Street racing has been making the papers lately, and, as you can probably guess, these aren't the kind of headlines that motorcyclists want to see. During the winter, an article ran in the L.A. Times (and was picked up by wire services across the country) that described motor-cyclists as a bunch of street-racing speed freaks with no respect for their own lives or the lives of others.
I'll be the first to admit that most of us are speed freaks--we wouldn't be tricking out sportbikes if we weren't. We might even be crazy. But willing to recklessly (and purposefully) endanger the lives of others? No way.
Sure, street racing does exist, and--confession time--I know more than a little about the street racing scene. I got my start racing on the streets, and I raced all across the country from 1982 until 1997. But even though street racing honed my skills and also paid the bills, the deeper I got into it, the more I realized that illegal drag racing was a dead-end street.
I'm not the only one. Nearly every African American professional drag racer (a lot of white guys, too!) came from a street racing background. It used to be that was just the way it was. For a lot of these guys, the street was the only place they could play. Until recently, no one has ever given street racers an opportunity to run without having a racing license or without having to tech bikes and build them to some silly rule system.
Fortunately, that's not the case any-more. Today, almost every dragstrip in the country has a Friday night test-and-tune where anybody can race against anybody else, grudge-match style. Places like Rockingham (North Carolina) Dragway and Maryland International Raceway/Budds Creek are taking moves to make the track more inviting to guys who usually make their dough on the streets. At Superbike Showdown series events, for example, if time permits, you can approach the event managers and set up a grudge match. You can run these in any way you want--I've even seen it done with a flagman on the strip! If you want the clocks off, you can even do that. Programs like this maintain all the character of street racing but in a safe, legal environment.
As far as I'm concerned, taking racing off the streets is the only way to do it. You don't need to worry about a car running through a barricade you set up and killing someone. You don't have to worry about the police showing up and pulling your license, or about getting arrested, hauled to jail and having your motorcycle impounded, which is almost a sure thing if you get busted racing on the street. Say you dropped $20,000 on your bike--do you want it hanging from the back of a tow truck or dropped (literally) in some impound lot? Do it on the track, and you don't have to worry about any of that. You can concentrate on going fast, which is really what it's all about, right?
I'd be lying if I said that I didn't miss the excitement of racing on the street, but it was always clear to me that that's a good way to go nowhere fast. It's like the difference be-tween playing basketball on the streets or on the court and in front of crowds with the NBA. The difference between the back-streets and the strip is that great. Imagine telling an NBA scout, "Nah, I'd rather play streetball with my buddies"--that's how ridiculous the idea of street racing sounds to me right now.
I left street racing behind and never looked back. Now, I've got a factory con-tract with Kawasaki, and I get paid to travel the country and live out my dream--what more could a person ask for? More import-antly, I can raise my family and be proud of how I earn my living. I doubt I could say the same if I was still playing on the street. I'd probably be in jail by now, or paralyzed, or worse.
Could you be next? There's only one way to find out--get your bike off the streets and on the track!