Street Racing Subculture

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Street-Racing It's eight o'clock and you've just finished your Big Mac and vanilla milkshake after a long day of work. You sit in the comfort of your apartment, watching the sunshine settle into the darkness of the impending night sky. Just a couple more hours to go and your night is about to blast off. In the garage of your house, under a shiny, midnight blue car cover, rests your 1996 Mustang GT, a common American muscle car that happens to be loaded with additional features which allow the car to reach speeds in excess of 160 m.p.h. Gauges, tachometers, shift lights, turbo timers, short shifters, air intake, cams, upper struts, Nitrous Oxide, and wires are just some of the incentives that a top-notch street-racer's vehicle will have in its repertoire. Around midnight, you'll return to that same McDonalds, but this time it's not for the food, it's for the racing. This is the crucial point of the night, when all racers gather and possibly even listen to police scanners, determining what area the cops will most likely be circling during the night. Then you're off to a side street behind the Tallahassee Regional Airport, as the sound of the turbines of planes meld with the hot flaming sound of turbo-charged cars with shining dual exhaust pipes. Joining you will be racers from all walks of life - Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chinese, Filipinos, Jamaicans, Italians, African Americans, and many others all set out to win some money, earn some respect, and prove that their car is the fastest. So there you have it - a typical night in the life of a street-racer, a subculture that has been steadily growing since the early 1990s when it was started by Asian Americans in Southern California. In fact, all over California, street-racing has been a popular and also powerful organization, spanning cities from San Francisco all the way down to San Diego. Even

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