Then he was like, ‘You could bring anything. “I was kind of teasing him about it and he was like, ‘Word,’ and he got all upset. You put them together like Legos,’” Kay recounts. And I was like, ‘Yo, c’mon man, a Honda? Hondas are like Lego cars. There was a young dude in his garage and I overheard him talking about his Honda. He speaks with strength, nearly choking on vowels, expressing excitement by stopping mid-sentence, standing stiffly and offering a quick, punctuated “ yo!” or “what!” or “word?” before continuing a story. While diminutive in stature, everything else about him is big. The groundwork for a race is talk and more talk about how fast your car can go – setting an expectation which rarely matches reality – and at least two people committing to the race, a location and a wager. Racing is lots of talking and not as much driving. Kay remembers Brooklyn in the ‘90s when the Mazda RX 7 was considered “the king of the street,” races weren’t consigned to highways (or any other roads harder to access by the police) and “illegal street racing” seemed like jaywalking, barely noticed and almost never penalized. The laws prohibiting it are more heavily enforced today than when Kay first got into it about fifteen years ago. Kay, like most other racers interviewed for this story, asked to be given a pseudonym because street racing is illegal, and has been for some time. Kay’s racecar, a Mazda RX 7, can do a quarter of a mile-a lap around an athletics track-in a little over twelve seconds. When you’re driving, you don’t even know where you are, you can’t even see anything.” “There’s nothing normal about driving that fast,” said Kay, a street racer who has been neck-deep in the sport since he was a boy living in Brooklyn. Commuters wonder what the hold-up could be. The racecars lead, lined up like the first row of a marching band in a parade. Drivers use their cars as the blockade twenty, thirty, or more, plod along the highway-or on a side street, although that carries the risk of residents, jolted awake during the race by the whizzing of engines accelerating to upwards of 100-150 miles per hour, alerting the police. This is how a street race usually goes: drivers meet near the designated race location. Speed isn’t the type of fun that needs to be rationalized. To others, it’s music, the sound of a well-tuned instrument, its perfect pitch. The sound was described to me as “trying to drown a weed whacker in a bathtub.” It’s throaty, as if the guts of the car are running exposed. Racing is the pursuit of speed, speed that’s strong and loud. When Mattel launched Hot Wheels toy cars in the ‘60s, kids were hooked because matched head-to-head with Matchbox cars, Hot Wheels would win. The desire for more of it is inherited from when you thought your toy racecar could go faster than his toy racecar you’d take your mark, say vroom and try to reach the make-believe finish line first. Driving in a racecar is no time for sightseeing.
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