding for much of the carnage.

Lawmakers and police are trying to crack down on speeders in general, and they’re going after street racers specifically. In coming weeks, the Los Angeles City Council will consider a proposal by Councilman Hal Bernson of Northridge to fine spectators at drag races up to $250. And the Police Commission recently recommended that the city lobby Sacramento to increase state-mandated fines, jail terms and impound times for drivers caught racing illegally, Assistant City Atty. Henry Morris said.

“We feel it’s a safety hazard on the streets,” Bernson spokesman Ali Sar said. “We’d like to remedy that, and we’ll see what we can do.”

The closest drag-racing track to the Valley is in Palmdale. In recent months, City Councilman Alex Padilla has been looking into building one closer, but he determined that a drag strip couldn’t be justified as a top city priority given more pressing uses, such as housing and school sites, for large parcels of land.

“Realistically, I don’t see it happening soon,” he said.

But there’s always the street. When they can, police will post black-and-whites at known hot spots--at San Fernando Mission Road near the 405, for example, or Canoga Avenue north of Plummer. But the racers often manage to keep one step ahead of the law. “There’s networks, clubs, communications, pagers, cell phones; they monitor police,” said Sgt. Robert Davis of the LAPD’s Devonshire Division. “As a result, they have huge crowds. And you can imagine the injuries if a car goes out of control on a street lined with hundreds of people.”

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Davis believes environmental modifications--speed humps, cameras, narrower streets--might help dissuade illegal-race fans, but such measures are costly.

Others are looking to San Diego, which under a state-funded program, racelegal.com, hosts drag races in the parking lot of Qualcomm Stadium.

The program’s founder, Stephen Bender, is a professor at San Diego State University’s School of Public Health. He notes that sanctioned racing isn’t a panacea: in 1999, 13 people were killed on San Diego County streets as a result of “exhibitions of speed” he says.

But starting next month, San Diego police will receive a $400,000 grant to help them fight street races. Bender, who wrote the grant proposal, is hoping the combination of legal options and stepped-up enforcement will reduce San Diego’s big racing problem. It’s a strategy he’d like to take statewide.

“From a public health perspective, it’s off the scale,” Bender says. “As a kid, you just don’t visualize how serious the consequences could be.”

Avila, 23, has a kid of his own--a 4-year-old boy who’s already interested in car culture. Avila says he’d rather see the kid racing on a track when he’s older. At the same time, he and his friends are dismissive of a new legal option, an eighth-mile drag strip under construction at Irwindale Speedway. An eighth-mile is half the length of a traditional strip, they say, and half as much fun.

They also admit that the streets will always have a certain illicit allure.

“First gear, you’re thinking ‘don’t screw up, don’t peel out a lot, take it easy,’ ” Avila says. “Second gear is more like, ‘OK, time to relax now. I’m out of the hole.’ The hard part is over. Third gear you’re more worried about someone pulling out in front of you. All you want to do is finish the race. Get it over with before the cops show up.”

Just after 1 a.m., Avila and his crew find the action down on Glenoaks Boulevard in Shadow Hills, where dozens of fast cars have taken over the street, lined up in pairs, waiting for their turn to squeal out, as dozens more young onlookers crowd the sidewalk.

Moments later, however, the sky goes red and blue, and the stampede is on. Race cars scuttle around corners. Pedestrians run for their clunkers and pickups and Chevy Suburbans.

Avila’s ’93 Integra makes a quick right down a nondescript side street, followed by the ’98 Integra and the Benz sedan, vanishing with all the rest.